The Color Game’s blog

The posts on this blog explore the digital life of the Color Game, a gaming app launched by our lab. Our goal: documenting the evolution of a new language without words, and recording its birth in data. To find out more, visit colorgame.net.

A Color Game week

Nothing, the saying goes, ruins your Friday like realising it's a Tuesday. Fortunately there's procrastination. Our data show Color-Gamers are most likely to open the app on Tuesdays, following an

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The Color-Game-o-Scope

It’s been six months since we launched the Color Game App. The project will last for another half year before we make all our hypotheses public. For us, the Color Game is an experiment in cultural evolution: we want to see how communication practices change over the long run. That makes it important to know how our players themselves evolve: are we dealing with a rapidly changing population of fickle players, or do the same happy few come back every day? The answer is to be found in… the Color-Game-O-Scope!

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It’s Color Game o’clock!

Most of us prefer to play live, with players who happen to be present on line at the same moment. But not every hour is a green-dots hour. What's a Color-Gamer to do?

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How Color Game pseudonyms work

The posts on this blog explore the digital life of the Color Game, a gaming app launched by our lab. Our goal: inventing a universal language without words, and recording its birth in data. To find out more, visit colorgame.net. Several players told us they were puzzled at the way the Color Game names them — or their friends. They should be! The naming scheme that we set up for the game is quite intricate. It helps us to make the game as anonymous as possible. Here's how it works.

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How the best color-gamers got there

The posts on this blog explore the digital life of the Color Game, a gaming app launched by our lab. Its goal: inventing a universal language without words, and recording its birth in data. To find out more, visit colorgame.net. The Color Game's players have been getting better at playing the game. How did they do it? Practice seems an obvious answer. But what kind of practice?

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How the Color Game’s players mastered the game

The posts on this blog explore the digital life of the Color Game, a gaming app launched by our lab. Our goal: documenting the evolution of a new language without words, and recording its birth in data. To find out more, visit colorgame.net.

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Frequently Asked Questions

Players of the Color Game frequently ask: My friend and I connected at the same moment, but I can't see anyone to play live with — is this normal? Yes. The Color Game divides players into

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The Color Game’s World

Launching the Color Game was a shot in the dark. Who would hear about it? Who would play it? Would they like it enough to go on playing? Two weeks after the public launch, the Color Game's reach went beyond our expectations. Color-Gamers are becoming more numerous every day, and their origins are surprisingly diverse.

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Introducing the Color Game

Last week, the Color Game, the first smartphone app specifically designed to study the dynamics of language evolution was launched by our team at the Max Planck Institute for the Science of Human History. This blog will follow the development of the Color Game project. In this first post, we first take a closer look to its characteristics from the players’ point of view, and to the features that makes it a realistic playground for the study of language evolution.

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