Acro

Acrophobia, commonly referred to as Acro for short, and also known as Acromania, is a multi-round, multiplayer online Internet Relay Chat game. The game was originally created by Anthony Shubert in the mid 1990s and has since been been ported by a number of different developers.

A player tells Roger, the #ags bot, rog acro, whenceforth he spews a random acronym, and then players compete to make the most coherent or humorous sentence from it (a form of backronym). After a set amount of time expires, each player then votes via Roger on which they preferred most, and points are awarded to the most popular backronym. Usually, nonsense backronyms will score low and the most humorous sounding backronym which effectively makes a sentence from the initials will win.

Example round

This is an example of a typical round of acro on #ags and the selection of backronyms the players would have to vote upon. In this particular case the result was a tie between entries 2 and 3, in which case the fastest entry (i.e. lowest numbered) wins.

<SSH>	 rog acro
<Roger>	 Your letters are: HEFDS, 60 seconds starts now. PM me your entries, consisting
of 5 words, each starting with the corresponding letter. 'Roger acro rules' for info.
<Roger>	 Time up! There were 3 entries:
<Roger>	 1: Help, everyone! Finnish devils surrounding!
<Roger>	 2: Hairy elephants find dingos scary
<Roger>	 3: Highly explosive food, don't smoke!
<Roger>	 You have 32 seconds to vote, say a number.
<SSH>	 3
<Zoot>	 2
<Haddas> 3
<Neccy>	 2
<scotch> 1
<Roger>	 Voting time over. Congratulations SSH, you are the winner with 2 votes for 
entry number 2! (Fastest entry wins in a voting draw.)

Statistics

There is now an acro statistics page, updated weekly.

Etiquette

It is considered bad form to make entries that just use the letters. Rlacey and Hotspot appear to be the worst culprits of this. Sometimes people vote for such entries just to find out who is doing it.

Some people also frown upon entering, but not voting. Some entrants also deliberately vote for a bad entry because they think that no-one else will vote for it and they will still win, although this can backfire. This is also seen as cheating. There is talk from time to time to change the rules so that a punishment is meted upon those resorting to these tactics.