Think you know your mefites? Try your hand at
Says Who?, the Metafilter identification game.
I spent the last couple days putting this together, based on an old idea someone hacked together years ago (and which I cannot seem to track down).
It's pretty simple: you're presented with a random comment from the blue, the green, or the grey, and a list of five users, and your job is to make your best guess as to which of them is the actual author.
All the listed mefites are, or were, highly prolific on the subsite in question, having made at least on the order of a thousand comments or so (so the names will tend to be familiar). If you have no idea on any given option, that's what the "(I couldn't even guess)" option is for, so don't be afraid to skip the ones where you don't have even a sliver of a reason to guess.
The game keeps track of all the answers, so there's fun Infodump-style analytical possibilities in the long run once a lot of folks have played and put data into the system.
If you play while logged in, it'll also track your results for you over time, so you can see how you've done in terms of correct and incorrect guesses and number of skips. You can also play if you're not logged in, without scorekeeping. If you really want to play and really don't want your guesses associated with your userid, logging out first is the way to go.
pb has done his best to make my code perform really clean and quick, but there's always the possibility that I buggered something up so if you see anything weird going on, please let me know.
Misc. notes:
- You are very unlikely to see the same comment twice, given how large the pool of comments to choose from is.
- I experimented with larger pools of users, but even with the relatively small number included in this version (about 200 or so per subsite, with some overlap between for folks very talkative on multiple subsites) the game is hard. If you're not seeing your username pop up, it's nothing personal; most people aren't in here.
- I may find an elegant way to include people who are newer-but-quite-active in the candidates in the long run, based on some sort of comments-per-unit time, but for now the selection process favors older users since it's just looking at a raw threshold of a large minimum number of comments.
posted by cortex to MetaFilter-Related at 11:03 AM (317 comments total)
34 users marked this as a favorite
Although I suck at it.
posted by zarq at 11:06 AM on July 16, 2010