Telephone Pictionary

Telephone Pictionary is a game that plays with semiotic slippage using images and words. In the game, a stack of paper is passed around a circle of players. The first player writes a phrase on the first sheet of paper in the stack, then passes the stack to the second player. The second player reads the phrase, flips the first sheet of paper to the back of the stack, and then attempts to pictorially represent that phrase on the second sheet of paper. After the second player is finished drawing, the stack is passed to the third player. The third player must attempt to understand Player 2’s drawing without looking at the original phrase written by the first player. On the third sheet of paper Player 3 writes a new phrase based on Player 2’s drawing. The stack is then passed on to Player 4, who reads Player 3’s phrase, flips to the next sheet of paper, and attempts to pictorially represent Player 3’s phrase. Thus the stack goes around the circle, eventually coming back to the first player. When my friends and I play this game, everybody in the circle starts their own stack and the stacks are always passed at the same time in the same direction, so everyone in the circle is engaged in either drawing, or image-deciphering.

Sometimes the final paper is very similar to the first player’s desired meaning, and sometimes it’s hilariously off the mark. What’s great about this game versus the spoken-word game Telephone is that in Telephone Pictonary there is a record of exactly when and how the misinterpretation took place. You can count back through the sheets of paper and see who misinterpreted whose drawing. (“You thought that was a donkey? I drew a unicorn! See, look at its horn!” “No, to me that looks like a donkey ear!”) It’s fun flipping through the papers and seeing where misinterpretations (based on rushed drawing or misunderstood symbols, or even bad handwriting) take place, and what new direction the stack evolves toward, based on that misinterpretation.

You can imagine a phrase like “no smoking” being easily translated from words into picture, back and forth around the entire circle. Among my friends, a stack that alternates between the cigarette-in-a-circle-with-a-diagonal-line-through-it image and the phrase “no smoking” would be considered a boring outcome. We usually try to come up with less obvious phrases, and sometimes there are players who act as intentional obfuscators for the sake of making things more interesting.