I apparently have a knack for coming up with nerdy party games. Three Fridays ago, my 6.033 TA encouraged us to practice creating diagrams for our design project proposals by trying to identify UNIX commands or filesystem structures from our partner's drawings. He claims that this "6.033 pictionary" was a result of strong nudging of the course's writing staff. Given that I had been encouraged by some of my friends to learn git earlier that day, naturally, I merged the two ideas and decided that gitionary needed to be created. I told Nelson, who is quite fluent in the ways of git, and he generated the game cards so we could actually play with the idea.
The original premise was simple: draw the appropriate directed acyclic graph corresponding to git commands so that your friends could guess it. However, many people who would likely end up playing the game did not yet know git, myself included, so we thought it would be good to allow drawing non-DAGs, too.
Nelson generated a set of printable gitionary cards (8.5"x11", double-sided on the long edge, requires cutting into cards), and we test ran the game with a rotating "artist" and the rest of the room guessing. I've included some (semi-arbitrarily selected) highlights drawn that evening below. Many of the most successful were not drawn as directed acyclic graphs, such as git-revert:
git-stash turned out to be difficult when initially drawn in a way that reflected what the command did, and more surprisingly still took about half a minute after the lower left-hand corner of the sheet was sketched:
A somewhat hilarious failure mode of gitionary is that objects which would ordinarily be drawn as a combination of circles and lines inadvertently look like DAGs. This was a problem Jeff had while he was drawing a magnifying glass to represent git-show:
You can also click through to see the rest of the drawings from the first run of gitionary:
- add by jesstess
- bisect by gdb
- branch by lizdenys
- checkout by nelhage
- cherry-pick by fawkes
- clean by ccpost
- commit by lizdenys
- describe by kasittig
- diff by broder
- fetch by price
- format-patch by ccpost
- gc by jbarnold
- log by adamf
- merge by broder
- mv by adamf
- notes by swarnock
- pull by wdaher
- push by njess
- rebase by fawkes
- rev-list by nelhage
- rm by swarnock
- status by flipdog
- tag by kasittig
I definitely encourage you to get a group of your favorite nerdy friends together to play the game, and maybe, you will do more than one of the plumbing commands.
Now that I've created a party game about gitionary, I think I should probably go spend some time learning git. Word on the street is that I'll think the back-end model is "cute."