Telephone Game

The telephone game was a popular children's game in schools when I was a kid. The game involves a group of people and emphasizes how information can changed as it is passed along from person to person. The game is usually played in a cirlce, although it never really mattered. The rules of the game are as follows:

• Group Size: The game works best with at least five players but can ivolve many more. The more people, the more fund and chaotic the game becomes.
• Starting the Game: The game stars with one person, the caller who thinks of a phrase or a sentence. The phrase can be anything -- a simple sentence, a phrase from a popular song, a quote, or soemthing completely random. It is important that the phrase is not too long to avoid confusion, but not so short that it's too easy.
• Passing the Message:* the caller then whispers the phrase into the ear of th person sitting or standing next to them. That person listens carefully and then immediately whispers what they heard to the next person. Each player must only pass the messagge on once, and they cannot repeat or clarify the message.
• Repetition: This process continues around the circle until the last person in the gruop hears the phrase.
• Final Reveal: Once the last person receives the message, they say out loud what they heard. The person who started the game then reveals the original phrase. Often, the final message is hilariously different from the original.

The adults in school always wanted to emphasize the fact that whatever the original message was that the same phrase never made it all the way to the last person in the line. There really never was an instance when the original statement was the last statement spoken. It never mattered how simple the formulation was, how short the utterance, no-one was able to properly pass the information along to others. Maybe, as kids we never wanted to take the game seriously. It must be funny for any kid to make significant or even insignificant alterations to the phrase in order to evoke some kind of comedic response from the other participants. In a way, I see telephone being played everywhere, at every age, and in every way. The adults play telephone with everything they believe to have learned. The problem I see is not so much adults attempting to be funny to evoke a comedic response, to garner attention, rather that no one ever was really joking about not knowing what was previously said. Everyone is just incapable of listening to each other to begin with.