On Monday morning, Draw Something, a New York City creation, was on everybody’s mind down by Wall Street. Actually, to be more accurate, Zynga was on everybody’s mind. For Zynga, the company that now owns Draw Something, this is a good thing. To blockquote Jenna Wortham and Brian X. Chen’s story from Monday morning’s New York Times:
”They bought a property that went from 0 to 60 in four seconds,” said Lewis Ward, a research analyst at IDC who focuses on the game industry.
This is a bit of an inside joke. Like Wortham and Chen make clear in their story, the story of Draw Something and OMGPOP is somewhat of an accident, which is sort of a poignant idea, when you think about it. The company, which started not long after Facebook started, is somehow educational a fantastic idea. Look at The Washington Post Company, for instance. This is the newspaper that (recently) lost its cash cow, Kaplan. The for-profit education business isn’t doing so well, so they take a turn and work on WaPo Labs. If this isn’t making, sense, say so, and we’ll clarify.) In the meantime, let’s talk about Draw Something.
It’s a cool app. We tried it for the first time on Monday morning. You’re presented with a blank sheet of paper (a.k.a. pixels) and, like the name implies, you draw something. Send it to a friend. See if they can guess what it is. It’s just like Pictionary, only more social. This is also an inside joke, because Pictionary is the ultimate after dinner game, the family game, the thing that you do when you need to just lean back and look at pictures. Somehow, this is probably what was on the founders’ minds, when they dreamt up the idea. Let us explain, quoting Wortham and Chen once again:
The company’s first drawing game, created by Mr. Forman and E. J. Mablekos, Omgpop’s chief technology officer, was a Web-based game called Draw My Thing. It was competitive, with a timer restricting how long a player could take to guess words, and participants would race to type the answer in a chat room. …
Chat room! This is a good idea, too, and probably also another inside joke, within the New York tech industry. Like Zynga (Silicon Valley-based) and AOL (Silicon Alley-based) before it, OMGPOP has mastered the concept of social games and Zynga wanted to add them to their family of ripoff games. If you make a simple thing that sparks someone’s nostalgic flint, whether the user is a Pictionary player or a wannabe artist or a professional, it’ll catch on. We don’t like to speak in phrases like “secret formula,” but it makes sense in this context.
This is all to say, if you haven’t tried Draw Something, go for it. It’s fun, it’s free and it works.
