Media

Almost Worthless

69 rejected/leftover ideas from my UsVsTh3m notes

Yesterday I tried the one-Like Twitter meme thing:

Contrary to what many say, ideas aren’t worthless, but if you’re doing creative work you should aim to make them almost worthless by having far more than you can ever use. So here’s an almost worthless list of daft ideas, maybe one of them’ll inspire something interesting.

  1. WIN £1000000 (in binary) - give away 64 quid and make some unobservant people angry
  2. 3D Monster Maze 2014 - recreate the ZX81 classic using photos of someone in crap dinosaur suit in hedge maze
  3. Emergency Offline Internet Kit - Zip file of single-user Twitter, crap Wikipedia articles, etc
  4. DUMP Magazine - printable publication aimed at people who are on the toilet, with toilet-themed content
  5. Four Candles - a topic-based index of videos of all Two Ronnies sketches
  6. Head Balls, Ed Balls - politican-related footy sim
  7. Clash of the CyberKittens - reactions-based shoot-out, when you win share your performance to challenge others
  8. Celebrikit - identikit thing using facial features of celebs from photo archive
  9. You Can’t Do Your Tax Return Under Pressure
  10. Swearfighter - beat-em-up where you have to type swears to attack, can’t repeat them so gets tricky
  11. Design A Kitten - create your perfect cute animated fwuffball & share it
  12. Top Shelf or Bottom Shelf? - is the cropped photo from a porn mag or one of those puzzle mags that always have a woman on the cover for some reason
  13. Northometer redone for Game of Thrones
  14. Play Your Shards Right - is each building higher or lower than the previous one?
  15. Meme Therapy - problem page where the replies are always based around prescribing & over-analysing internet memes
  16. Fatty Mush - Candy Crush clone but featuring greasy fried foods, unhealthy-looking characters & belching sounds
  17. How Optimistic Are You? - just asks what you think you’ll score in a quiz, and that’s your score
  18. Sandwich Construction Simulator - build up the layers, share and rate them
  19. Realistic London Simulator - pick some common minor annoyance and make the player experience it repeatedly until they give up
  20. Realistic Countryside Simulator - nothing happens but it looks lovely
  21. Gallery of imaginary friends - user-submitted hand-drawn pics and descriptions
  22. KNN, Kitten News Network - take a news feed of text & pics and present it automatically with animated kittens & meowing audio
  23. Ballbearing shooty game Crossfire for 2 players on a phone
  24. Something about Culture Club on The A Team, it was so bloody weird I’m still not 100% convinced it actually happened
  25. Lorem ipsum typing game
  26. Message In A Bottle - submit a message, wait a while to get one back that someone else wrote (or fib & have disturbing presets?)
  27. Gauntlet clone but level layout consists of letters of your Twitter username & monsters are your followers
  28. Online Auld Lang Syne - submit pic of yourself with arms crossed to join ever-growing chain. Terrible singing plays on loop
  29. World’s Fastest Sloth - try to make a sloth travel 10m as fast as possible, maybe with QWOP-like controls
  30. Weightwatcher - shown photos, guess weight, analyse results to spot gender biases etc of player & people in general
  31. World’s Biggest Time-waster - hold down button, shows how much time you’ve wasted, position in chart and total time wasted by everyone so far
  32. Death masks quiz - name the famous faces, dark & stylish presentation
  33. Are You A NIMBY? - asks how you’d feel about various things being put next to your home, everyone ends up a NIMBY
  34. Darkest Moments In Animation - all from The Plague Dogs
  35. Where’s Your Nearest Hellmouth? - shows a nearby location on Google Maps with animated demons spewing out
  36. You Can’t Edit Copy Under Pressure
  37. International Clickbait Day - “You won’t believe what’s going to happen”
  38. How Long Is Your Sausage? - keep the wobbling, ever-growing sausage away from sharp edges, tweet “My sausage is X.Ym long!”
  39. One of those Christmassy log fire videos, but someone then starts burning presents, sobs, etc. Make it go on for hours
  40. Medieval Monk Simulator 1307
  41. Spoiler Bomb - make hundreds of movie/TV spoilers fly up the screen
  42. Make those sliding tile puzzles from your own GIFs
  43. Who’s Your Patron Saint? - enter job & hobbies, get saints & descriptions of their weird lives
  44. Stare-out game - detect blinking on webcam?
  45. Virtual scratchcards with crap virtual prizes
  46. Sherlock’s Or Bollocks? - is it a case mentioned in the Holmes stories, or made-up nonsense?
  47. Ecommerce sweatshop game - drag and drop to frantically fill the virtual shelves in run-up to Christmas
  48. Weather app using stupid GIFs
  49. Do something with binaural audio (game? crossing road with just audio? Escape from maze?)
  50. George Osborne Virtual Pet - feed him Byron burgers, work on budget, phone mummy, etc
  51. How BASIC Are You? - as in the programming language
  52. Fax It Up - upload pic/text, send URL to someone, pic comes through slowly as glitchy pixellated fax
  53. How Much Is Your Body Worth? - based on its chemical composition of minerals etc
  54. Can you tap along perfectly to the Friends claps?
  55. Blatantly rehash my Programming Language Inventor or Serial Killer? quiz
  56. How Much Do They Earn? - try to guess wages from photos, analyse biases
  57. 2 player tug-of-war game for phones
  58. The Singing Ringing Tree as a weird Mario game
  59. Animal poo quiz
  60. A chat room that only lets you swear, you can’t say anything else. Would end up weirdly inoffensive
  61. Guess your age from apps on your phone home screen
  62. GIFTV - make a ‘TV channel’ showing your selection of GIFs
  63. Are You Sex-Obsessed? - vague double-entendre instructions make the player inevitably draw/click/type rude things
  64. Googlifier - stick googly eyes on pics, shake phone/mouse to make them jiggle
  65. Realistic Conkers Simulator - must feature tangling and stampsies
  66. Horrorscope - enter your DOB, get a gruesome over-the-top prediction of how you’ll die
  67. Pac-Man but in The Shining’s maze
  68. Award-o-matic - give yourself a ridiculous mundane accolade, along the lines of Rear of the Year, Spectacle Wearer of the Year, etc
  69. Crapper Mapper 2: Eclectic Bog-or-loo