It occurs to me that the “Three famous people” game that I described yesterday can be played the other way. Rather than the challenge being to find the answer, the challenge can be to come up with a good question.
It can be surprisingly difficult to find two famous people with exactly *one* other famous person obviously connecting them.
For example, yesterday Sharon suggested “Tom Hanks” and “Neil Young”. I thought she meant Jonathan Demme, since he connects them through the film “Philadelphia”. But it turns out she meant Daryl Hannah, which definitely works as a good answer at the moment.
So maybe we can design a kind of crowd sourcing game: Contestants post two famous names, and various people out there on the internet try to guess who is the third famous person clearly connected to both of them.
Your goal as a contestant is to post two names that will result in nearly everybody guessing the same third name. The greater the unanimity of response, the higher your score.
By the way, we should probably ban the use of famous people who strongly evoke one person in particular (e.g.: Stan Laurel).
Come to think of it, I wonder whether we can use this general method for turning around any guessing game: Given any given guessing game, use the Crowd to create another game, one which measures the quality not of the answers, but of the questions.
Given that you already have a three node graphic / logo and some code to go with it, I bet this new game (or the previous one) are almost ready to go in terms of being “web ready.”
Next step – mobile version in which you adopt a character. When another person comes near that has a connection, your two phones buzz. Then you have to find the third person in the crowd.
Or, you and a friend settle on a pair, and go looking for a third.
Is this the new Tinder? Shall we call it BrushFire?
…r
Ooh, cool idea!!!