Fun with Charades - Initial vision

Here's the initial vision, target audience, and problem statement that we started with:

• Vision: To create a fun place where people make new friends online
• Target: Teens, college kids, yuppies, casual gamers
• Problem: To connect people online through dumb charades

As we thought about this, there were a number of questions:

• Do people care at all about charades? Ellen's charades game was wildly popular, and there was a lot of buzz around Heads Up Charades!, but that was not indicative of whether people would want to play online.
• Would charades be engaging enough that people would want to play regularly?
• If we set up a real-time game to mimic the mechanics of the game we are used to, that would require friends being present at the same time, which may be hard to schedule.
• If scheduling was hard, would people be comfortable playing with strangers in game rooms, like online poker?
• Wouldn't people freak out just a bit about using video online? Are there communities that are more open to using video online?
• If we built an async game with mobile apps so that people could play when they had time, that might work. But would it be practical for people to respond to a challenge by acting while simultaneously holding their smartphones in front of them?
• And then, there was the question of whether we had an interest and competencies in gaming.