On February 3, Tumblr user Relientk used the site’s recently launched survey feature to list several common baking ingredients. “Okay, let’s go bake a cake,” the poll urged. There were no further instructions, no rules. User votes implicitly set the percentage of things like butter, flour, sugar… and vanilla extract.
If you’re already a Tumblr user, you know how this was. The resulting cake recipe was 44 percent vanilla, briefly changing the phrase “vanilla extract” in a site-wide meme. Although the gag was short-lived and the cake (based on a real life baking test) far from delicious, it’s become part of a much bigger trend on Tumblr: turning the site’s polls into sometimes surprisingly complex and often great fun games.
Support for Tumblr polls has been implemented in January this year, many years after Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram implemented (and, in some cases, discontinued) their own polling features. And much of the Tumblr user base has used them in ways you’d expect. Artists and creatives ask their followers to vote on their next project or select features to collaboratively design a character. Students and researchers collect general user data, either for academic purposes or to satisfy their own curiosity. And inevitably, horny fans have readily embraced the feature to crown the hottest characters of any given franchise or your favorite tumblr.
Tumblr doesn’t stop at the stark simplicity of polls, having devised numerous innovative ways to gamify the feature.
But Tumblr has also turned the poll system into a simple game design tool, setting challenges for readers at different levels of difficulty and surrealism. Some polling games require achieving a final breakdown of votes that is perfectly balanced to defeat an evil sorcerer robot. Others need you to make sure the votes match specific percentages to successfully assassinate Julius Caesar. Others ask you to “build” a particular visual result using the survey bar chart, by doing things like carrying an elephant up some stairs to reach a peanut.
Some of these games are basically popularity contests, like finding out which animal emoji wins a race. But many of them rely on the information gap created by the survey system. As with other platforms like Twitter, an active poll will display a question (or, in some cases, a scenario that the game takes place in) with a list of different options for a user to select. The number of votes for each option is hidden until the user has made their own selection or until the poll deadline is met, after which the resulting breakdown is displayed as a horizontal bar chart.
This means that many games follow some variation of the “prisoner’s dilemma” format, a situation in which people cannot directly see how other people are performing a task, but must choose to act in their own interest or figure out how to cooperate to achieve a common goal or reward.
Unlike the classic prisoner’s dilemma, Tumblr users have several ways to inform each other about the current state of the game. They can leave comments directly on the survey, something anyone viewing the post can see. Or they can reblog the poll and add notes to their tags, creating a message that only people viewing the reblog see. While some polling games ask people to vote without checking the tags and comments, this is generally not considered cheating. If anything, it’s pretty much mandatory to “win” these games that require very specific vote breakdowns.
While the participants seem interested in winning poll games, people seem largely unbothered by the sabotage.
The very nature of these games also makes them vulnerable to sabotage. There is no firm requirement to play fair, and if you’ve spent any time online, then you already know that some people really enjoy being a nuisance. Fortunately, no one seems to care about losing. Tumblr’s legacy is built on years of chaotic creativity, fueled by niche inside jokes and rapidly evolving memes. The real prize is the discord that you help sow along the way.
There are other variants of Tumblr polling games that are hard to smash as well. The feature can be used to impromptu role playing, listing the different actions users can take to navigate through a crowdsourced choose-your-own-adventure scenario. There’s no personal autonomy, of course: the action with the most votes is ultimately how the story will proceed. But the fun here is in the journey rather than the destination.
It’s a stark contrast to the way surveys have played out on other platforms. Look, for example, at chief Elon Musk’s haphazard use of informal Twitter polling as a makeshift tool to democratize the platform, allowing ordinary users to vote to unban Donald Trump’s account, nonchalantly reversing mass account suspensions and even demanding that Musk resign. from his position as CEO of Twitter. Despite showing at least some Mindful that he has essentially become the troll king of Twitter’s 4chan-lite era, Musk seems to view the polls as an infallible representation of the “voice of the people.”
Tumblr, however, is painfully aware that its platform is populated primarily by weird, savage Internet gremlins and apparently acknowledges that that group is unlikely to take polls seriously. This is a community that collaboratively managed to conceive best mafia movie ever made; Of course, people will try to rig polls for the fun of it. The poll games that grew out of this chaos are low-effort, low-stakes, and serve Tumblr’s whimsical, if slightly unhinged, sense of community. Teamwork may not make the dream work, but at least everyone can have fun stabbing Caesar or baking a really horrible cake.
The desire to create games can be quenched with a host of hobbyist design tools online. RobloxThe popularity among children is largely due to its user base who create social games on the platform. titles like dreams and Minecraft they are meta-games that support the construction of interactive experiences. Meta hopes to take over the metaverse by having people create minigames (among other experiences) for their worlds horizon platform.
And earlier this year, TikTok experienced a similar phenomenon with “DabloonTok” in which users created a random role-playing environment around the platform’s algorithm. What initially started as a meme depicting a cat holding an outstretched paw quickly evolved into a semi-functional digital economy that depended on the scenario that would play out in the videos appearing in a user’s feed.
Like many TikTok trends, DabloonTok was short-lived. And Tumblr’s own interest in poll games also seems to be waning a bit. But regardless of the platform, another seemingly insignificant feature will most likely soon be repurposed for gaming and entertainment. If the “Twitch Plays Pokémon” social experiment has taught us anything, it’s that people are collectively willing to find new ways to enjoy things, even if it means spending a lot of time using them “incorrectly.”
