Emergent Behavior in "Telephone Pictionary"

The game "Telephone Pictionary"  is dependent upon emergent behavior for its humor. Based upon a combination of two childhood games, the game combines the interpretive natures of recognizing elements in a drawn figure and representing abstract concepts visually. Like the original "Telephone" game before it, "Telephone Pictionary" relies on errors/misinterpretations— an emerging behavior as slight deviations from the original, intended phrase are incorporated out of the hand-drawn representations— to trace a path from what the intended phrase was in the beginning to what it evolved into in the end.
To play Telephone Pictionary, each player is passed a stack of blank cards (one card per participating player, including themselves), and they start by writing a phrase of some sort ("London Bridge is Falling Down", "A Three-Toed Sloth", "Two Wrongs Don't Make a Right", etc.). Then the stack is passed to the next player, and play cycles between drawing what the previous phrase suggested or interpreting the previous drawing into recognizable phrases or objects. A time limit is imposed on writing/drawing rounds, keeping artists from becoming too detailed in their visuals or writers from extracting excessive details. When the stack reaches the player it started with, the result is often a humorous distortion wildly different from the intended phrase.

Our team has noticed two varieties of emergent behavior in this game, dependent upon the results:

1. ICONOGRAPHIC REPRESENTATION: If an iconic object or phrase is represented (or interpreted), this tends to remain consistent throughout. For instance, one of our instances began with the phrase "Singing in the Rain" and remained consistent throughout the entire game. This is because "Singing in the Rain" is an icon in society, and the unusual combination of a person vocalizing in precipitation is easily recognizable.
2. OBJECTIVE REPRESENTATION: If a specific icon was not identifiable in the original phrase or drawing, we've found that most people will break it down into recognizable objects. Because of the time limit imposed by the game, most people find it difficult to link all the objects together into a coherent system or group, so more often than not the participant will reduce it to recognizable objects. Thus, the context of their use together is lost as the cards are passed around, but the "gist" is retained. This is compounded with each following card until it is reduced to a very simple concept.

The following includes pictures and video of prior games played. In addition to being an excellent documentation of emergent behavior, the game also serves an excellent purpose as a self-documenting game as a whole.

EXAMPLE GAMES: