Blog Post 7
Like with many things multiplayer, playing with peers changes from group to group. In a classroom setting it becomes increasingly obvious that more laser focused jokes, or things that might be more funny to one person rather than another change the dynamic, as people don't know each other and the pool of people in which to gather opinions from is so broad the ideas that might be uniquely funny to people of a certain persuasion, certain set of tastes or who are just in on one joke get shunted to the side, same with ideas that might be a little farther out or trying to be funny on shock value as the classroom setting limited that. This is why I don't really think I can comment much on how playing with the audience changed the game as while I certainly noticed they existed and that the points would change the fact that we were already playing in such a large group kind of diminished the more laser focused playing experienced that playing with friends brings you and already made me feel like I was playing with the audience. I feel like when I play jackbox with my friends that the jokes tend to be self reflective, relate to people in the group, things we find funny, games we play, while in this large group all of the characters or jokes who could potentially be winners had to be well known, likely the only person who could be made fun of in this scenario would be the professor, and while certainly an option it isn't quite as fun as everyone being at play for something along those lines. The also additional lack of shared cultural interaction made it even more difficult as players might not all realize why a towel is so funny in the context of "objects better than a swiss army knife" as while 42 being the meaning of life has made its way into pop culture pretty strongly from hitchikers guide to the galaxy, the utility of a towel has not, neither has a fish that goes in the ear in order to translate languages. But to summarize my point while the jackbox games are always great fun I feel like they often end up being experiments in what boundaries can be pushed within a friend group or online community with shared history, and in the classroom setting that kind of breaks down.












