About
Custom Bingo Cards are a type of exploitable images often used in online forum games in which participants are asked to create their own bingo sheet with a set of words or phrases, usually tailored to specific fandoms, communities or events. The goal of the game is to fill in five adjacent boxes on the bingo sheet in the shortest amount of time possible.
Origin
The game of bingo[1] can be traced back to approximately the year 1530 with the Italian lottery game “Il Giuoco del Lotto d’Italia”. Over the course of the next few centuries, the game was eventually co-opted by the French in the late 18th century. Bingo reached the web in the mid 1990s through virtual game rooms on Bingo Zone[11] and Pogo (shown below, left).[12] In 1995, the derivative game Slingo[13] (shown below, right) launched, replacing the traditional bingo format of calling one number at a time with randomization inspired by slot machines. Although it is unknown when bingo cards first became customized using words and phrases instead of numbers, custom bingo generators were created on the web as early as February 1st, 2001.[2][3]
Spread
According to a NeoGaf thread[4] posted on June 27th, 2007, the now-defunct gaming website Angry-gamer.net created custom bingo sheets for Electronic Entertainment Expo presentations beginning in 2006. Starting in July 2008, gaming website Joystiq[5] started an annual E3 Bingo in which they post bingo sheets for the announcements by companies such as Sony (shown below, left), Microsoft (shown below, center) and Nintendo (shown below, left).
As early as April 2008, Ronery Bingo began circulating 4chan’s /a/ (Anime and Manga) board.[16] Threads with these cards were so pervasive, one thread resulted in a ban for everyone who posted the card.[17] In February 2010, Illinois Science Council member Monica Metzler created a custom bingo sheet called “Bad Presentation Bingo”[6], which was based around common and well known mistakes made during presentations of any kind such as flaws in the slides or the speaker rambling. This bingo card has been mentioned on Idea.org[7], the Research Explainer[8] and My Research Rants.[9] It is also often shared on Twitter.[10]
Notable Examples
Custom bingo cards are often shared on deviantART[14], Tumblr[15] and 4chan.[18]
Search Interest
External References
[2]Thisiscool.com – Build Your Own Bingo
[3]Teach-Nology – Bingo Card Maker
[4]NeoGaf – E3 2007 Bingo Game
[5]Joystiq – Tagged: E3-2008-Bingo
[6]Research Explainer – Bad Presentation Bingo
[7]Idea.org – Bad Presentation Bingo: 24 things to avoid when talking to public
[8]Research Explainer – Play “Bad Presentation Bingo”: Losers are Winners!
[9]My Research Rants – Bingo game to play during bad presentations
[10]Twitter – Search Results For: ‘Bad Presentation Bingo’
[11]Bingo Zone – Archive From 12/10/97
[12]Pogo – Archive From November 1999
[14]deviantART – Search results for “bingo card”
[15]Tumblr – Posts tagged “bingo card”
[16]Foolz Archive – Ronery /a/ Bingo 04/27/08
[17]Foolz Archive – Everyone who posted in that thread got banned. Mods were having a field day. 05/13/08
[18]Foolz Archive – Search results for “bingo card”