Opposable Thumbs / Gaming & Entertainment

You Don’t Know Jack shines on Facebook

Irreverent trivia highlights the true meaning of "social gaming"

Names and faces blurred to protect my stupid friends (and that one smart one).

Many of the most popular "social" games on Facebook are really the opposite of social, when you get down to it. Truly social games—the kind you play together on a couch or on a multi-player server—have you working with friends towards some common objective or working against them in a battle of skill. With many Facebook games, however, the "socializing" portion boils down to visiting a virtual dollhouse to gain a few meaningless points or spamming your friends' walls to ask them to send you a virtual present. Meanwhile, the game is constantly bugging you to spend real money on some valueless in-game trinket or begging you to share some meaningless achievement with friends that almost assuredly have no interest. Having fun yet?

And then there's You Don't Know Jack, which launched on Facebook today as quite possibly the best version yet of Jellyvision's popular, irreverent trivia series. Instead of exploiting Facebook for annoying viral marketing or addictive and vacant micro-transaction hell, the new game serves as proof that Facebook can be used to add real social competition to strong, proven game design.

If you remember the classic You Don't Know Jack PC games from the '90s, or have the recent console-and-PC revamp, then you know what to expect with the Facebook version. There's still the same sharply written and voice-acted questions, the same mix of high culture and current event topics with pop culture trashiness and sophomoric humor, and the same absurdist send-ups of the staid, Jeopardy-style quiz show format. Many of the questions require you to unpack some truly obscure references just to understand what's being asked, and trying to keep up with the never-a-dull-moment pacing is a large part of the fun.

Standard multiple choice questions are broken up by rhyming-based "gibberish questions and quick-fire, either-or "DisOrDat" questions, as well as the standard game-ending "Jack Attack" matching section. Each five-question game take only seven or eight minutes to complete, making it the perfect coffee break time waster.

While you play each game on your own, YDKJ makes the most of its Facebook connection by putting you in indirect competition with friends that have already played the same set of questions. After you buzz in, you see how up to six of your Facebook buddies fared on the same question, and see your relative position slide up and down as you do. It's not quite as fun as laughing along with a bunch of friends on your couch, but it is a hell of a lot more convenient, and allows for easy play with more people in different schedules and locations.

The game does bug you at the end of each episode to brag about various achievements on your friends' walls, but the potential for between-game trash-talking actually makes these messages a lot less annoying than the standard social gaming spam. You Don't Know Jack also keeps a constantly-updated comparative ranking between you and each of your friends, which provides a strong motivation to try and improve. In a game like Farmville, your in-game level just proves how much more time/money you've wasted compared to your friends. In You Don't Know Jack, seeing another player is rated as "62% smarter than you" provides a much better incentive to play just one more game.

And that's where the nominally free-to-play You Don't Know Jack brings the dreaded monetization into the equation. You're given one free game per day, and can earn more somewhat frequently by earning some appropriately weird achievements (such as playing a new game between midnight and 12:15 a.m.). Past that, you'll be paying anywhere from 30 to 40 cents per play, making this more like an old-school arcade game than a new-school social money sink. You can also buy an assortment of "score enhancers" that add a 10 to 50 percent bonus to your final score, a sad addition that screws up the game's careful knowledge-based balance and adds a worrying "pay-to-win" specter to the proceedings.

But it's not a dealbreaker. After a week of beta testing, You Don't Know Jack remains my favorite version of one of my favorite gaming franchises, and one that really shows the power of Facebook to help game design, rather than pervert it.

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