User:Mrpollock

LikiWinks

LikiWinks is an educational strategy game for people of all ages and abilities, using Wikipedia as the gameboard and navigating through wikilinks as the method of play.

The game was developed by Michael Pollock and the “guidelines” are listed below (please note that there are no “official rules” to the game, as participants may decide to change the way they play the game to suit their own needs).

LikiWinks guidelines:

Standard game: Using the LikiWinks entry in Wikipedia as a starting point, players try to navigate through Wikipedia links to a finishing point in as few steps as possible. For example, the finishing point could be Winston Churchill, Mickey Mouse, iPod or the next celebrity/politician mentioned on CNN. Players can decide upon the finishing point themselves or they can ask an independent person to decide for them.

A time limit for the game is decided upon it can be as long as you like – 30minutes or a day.

Players can go back and refine their wikilinks over and over again within the game’s time limit, to see how they can reduce the number of steps between the start and finish points.

When the time limit has been reached, each player stops LikiWinking and counts the number of steps it has taken them to get from start to finish. The player with the fewest steps is the winner. The entries of the winner’s steps are shared among the rest of the players so that they can verify the winner’s steps.

Subject-specific game: In this version of the game, start and finish points are determined by the team or by an independent person (such as a teacher) and may be linked by their subject matter, e.g., for history: Napoleon Bonaparte and John Calvin; for entertainment: Paul McCartney and Hannah Montana; etc.

The time limit and step verification are the same as for the standard game.

This LikiWinks page has a number of different wikilinks embedded in it so that players have a choice in the initial direction for their journey – this is where the strategy comes in. Players should think about the start and finish points to see if they can determine some common links.

Happy LikiWinking!