Going Mobile! - HTML5 Canvas - page 836

The First Application
The application we are going to create is a simple BS Bingo game. BS Bingo was designed
on paper well before mobile devices were available. This cynical game concept is based on
the feeling (by some) that the typical business workplace has been overtaken with Dilbert- or
Office Space -esque annoying corporate jargon and doublespeak. This doublespeak seems to
have deeply rooted itself in the workplace over the last 20 years, mostly to the annoyance of
software developers (such as ourselves).
In the pen-and-paper version of the game, each player brings a “bingo card” to a meeting
whereheexpectstohearalotofthiscorporatedoublespeak.Thebingocardisa5×5grid,and
each of the 25 squares is filled with one of the annoying words or jargon phrases. During the
meeting, each player marks off squares as the words or phrases are said aloud by the unsus-
pecting (and not playing) members of the meeting. When a player has a full column or row of
his card marked off, he is supposed to jump up from the meeting table and yell “BS!”
Whetherthisgamewaseverwidelyplayed(orevenplayedatall)isadebatable urbanlegend,
but the simple concept of clicking squares to highlight them makes for a useful piece of code
that we can build easily and then port to the iPhone. We are not even going to build the en-
tire game here; we will leave extending it into a full application (possibly adding multiplayer,
which is discussed in Chapter 11 ) for you, the reader.