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You Really Should Be Playing This Game: Broken Picture Telephone By: PoisonRamune, the Apathetic Lizardman Recently, a friend of mine showed me a very interesting website based on the children’s game “telephone” (a game that’s used to show children how rumors become distorted as they’re shared by one person to another). The Broken Picture Telephone, which can be found at www.brokenpicturetelephone.com works in a similar way, but uses pictures along with words to create humorous miscommunication/misinterpretation.
The premise is simple, one player will start the game off by typing any phrase that comes to mind (the more unique, the better). The next player is to then draw something based on the first player’s phrase; after which the next player will type out a description of the second player’s drawing. The game continues on in this fashion until all the turns have been taken; at the end of the game all the drawings and descriptions are displayed in chronological order, the results are always hilarious as you then clearly see the on going misinterpretation of the pictures and words as the game went on.
One thing I really love about this game is the accessibility. If you’re reading this article, you can play this game. All your drawing and writing is done in the site’s flash applet, so there’s no need for Photoshop, MS Paint or even notepad. The game is 100% web based, so there’s absolutely no excuse as to not play this game. Another thing great thing about this game is that its fun factor is totally dependent on you. Nearly everyone I’ve showed this site to that didn’t like it or saw no point in it, aren’t very creative/imaginative people to begin with. Though this would actually be considered more of a party game or board game in the encyclopedia of game genres, I think this game actually falls more on the same of the spectrum as Little Big Planet or Animal Crossing where the game sucks only if you suck. If you’ve got a decent imagination, this game is a total blast to play. While this game is very fun to play and has become a huge time sink for me, it’s not without its problems. One major problem with this game is the site’s glitchiness. I think this has more to do with the fact that this game has experienced a huge influx of players by word of mouth advertisement, but many times the site takes forever to load pages and on very rare occasions the site will “eat” a submission as you’re saving it. Though the technical problems with the site will most likely eventually subside, the human created problems probably won’t and that’s honestly a damn shame. Like in every internet community/multiplayer game there’s always a fair supply of morons that ruin things for the masses. In this game’s case you’ll get a panel that is offense, obviously non-sequitor or downright abusive at times. So far I’ve seen things such as: the game’s final caption being “And (some idiot’s user name) doesn’t take shit from anybody,” people with penises coming out of their face (which coincidently was drawn by that guy that doesn’t take shit from people), and images that are totally racist. Despite the fact that you don’t really experience this all too much (perhaps about 5% of the time or so), it’s still very upsetting to see a game you tried so hard to advance in a clever way be ruined by some moron that just wanted to draw topless girls. Normally, when I tell you guys to get out there and try some game out I don’t really expect you to take me all too seriously. However, I really hope that after reading this article you visit The Broken Picture Telephone and create an account. When you do please be sure to let me know you did. Hope to see all you guys there, since you really should be playing this game.
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