I recently found out that kids no longer use the same gesture for telephone that I grew up with. You know the one - pinky and thumb raised, other fingers folded down. Kids make a claw instead.
My worldview has shifted a little since. I'm pretty sure part of my inner child expired that day.
Telephones were not a fixture in my life until I was in my double digits. I remember using analogue phones though. The ones that inspired this (dying) gesture with their curved handle with two circles for the receiver and speaker and oh, the rotary dial. Spinning that dial was one of life's little joys then.
After a while, the shapes changed, smartphones arrived, and life sort of got fucked? Or better, depending on who you ask. And here we are now.
Telephones didn't just mean these electronic devices for me though. It was the name for a popular childhood game called Chinese whispers.
(There's a wonderful article on JStor exploring why the game is called such - head on over to Proiti's JStor hack to access it if you want to know more).
The concept is simple, you whisper a sentence to the person next to you, they do the same, and mishearings abound until the original sentence is lost between eardrum to eardrum. There was also always that one player who would deliberately distort the sentence. Don't hide - we were onto you, kid.
I can't have those analogue days back unless there's a massive shift in time and space -what I can have is the experience of playing Telephone with friends.
Gartic Phone has multiple variations of the game, which can be played in a browser, by anyone with an internet connection and a computer.
I played a version that called for a wacky one-line prompt; the next player had to draw the prompt, and the next had to write what they thought the prompt was. Rinse and repeat.
Prompts about DJ hippos resulted in artwork of farting bunnies, frogs won pageants and were proposed to, and honey jars guillotined resulted in colourful deaths.
(This funky frog was drawn by the brilliant Saumitra)
I know I tend to be enthused about most of my Things, but I'm sure this will be a party favourite for a while.
Try it with your friends and I will personally take responsibility if you don't have fun.
P.S. We're stupidly late with JOT today. Our Editor apologises. Apparently, her day was a LOT of things.
Know anyone into games and cool things on the internet? Prompt them into Just One Thing today!