Pictionary

Pictionary is a dirty elitist game. (I’m speaking in hyperbole, just in case that doesn’t travel through the text well.) Pictionary basically asks one to laugh at those with drawing skills that are less fortunate than yours, and tries to provide a setting in which that would be acceptable.

How shameful.

There is an element of truth to what I’m saying though. For those who possibly don’t know, Pictionary involves two teams. The people on each team take turns drawing a word from a card to make the rest of the group guess the word. The first group to guess the word wins.

So honestly, this game shouldn’t be very fun. It reverts to the days of cave drawings as communication. This drawing of words as pictures used to be very serious stuff, and now we mock their struggle. Honestly, if my handwriting is any indication, then I would have failed miserably in recreating my hunt of the wildebeest.

Pictionary fits in that same category with Charades where the actions are not themselves all that much like a game. I actually was thinking about this game recently in my theater class as they performed an example of pantomime in class. They used student volunteers to act as cavemen and Ug, played by one of the professional actors, tried to convey a request for them to work together to take down a wooly mammoth. The rest of the class laughed during the performance, especially during the moments in which Ug received baffled looks as the cavemen failed to understand his message

This kind of humor from the inefficiencies of poor communicatio.n underlies quite a few comical moments in life. I bet off the top of your head, you can think of a time when you thought the other person said something, but really you misheard them, and chaos (hopefully minor) ensued.

Games like Pictionary force this poor communication. The most efficient way to get your team to guess the word is to show them the word, or write the word. However, the rules divert you onto this roundabout method where you have to reduce the word into a symbol or image, and then actually draw that image. This might be easy for words like basketball, but I found an online list of words you could use for Pictionary (http://www.thegamegal.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/11/Pictionary-Words-Really-Hard.pdf) where there are words like “twang.” How do you represent a twang in a draw-able form? Suggestions?

Combine the representation problem with my less-than-stellar artwork skills, and it’s sure to be an entertaining time.

To illustrate, I had some friends/family members do a Pictionary-style sketch. Can you guess the word?

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