If your head is exploding or melting from all the news you scroll through OR if you are convinced the entire internet is a burning dumpster, I’m here to assure you there is plenty to find joy, inspiration, and even a smile-- hence the recent series of posts tagged smallthings
Okay, raise your virtual hand if you love and appreciate the ideal of Wikipedia? It is literally a living ecosystem of open, right? If you have never experienced Listen to Wikipedia open it in another tab for some ambient music generated by the most recent edits to Wikipedia.
That’s amazing right?
Let’s take it up notch with a retro arcade style game you can play in your browser, also powered by the edit activity in Wikipedia. Get ready to play WikiAsteroids
As you can see in the screenshot, my gameplay is about to go south as I was too busy trying to take a screenshot. This is the idea of the game.
No idea what this old game is about? Of course Wikipedia has the details.
A classic asteroids arcade game with a Wikipedia twist! Each edit to an article on Wikipedia spawns an asteroid.
- The larger the edit, the larger the asteroid (and the more shots it takes to destroy).
- Blue asteroids indicate additions, red asteroids indicate subtractions.
- When you destroy an asteroid, an article preview shows up in the sidebar with a link to the edit.
- At the bottom of this page, you can toggle edits from various language Wikipedias.
By default, WikiAsteroids shows edits from the English Wikipedia. Additional languages can be toggled at the bottom of the page.
I am not very good at games, by first round I barely got 22 points. The fun thing is when your player gets smashed game over, they provide the link for the “asteroid” that did you in.
Mine was a bio for Canadian politician Bonita Zarrillo and I might have never come across her article had I not played this game.
Now while not strictly an academic OER, I hope you can appreciate the cleverness of this emulation of a game, plus that it is totally powered by the open APIs and content of Wikipedia that enable it to work.
Play a few rounds of WikiAsteroids and maybe share your high score screen and the article that crushed you.
My first attempt:
