About

Custom Bingo Cards are a type of exploitable images often used in online forum games in which participants are asked to create their own bingo sheet with a set of words or phrases, usually tailored to specific fandoms, communities or events. The goal of the game is to fill in five adjacent boxes on the bingo sheet in the shortest amount of time possible.

Origin

The game of bingo^[1] can be traced back to approximately the year 1530 with the Italian lottery game "Il Giuoco del Lotto d'Italia". Over the course of the next few centuries, the game was eventually co-opted by the French in the late 18th century. Bingo reached the web in the mid 1990s through virtual game rooms on Bingo Zone^[11] and Pogo (shown below, left).^[12] In 1995, the derivative game Slingo^[13] (shown below, right) launched, replacing the traditional bingo format of calling one number at a time with randomization inspired by slot machines. Although it is unknown when bingo cards first became customized using words and phrases instead of numbers, custom bingo generators were created on the web as early as February 1st, 2001.^[2][3]

Spread

According to a NeoGaf thread^[4] posted on June 27th, 2007, the now-defunct gaming website Angry-gamer.net created custom bingo sheets for Electronic Entertainment Expo presentations beginning in 2006. Starting in July 2008, gaming website Joystiq^[5] started an annual E3 Bingo in which they post bingo sheets for the announcements by companies such as Sony (shown below, left), Microsoft (shown below, center) and Nintendo (shown below, left).

As early as April 2008, Ronery Bingo began circulating 4chan's /a/ (Anime and Manga) board.^[16] Threads with these cards were so pervasive, one thread resulted in a ban for everyone who posted the card.^[17] In February 2010, Illinois Science Council member Monica Metzler created a custom bingo sheet called "Bad Presentation Bingo"^[6], which was based around common and well known mistakes made during presentations of any kind such as flaws in the slides or the speaker rambling. This bingo card has been mentioned on Idea.org^[7], the Research Explainer^[8] and My Research Rants.^[9] It is also often shared on Twitter.^[10]

Personalized Bingo Cards

In mid-June of 2017, a social game began spreading through Twitter in which users created Bingo Cards where each square represented an aspect of their personality. One of the earliest iterations of the meme was posted to Twitter by @mooonjou (shown below).^[19]

Over the following week, many more iterations would be posted to Twitter, often using the myfreebingocards generator.^[20]

Notable Examples

Custom bingo cards are often shared on deviantART^[14], Tumblr^[15] and 4chan.^[18]

Search Interest

External References