How Your Answers in The Jackbox Survey Scramble are Implemented

NOTE: the featured blog image displays the internal list-building tool in early development.

We’re not like these other companies making short lists that don’t give you the full picture. 

Top 10 Songs? That’s not even a playlist! 

20 Best Recipes? Small Potatoes!

50 Hottest Birds? They left out the egret?!?!

The Jackbox Survey Scramble has compiled opinion-based surveys with HUNDREDS of answers. 

And in order to create ranked lists that have HUNDREDS of answers, we needed to collect the thoughts of THOUSANDS of participants from all around the country (as well as countries across the globe for local versions).
 

Sending Out Surveys

If you are connected with us on social media or Discord, you may have noticed us asking for help filling out weekly 15-question surveys asking three one-word opinions per question.

Your participation and support in completing those surveys have made this game possible!  Our community alone has contributed over a million points of data. Combined with the efforts of external partners collecting data across the globe, we have over ten million opinions ranked and moderated across over two hundred different topics and nine different regional territories.  

And that’s just the beginning! Our database of answers and lists of top-ranked responses will continue to grow and evolve over time as you, our players, contribute new responses just by playing the game! We will periodically review all new responses and update the rankings for each question, so what you see in the list of Best Liquids on day one could be totally different if you see that same list months later! 

Why One Word?

The surveys we sent out were all very different. There were questions about food, monsters, history, pop culture, dog thoughts and, of course, bad jobs for a clown. The one consistent across these diverse surveys is that all responses must be ONE WORD.

This is because we were looking for the places where opinions overlapped. To create a ranked list, multiple people must write the same word MANY times. If we ask “What do you do on lazy Sunday afternoon” it’s much more likely that more than one person will answer “knit”, but only I would write “work on my Kurt Russell crochet.”

Plus, Jackbox Games has always encouraged our players to be creative, funny and cute and finding hundreds of different ways to answer questions like “things that spin”’ with just one word is a challenge they will excel at.
 

What went in?

Other than responses that were much longer than one word, not fit for public eyes, or incomprehensible, EVERYTHING.

If in our survey several people wrote “rocks” for What’s a Good Snack… it’s on the list. 

Combining answers to get everything in there

To have the list reflect as many of your answers as possible, we sometimes combined very similar concepts into one answer. With a question like, “How would you escape from bees?”, if people responded with “running” and “runaway” and “sprint”, moderators will combine all of those into “run”, so that all the variations will be accepted, but only one slot on the list is used and we can cram in more of your various bee strategies

We were very nice.

If multiple people wrote the same answer, we tried to put it in the game. We instructed people to write ONE WORD, but if enough people tried to pass off two words as one… the game accepted it. 

We accept compound words if they are popular. We call this the “icecream” rule. While there would normally be a space between the two words, this game is based on public opinion and there are many sets of words that we, as a society, agree to work together to create a singular idea (once again, this only works if LOTS of people mushed up the same two words).

Also, we did take it down to one word when we could… If we asked for famous people and you wrote “RenéeZellweger”... we would just display “Zelleweger” because it's obvious who you meant. 

What Gets Added?

As you can see, navigating the complex labyrinth of human thoughts and opinions is a pretty tricky undertaking. The best part is: it never ends!

One of the coolest aspects of the Survey Scramble is that the survey isn't really over… the lists in the game will keep growing and changing. As players enter their answers into Survey Scramble, the game keeps collecting them. So if it’s an answer that’s already on the list, it becomes more popular. If it’s a brand new answer… it may be added in the future.

New answers will go through the same screening process as the initial surveys, so it takes a little time to look over new entrees and see if they should go under an existing display value or become a new entree on the list. The most popular submitted answers go to the top of the list which is checked by an actual human being*.

But don’t be surprised if the next time you see a survey you’ve played before… the order is a little bit different, and there are words that didn’t show up before. 

The MORE answers we get, the MORE choosy we can be about what goes in. We like to let some funny/weird stuff in every now and then, but once the game is live for a couple weeks, you won’t see anything that didn’t get TONS of people submitting it. So if you see the word “Wood” under the category “Name Something Sharp”.... A lot of your fellow players think wood is sharp**

So when you play, you can let people know how YOU think. 

*Like me, so I’ve seen a lot of thoughts on good pooping locations.

**Like me and I have the scar to prove it.

Learn more about The Jackbox Survey Scramble and purchase here.