Broken Picture Telephone is a really interesting game which plays similarly to the well-known game of Broken Telephone. An initial message passes from one person to the next, and when it reaches the last person we see how badly lost in communicaton the initial message became. BPT achieves this by using text and drawing prompts. If you are shown a text prompt, you are given 10 minutes using very limited drawing tools and space to portray that message with a drawing. If you are shown a drawing prompt, you have to type up a message describing the picture the best you can in a limited space. When the whole chain is complete, the frames are revealed to all the players who can see how the game began, and how it progressed towards the end.
Here are two snippets from two different games (click for larger pic):
http://www.brokenpicturetelephone.com/view?id=59252
http://www.brokenpicturetelephone.com/view?id=44939
(Yeah I spelled it wrong :[ )
Of course, very rarely does the initial message stay throughout the entire course of the game, but it has happened in very rare occasions. Sometimes themes from the beginning of the game become lost, only to suddenly re-emerge again near the end. BPT really lets you see what the most prevalent motifs are in the minds of people from around the world. There is actually a fairly large player base from Europe and southeast Asia, aside from North America. These themes are usually encountered when a drawing isn't very clear, and thus the person defaults to a common symbol or image that they are familiar with. It is not uncommon for someone to draw a pizza, beach ball, or slice of cheese, only to have it described as "Pac-Man". It's also been a common complaint that most people mix up the "peace symbol" with the Mercedes-Benz logo.
Some common motifs that seem to pop up in many games include:
Jesus
Pac-Man
Cats, dogs
Super Mario
Poop
Godzilla/T-Rex
Satan/the Devil
Cacti
Apples, bananas
Barney the Dinosaur
Ninjas
Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles
And more recently, Obama and Michael Jackson have been popping up. As someone once said in the comments to a game, whether you describe a brown blob as 'poo' or 'melted chocolate ice cream' probably says something about your personality.
Another thing to behold is the ability of some amazing artists who can create such masterpieces even when using drawing tools which are even more spartan than MS Paint, even more impressive when taking the 10min limit into account. It really matters, especially for me since I can't draw very well and thus draw verrrry slowly. The top artists can be seen here.
The unfortunate reality right now is that the site is defunct. The site gained such popularity that the servers crashed and now images don't load up properly anymore, meaning nobody can play right now. It's sad because the site just got a bit more publicity when named one of the top 100 websites of 2009 by PC Magazine, and I'd imagine there are a lot of interested people flocking to the site only to be completely confused when they find that they can't actually play the game.
A single person owns, designed, and maintains BPT, and it has reached a level of popularity that the owner did not expect. Part of the problem is that he is only one who can make changes to the site, but he maintains a rather remote rapport with the fans. The news section (or "Blog" as it is called in BPT) is in a discrete part of the header, and recently he hasn't been updating much. He didn't actually respond until a few days after the site became dysfunctional, and seems sort of ambivalent towards fixing the site. Of course I can't tell if this is really the case since he hasn't updated us since.
During BPT's run it has had its fair share of problems, and there are a lot of ways it can be improved. There are sometimes trolls who post as many inappropriate pictures as they can, effectively ruining the natural course of the game. Most of these trolls are the unoriginal type whose weapon of choice is the tired old "crude phallus drawing". However there were some more original trolls that attacked BPT. One such troll started tons of games with the initial prompt: "Pokemon trainer catching a _____" where each game featured a different Pokemon. Another troll responded to everything with Star Trek. There was a really big push for better administration to curb the trolls' actions, but the owner never really followed up on those. More experienced players know that if they encounter a frame with an inappropriate picture or message, they should just "begin anew" by ignoring the frame and posting as if they were starting a new game.
Despite the occasional trolling and glitches, the site is easily addictive. I first started at the end of May, drawing with the mouse. Stats class made me take a break, but afterwards I returned and started drawing with the tablet stylus. It definitely allowed me to draw faster so that my pictures didn't look as plainly unfinished as it did before. I'm not sure that the quality of my pictures has really improved that much, however. If BPT ever does get fixed up, I'll definitely start playing again.
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