Updating A Childhood Game
In Germany it's called "Stille Post". In Turkey, it goes by "kulaktan kulağa". The moniker in France is "téléphone arabe" whereas in Finland the name is "rikkinäinen puhelin". There are plenty of other English titles: "pass the message", "whisper down the lane", "Russian scandal", "secret message" and "gossip". Interestingly, "Chinese rumors" seems to be the name getting the most ink when I looked it up online. Regardless, all of these handles were Greek to me as I'd only ever heard of this childhood game as "telephone", which took a back seat to tag and hide-and-seek or the big board games of the time: Parcheesi, Monopoly or even checkers. And it certainly couldn't compare to the major sports: baseball, football and basketball. Yeah, I'm talkin' the old days before the use of opposable thumbs on an iPhone became every kid's national pastime.
For those of you who don't know the particulars: You get a bunch of youngsters together in a line or circle with the first one whispering a message to the second who, in turn, whispers what he or she thinks they heard to the third, etc. When you get to the end of the line the final person repeats the message to the group with hilarity typically ensuing over the now butchered rendition of the original message. And the reason you can count on that happening is simple: Billy, who never gets anything straight, relays the intended phrase to Tammy, the mumbler, who mutters something incoherent to Tony, the class clown, who's liable to make anything up just for kicks, who tells Rory, who has the attention span of a gnat and on down the line until the initial message, "The sun rises in the east and sets in the west," comes out "Tell your mama she looks good in that sundress" (yeah, that was mostly Tony's doing).
Indeed, we're talkin' a totally harmless game that pokes fun at a breakdown in communication. Just a bit of childish whimsy. A benign pursuit seemingly much too passe for consideration in today's Minecraft/Grand Theft Auto generation. A pastime that is clearly past its time. Unless... I don't know, we were to give it some kind of facelift? Find a way to upgrade it to contemporary status? Maybe go from whispering in a person's ear to using bandwidths on laptops, tablets, iPhones and Smart TVs, no longer limiting it to a handful of people in a room. I mean, that would really open things up, right? Suddenly, we have the entire earth as a playing field with anyone and everyone from all seven continents able to join the game. And those that aren't actually playing, yeah, they'd still have the opportunity to be part of the audience. And, get this, they can switch from audience member to player any time they choose... Huh, not bad so far, right?
Okay, let's ratchet it up another notch: Instead of repeating some dumb innocuous phrase why not make it an entire story? Oh, and even better, let's add motivation to the mix. That's right, let's give this story a slant. Something edgy. Something that'll piss off half the people while making the other half feel really, really smug. Oh, and while we're at it, let's add some bots, you know, AI-driven material just to mess with people's heads so they're not quite sure if it's on the up and up. Just another menu item to keep everyone off balance, ya know, to make the experience more fun. Whoa, this new variation is checking all the boxes. Really bringin' the heat. Okay, that's it, why wait? With all the new bells and whistles it's high time we play for realz.
Alrighty then, let's bring in our previously mentioned players, only now instead of kids they're adults: Billy, who never got anything straight in school reads a story concocted by a random person on the internet (or a bot, really no way to tell), jots down what he thinks is the essence of it in an email and sends it to Tammy, the mumbler, who opts to relay it to Tony via phone, of course. Tony listens, dastardly twirling his waxed mustache, immediately shooting a text to Rory, whose noted short attention span has now reached early Alzheimer's. Rory proceeds to forget about it for a few weeks before finally posting the following on Facebook: "The candidate for senator in this state has ties to a sex trafficking ring" which doesn't really jive all that well with "The candidate was in a minor traffic accident some twenty years earlier" story initially read by Billy... And, yeah, as I type this I realize only too well... Damn.
How could I have missed it; it's all so obvious in black and white: the new high-octane version of "telephone" came to fruition years ago. The whole world's been playing it non-stop since social media began. So yeah, I'm gonna pause here, with egg on my face, and apologize for my coming so late to the party. Please, when you relay this story about my naivete (even if you are a bot), try to be kind.