Drop the Charade

I love a good game. Whether it's a company retreat or a birthday dinner, I am the one gleefully distributing cards, dividing teams, explaining rules nobody asked to learn. My charades skills are infamous among friends.

Most people resist, at least at first. Someone will say "I'm terrible at this." Someone else will try to sneak away to get another drink. There's a window, a few beats, where the whole thing could collapse.

Then one person commits. They stand up and start flailing and within sixty seconds the entire room is screaming, laughing, fully bought in. Soon enough, strangers start guessing from across the bar. Fortunately, I keep a complement of friends around who I can trust to commit at a moments notice.

I've watched this unfold countless times and it always ends the same way: everybody has fun. The person who tried hardest to avoid playing is usually the one who talks about it for weeks.

I don't remember where I first saw this video. It feels like something I've just always known, one of the earliest memes burned into my brain. It was posted sixteen years ago and has over ten million views.

It's called "First Follower: Leadership Lessons from a Dancing Guy." A lone man is dancing on a hillside at a music festival. He looks absurd, and surrounding onlookers disregard him. Then one person joins, then a second. Before long the hillside is covered by a thundering crowd of (literally) thousands.

The point: leadership is over-glorified. The dancing guy gets the credit, but the first follower is the one who transforms a lone nut into a leader. Without that second person, there is no movement.

I think about this every time I suggest a game and watch the room tense up.

My favorite party game is Salad Bowl. Everyone writes words or phrases on slips of paper and throws them into a bowl. Round one, you describe the clue with words. Round two, a single word. Round three, charades.

By the final round, the room has built its own private language. Someone's mangled Round 1 attempt at "Guy Fieri" has become a running bit, and by Round 3 all it takes is a single pantomime of frosted tips to send the room into hysterics. The person who tried to sneak off for a drink twenty minutes ago is now standing on a couch, red-faced, acting out an elaborate movie plot.

Once three or four people are in, the risk inverts and, suddenly, it's weirder not to play and the holdouts are just being lame.

I didn't grow up in a game-playing family. But at summer camp, games were the connective tissue of every single day. Before breakfast, after swimming, lights-out and well past it. Capture the flag, Egyptian rat screw, late-night Mafia. Camp taught me early that playing with people creates a kind of bond that just talking with them rarely can.

When ranking their greatest fears, Americans choose public speaking more often than they choose death. Jerry Seinfeld had a great bit about this: most people at a funeral would rather be in the casket than giving the eulogy.

Games tap the same nerve. They ask you to perform, to risk, to be seen trying and possibly failing. And growing up has trained most of us to avoid exactly that. We've gotten so armored against exposure that an unfamiliar game registers as a genuine fight-or-flight reaction.

I love that short window between when a game is suggested and when someone gives in and decides to play. That gap tells you everything about how defended a person has become. And the speed at which they cross it, every single time, tells you that defense was never too load-bearing.

So next time you have the chance, I hope you will suggest a game. And if you can't manage that, at least be second.

Up and to the right.