Critical Play

• What is the theme?
  • Charades is a social, party game where players are given a prompt that they have to communicate using gestures, or body language. The hard constraint is that no verbal communication is allowed.
  • The game can be divided into the following: prompt (usually name of a book or movie) → communicate (gestures/acting but no verbal communication) → Crowd guesses until correctness or failure
• What mechanics do they use?
  • The mechanics change based on the specific version of the game played. It can be a social game where people pick the prompt out of a hat. It can be a many-vs-many competitive game where each team gives each other challenging prompts to guess. Or it can be a one-vs-many games where the one (actor) gets points if they can make the crowd guess correctly.
  • A consistent setup is that the actor knows the prompt and the crowd does not know the prompt. The actor guides the crowd to the correct answer.
  • Constraints:
    • Actor is strictly prevented from using any verbal cues or words. They must not speak while they are acting.
    • A time limit is enforced to keep the game going. This prevents the game from lingering on for too long on a hard prompt. This also pumps up adrenaline of the players as the clock is ticking.
• What kind of fun do they promise the player?
  • Fellowship: The crowd often helps each other in brainstorming what the correct answer might be. They debate, filter likely guesses and engage in banter while brainstorming. This fosters fellowship and camaredie.
  • Discovery: The crowd guesses and discovers the correct guesses incrementally. At the end of unsuccessful attempts, the crowd is often ecstatic when they collectively say “OOOHHH, OF COURSE THAT WAS THE PROMPT”.
  • Challenge: The crowd tries to guess overcoming the challenge of the natural difficulty of the prompt, the time limit, and distractions by opposition ( in many-vs-many charades). Opposition will often shout, banter, and try to bluff or give false confidence to wrong guesses to distract the opposition.
  • Submission: In charades, the actor often submits themselves after failing multiple times with a difficult prompt.
  • Expression: Charades raises an interesting dynamic in the game of parallel hopelessness and hopefulness. Often, an actor will start in a state of hopelessness (”how can I act this difficult word out”) to gradual hopefulness as they find a clever idea to express.
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• How did they create this type of fun?
  • Charades shines with simple mechanics for amazing aesthetics. Very few games are as successful across nations, cultures, and languages. The lack of reliance on verbal communication is the main reason for this.
  • Simple instructions — shut up and act.
  • Right amount of difficulty — not too hard or not too easy. Adversarial nature of the game can create this difficulty – if the opposition is giving the prompts, there is a natural level of difficulty. If its a one-vs-many social game (i.e. you pick prompts out of a hat), the time limit can uptempo the difficulty.
• How is this fun and theme reinforced through graphic design decisions?
  • Charades is a social game which can be played with graphic design elements. But you can have cards that list the prompt, or use props to aid the acting.
• How does the game differentiate itself from other games in its genre?
  • Simplicity: Charades is meant to be way simpler than other guessing games.
  • Minimalism: Can be played with no props at all. Just two teams and acting.
• How do they handle abuse (or don’t?) Abuse is a critical concern for social games.
  • Social proof: If others around you are not engaging in abusing gestures, its unlikely a particular actor will engage in it. But the reverse is also true — one could give abusive book titles or movie names to an actor.
  • A simple PSA announcement to not be prejudiced is often made at the start of the game.
• How would you make it better?
  • Introduce different categories: Movies, books, cities, food, etc. — the categories are exhausted i.e. you cannot use a category twice
  • Incorporate technology: This game could be played in zoom with strangers! An interface of guessing can make it an easy one-vs-many game. Amazing for onboarding or icebreaking
  • Add props: Glasses, hats, fur, beards, wigs — anything!