During the Jackbox games lab, I only had the opportunity to play as an audience member which meant I mainly participated in voting phases of each game. The first two games we played were “Bracketeering” and “Doominate.” I thought that “Bracketeering” was more interesting because it was set up tournament-style. Players gave answers based on one prompt, then their answers were shared with the class under another prompt to twist the possible underlying meaning of their answers. Like many Jackbox games, there were multiple rounds of tournaments with scores being calculated after each round before adding up to the total leaderboard. “Doominate” reminded me a lot of another Jackbox game, “Quiplash.” But I felt like the instructions and rules of the game were overexplained, making the experience less amusing. One thing I noticed was that many people were not as interested in “untwisting” prompts and answer pairs to make them “good” compared to rounds where they had to “ruin” a prompt.
Playing Jackbox games in class was also an unfamiliar experience for me because we had to stay within a PG-rating. Although it was possible for comedy to be successful while being classroom friendly I feel that many Jackbox games thrive on the chaotic and crass inside jokes of a friend group. As an audience member, it was uninteresting at times where players were given time to submit their responses because there wasn’t any activity to participate in. That’s why I thought “DodoReMi” was an interesting game because it invited the audience to also choose an instrument and play in the rhythm mode.
