That Game With All the Names and Stuff

#6 - Time's Up!

A quick warning: I'm about to get very high-minded writing about a game that is essentially a souped-up version of charades. Before I do, I'd like to make one thing very clear: Time's Up! is fun. It's a ridiculous, ludicrous, hilarious good time. I cannot recommend enough to anybody who likes doing fun things. Go, grab your friends and play it right now. You will not regret it, because the game is awesome. Got that? Good.

Simply being fun would not be enough for Time's Up! to make it onto this list. I've played a lot of games with that same pure, intense, fun feeling that
Time's Up! overflows with. But this one has something more: it's not just fun, it's interesting. “Fun” makes me enjoy a game while I'm playing it; “interesting” keeps me enjoying it even after the game is over. And Time's Up! is as exceptionally interesting as it is fun. It takes one of the most classic gaming paradigms – the guessing game – and turns it into a vehicle for exploring how discourse communities are created.

“Discourse community” is a sociolinguistic term that basically means “a group of people that use language.” While that's a pretty vague definition, it's a more useful term than just listing what language people speak, because it can describe groups other than something like “English speakers” or “Japanese speakers.” Doctors are a discourse community, Torontonians are a discourse community, my family is a discourse community, because each of those groups uses language in a specific way that is foreign to those outside of the community. Non-doctors probably don't know what “otolaryngology” is, a Vancouverite wouldn't know what The Annex is and if a train passed by, you'd stare quizzically while I shouted “Oh no, not again!” But to the speakers in these communities, those words and phrases have clear, defined meanings. Discourse communities can be stacked within each other as well: oncologists are a specific community among doctors, for example. Furthermore, we're all part of multiple discourse communities at once: I'm an English speaker, a Canadian, a university student, a gamer, a Berton and a member of a whole host of other discourse communities.

Every session of Time's Up! creates a unique discourse community out of its players. Of course, this is somewhat true of any game, but Time's Up! makes this process explicit through its three-round structure. Round One is a fairly straightforward guessing game. There's a deck of forty cards with famous names on them: authors, actors, politicians, fictional characters, etc. You have a teammate, sitting across the table from you. On your turn, you have thirty seconds to get your teammate to correctly guess as many names as possible. You can use pretty much whatever clues you want, but you're not allowed to skip a card. So if you don't know who “Ambrose Bierce” is or your partner doesn't respond to the clue “the guy who played Chandler on Friends,” you have to get creative. Once your time is up, the deck gets passed and its the next team's turn. The deck keeps circling around the table in this manner until every single name has been correctly guessed. Each team counts up how many answers they got right and records their scores.

Then you shuffle the deck back up and Round Two starts. This is similar to Round One: you're still trying to get your teammate to correctly guess the names on the cards. But since you're re-using the cards from Round One, you already know what all the names are, so things get a little bit tougher: you can only use one word as your clue and your partner only gets one guess per card. You are, however, allowed to skip. Once again, you continue like this until the deck runs out of cards, at which point you tally your scores, shuffle up and start Round Three. Round Three is exactly the same as Round Two, except for this: no words are allowed at all. Gestures and sounds are the only legal clues. At the end of Round Three, the points over the three rounds are added together and the team with the highest score wins.

This structure does a wonderful job of illustrating how games create discourse communities. The process starts in Round One: somebody comes across a name they're not familiar with -
“Arnold Palmer,” for instance. So instead of describing why he's famous, they say “his last name sounds like the inside of your hand.” Or maybe you mix up Rosie O'Donell for Roseanne Barr, so instead of saying “she starred in a self-titled sitcom,” you describe her as a former host of The View who had a feud with Donald Trump. It doesn't matter if these clues are accurate or efficient, only if they're memorable. Once they get stuck in your head, they aren't leaving. In Round Two, “hand” becomes the clue for Arnold Palmer and “View” elicits a shout of “Roseanne Barr!” And in Round Three, those clues get further refined into actions. The meanings of the names get warped until they're meanings scarcely relate to who those people actually are. This process happens again and again. For me, Burt Reynolds will always be “the guy in all the movies,” Aslan is most certainly not Asian and quizzically uttering “JAG?” is the correct answer to every clue.

This is how discourse communities are formed in real life. A group realizes starts using general language to suit specific needs and eventually the meanings of words change to the extent that outsiders can't understand them. The same process happens in games: whether you're talking about trading wood for sheep, getting your opponent in check or facechecking a Neural Katana and taking net damage because you couldn't break the sub, a random passerby would have no idea what you're talking about. Time's Up! takes that idea and makes it central to the game's strategy. Good Time's Up! players have to recognize when a discourse is being create and adapt to it. Failure to do so makes effective guessing much more difficult, as you waste time using general terms when the specific associations you've created would recall the answer much faster. Whether you realize it or not, Time's Up! teaches you to create, recognize and adapt to your discourse community. That's more than just fun; it's interesting.

Last Time: #7 - Hanabi
Next Time: #5 - Tammany Hall

All pictures taken by me.