[For context, “Dance it Till You Don’t Remember” (DTYDR) is a game designed by our team where the players take turns to create dance moves. Each player must first do the chain of moves done by previous players and add a new move on top of that. There are music cards and prompt cards: The group draws a music card at the beginning of each round to decide the music played during that round. Each player draws a prompt card whenever it is their turn, and the move they create must fulfill the prompt on the card. The game ends when a player messes up the dance chain and they will receive a penalty from the group.]
The game I played for comparative analysis is Telephone, where messages are whispered from person to person and the original and the final messages are compared. This game dates back to the 17th century and is too old to identify its creator. It is a game that can be played in person without any props. This game is considered a children’s game so it probably targets young kids at its inception, but it is played by kids and adults alike. It can be played both among strangers and with friends and family.
I argue that “Dance it Till You Don’t Remember” inherits “Telephone”’s merits of building Fellowship through the Challenge of passing on message / dance moves among players, but it is better than “Telephone” by encouraging Expression of individuality (taking advantage of dance as a paragon of creative activity), bringing about pleasures of Sensation (through dancing to the music), scaling the Challenge (by having players memorize cumulative dance moves and improvise new moves based on prompts), and consolidating Fellowship through creating an environment where everyone can be comfortable showing either their talent or goofiness/awkwardness to the group.
In Telephone, the players share the same objective of passing on the message as accurately as possible. However, the fun of the game comes exactly from the message being messed up and the errors get accumulated along the way such that the final message could be significantly different from the initial message, often in an amusing way. Similarly, DTYDR gives the players the challenge of replicating the previous dance moves and passing them on to the next player. When different people are doing the same dance moves, they tend to add their own flavor to them, which would give rise to (mostly positive) reactions from the group. When playtesting DTYDR this past weekend, we noticed that when a player did another player’s move in their own way, people either got impressed (“That was so well done!”) or laughed in a friendly way. So DTYDR shares the same underlying logic with Telephone and creates wonderful group dynamics through passing something on while adding something new.
However, the “new” element in Telephone, i.e., errors in whispering the message, does not say much about the player as a unique and creative human being. It often happens that the player just fails to hear the message clearly from the previous player, so the amusing part is created largely “by chance”. Although chance creates interesting surprises, which is exactly what makes the game fun, I observed that my friends got bored of the game after playing a few rounds. After all, it could hardly bring players other values apart from giving them a laugh. DTYDR is superior in this regard by grounding the fun of the game in creating room for the players’ self-expression. Not only can players add their own flavor to the previous dance moves, they also need to append a new dance move to the dance chain. Each player can decide what dance move they improvise and however easy or challenging it is. It is really their time to come up with the moves that could most represent them and win the cheers from the group. Moreover, in Telephone, the fun of the game comes only from one source: making errors. But in DTYDR we create enjoyable experiences for players from different dimensions: Not only is it gratifying to create self-expressive dance moves, it is also a great enjoyment dancing to the music carefully curated in our music cards.
Another reason that makes (adult) players easily get bored of Telephone is that the rules of the game are overly simple and the task is not challenging enough. Most of the time the players are able to hear clearly and successfully pass on the message, in which case the game would not create any amusing effect. DTYDR scales the challenge for the players by having them memorize a series of dance moves in a rather short amount of time and dance them out. As the game goes on, the challenge automatically increases, with more moves being added to the chain and people starting to blank on earlier moves. Additionally, we add variety to the challenge by having the players draw from our well-designed prompt cards and dance based on the prompts, which can include “Dance with your left leg still” “Dance like MJ” “Dance like you just failed an exam”. These constraints on the specificity, the style, and the emotions expressed through the dance move are not just meant to be challenging, but also to make the dance entertaining. The variety of prompt cards also make each round of the game a unique experience and thus make the game more replayable.
By encouraging the players to express their individuality and adding in goofy and funny elements through the use of prompt cards, DTYDR ultimately aims at creating a rich experience of fellowship where users can celebrate one another’s uniqueness and build emotional connections and unforgettable memories. This aspect of creating connections and promoting intimacy among players is very much lacking in Telephone.
