What is Pickr? It is a tournament style game that can be played online. Players select a topic (or more commonly, may click on a link to find one) for the tournament to be based upon. When the game is opened, users are shown 2 random choices that are essentially contestants for the given topic.
The player continues to play until only the victor remains, in continuous rounds. The interface is as simple as it gets, you are given two choices, and you click or tap the one you prefer.
The thing that makes this truly interesting though of course, is that a ranking of all the choices are presented. The choices are sorted first by the total number of games that a choice has remained as the supreme victor, then by the number of intermediate rounds that were played to complete that game.
An important note to be made about Pickr though, is that it is not a ranking app of preferences. The selections of choices are made at random, and face off against each other randomly, meaning that in theory a player’s number 1 and 2 choices may face off in the first round. Whatever rank or tree that’s generated from that, the player’s number 2 choice will have been unfairly ranked. What could be introduced as a remedy for this, would be a separate loser’s bracket, to give opportunities for the number 2 choice to redeem itself, but that would be besides the point. And what is the point you ask? Pickr is not meant to be a strict record per se of anything. It’s not meant to be the next way to poll for preferences, or a replacement for something like Strawpoll. Instead, what Pickr does, and does very well, is encourage this very act of making the binary decision, by managing focus of the players.
In a world practically filled with an infinite number of distractions, Pickr narrows your focus to the given topic you have selected, then narrows it down further to 2 choices, and you simply choose one or the other. The vague topic title and description may dictate how you may be encouraged to choose, but at the end of the day, you are free to arbitrarily choose on whatever internal criteria, of the two that were presented to you.
Anyone in the world can create a topic, and it can be shared equally with anyone, by sharing the link.
Ask yourself, is there any field, no matter how trivial, in which you have a strong opinion on? Or perhaps you are a part of a community with a rabid fanbase? If you want to focus the attention of peers, or an online community for a while, based on the topic you’ve created – you can do that using Pickr.