Chinese whispers is the British term for the game known as telephone in the United States and other Anglophone countries. It is an internationally popular children's game, in which the players form a line and the first person in the line whispers a message to the ear of the next person in the line, and so on, until the last player is reached, who announces the message to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.
The game is often played by children as a party game or on the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread, or, more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection or even oral traditions.
Video Chinese whispers
Etymology
As the game is popular among children worldwide, it is also known under various other names depending on locality, such as Russian scandal, whisper down the lane, broken telephone, operator, grapevine, gossip, don't drink the milk, secret message, the messenger game, and pass the message among others. In France, it is called téléphone arabe (Arabic telephone) or - less offensively - téléphone sans fil (wireless telephone). In Malaysia, this game is commonly referred to as telefon rosak, which translates to broken telephone. In the United States, the game is known under the name telephone - which in this use is never shortened to the colloquial and more common word phone.
Historians trace Westerners' use of the word "Chinese" to denote "confusion" and "incomprehensibility" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 17th century, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's culture and worldview. Using the phrase "Chinese whispers" suggested a belief that the Chinese language itself is not understandable. In addition, Chinese people have historically been stereotyped by Westerners as secretive or inscrutable, making this usage offensive. The more fundamental metonymic use of the name of a foreign language to represent a broader class of situations involving foreign languages or difficulty of understanding a language is also captured in older idioms, such as "It's all Greek to me".
The game has no winner: the entertainment comes from comparing the original and final messages. Intermediate messages may also be compared; some messages will become unrecognizable after only a few steps.
As well as providing amusement, the game can have educational value. It shows how easily information can become corrupted by indirect communication. The game has been used in schools to simulate the spread of gossip and its supposed harmful effects. It can also be used to teach young children to moderate the volume of their voice, and how to listen attentively; in this case, a game is a success if the message is transmitted accurately with each child whispering rather than shouting. It can also be used for older or adult learners of a foreign language, where the challenge of speaking comprehensibly, and understanding, is more difficult because of the low volume, and hence a greater mastery of the fine points of pronunciation is required.
Maps Chinese whispers
Variants
A variant of Chinese whispers is called Rumors. In this version of the game, when players transfer the message, they deliberately change one or two words of the phrase (often to something more humorous than the previous message). Intermediate messages can be compared. What an individual player changes in the message often says something about the player.
The pen-and-paper game Telephone Pictionary (also known as Eat Poop You Cat) is played by alternately writing and illustrating captions, the paper being folded so that each player can only see the previous participant's contribution. Commercial boardgame versions Telestrations and Cranium Scribblish were both released in 2009. The game has also been implemented online at Broken Picture Telephone, Drawception and other sites.
A translation relay is a variant in which the first player produces a text in a given language, together with a basic guide to understanding, which includes a lexicon, an interlinear gloss, possibly a list of grammatical morphemes, comments on the meaning of difficult words, etc. (everything except an actual translation). The text is passed on to the following player, who tries to make sense of it and casts it into his/her language of choice, then repeating the procedure, and so on. Each player only knows the translation done by his immediate predecessor, but customarily the relay master or mistress collects all of them. The relay ends when the last player returns the translation to the beginning player. The game has been played in the conlang community.
See also
- Drawception
- Epistemology
- Mondegreen
- Pavement radio
- Rumor
- Snowball effect
- Generation loss
References
External links
- Broken Picture Telephone, an online game based on Chinese Whispers; recently re-activated.
- Drawception, another online game which uses the concept.
- Chinese Whispers, explains the game and offers some examples.
- Gossip, Rumors, and the Two-Part Telephone Game
- Global Gossip Game, a game of Gossip that passes from library to library around the world on International Games Day @ your library.
- The Misemotions Game, a variation of the Chinese Whispers where participants have to properly convey emotions instead of text messages.
Source of the article : Wikipedia
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