Games

What these bots do

Game bots bring short rounds into chat: word games, trivia, card games, drawing guesses, collection games. They fill the gap between "nothing is happening here" and "let us schedule two hours".

Their real value is activation. A server with no reason to type goes quiet. A trivia round in the evening gives people a reason to open the channel, and the conversations that carry a server grow out of that.

Features that actually matter

Round length. A game that takes twenty minutes happens once. One that takes three minutes happens daily. For everyday use, short formats almost always win.

Concurrency. Can two channels play at the same time? On larger servers that is the difference between a game for everyone and a game for whoever happened to be there first.

Content in your language. Trivia and word games live or die by their question database. Many bots only ship English content. If your server speaks German, check before inviting. It is the most common reason a game bot disappears again after a week.

Noise level. Games generate messages. A bot that comments on every answer separately makes the channel unreadable. Good implementations edit one message repeatedly instead of sending twenty.

Leaderboards, kept separate. If game points feed the same list as activity points, the winner is whoever plays, not whoever contributes. Keep the rankings apart.

Permissions worth checking

Not much: Send Messages, Read Message History, Add Reactions for answer buttons, and Attach Files where images are generated. Some games want Manage Messages to tidy up intermediate states, which is defensible, but it should be explained.

They do not need Manage Roles (unless there are winner roles), Moderate Members, Manage Channels or Administrator.

More important than the permission list is the channel question: create a dedicated games channel and confine the bot to it. Without that boundary the game migrates into your main channel and pushes out whatever belongs there.

Where server owners go wrong

The first mistake is too many game bots at once. Three bots with overlapping commands mean none of them gets used properly, and all three respond to the same prefix.

The second is unsupervised competition. Wherever points are awarded, people cheat: with alt accounts, with search engines, with arrangements. If the leaderboard is supposed to mean something, it needs rules and somebody enforcing them.

The third is using games as a substitute for substance. A server that only survives on games is an arcade rather than a community. Games are a reason to talk, not a reason to stay.