Telephone Pictionary Take II: Origin Story?

[marcusmarcusrc]

I was trying to remember how my social circle got started with telephone pictionary.

My hazy, reconstructed timeline starts with games of "traditional" pictionary in the ET living room, and one day arcanology deciding that the words we were drawing were too easy (eg, "tongue") and getting a dictionary with which to inflict upon us "abusive pictionary" words like "gratuitous" and "honor". This was perhaps sophomore year?

Sometime between then and going to Caltech I acquired telephone pictionary as an obsession, because I remember trying to spread it to my Caltech social group with limited success. On one return trip to Boston I think I remember bringing back telephone pictionary to the new undergrads, it having temporarily died out in the interim. But I have no recollection of whether we invented it (presumably an example of convergent evolution with other telephone pictionary inventors around the world and throughout history) or whether it was brought to us from the outside world (or whether it had been around ET before arcanology and I ever arrived). Does anyone know or remember?

(Wikipedia has a reference to a 1995 games books including the game: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eat_Poop_You_Cat)

Comments

[tallou.livejournal.com]

My first introduction to telephone pictionary was a power outage at InTouch Systems, probably in the summer of 2000. It didn't come there from ET.

[marcusmarcusrc.livejournal.com]

Huh. Might that mean that I never played it at ET as an undergrad at all, and in fact picked it up afterwards on one of my Boston visits? I guess that's possible - I make up memories all the time, which can be kind of disturbing, and I do have many many years worth of ET memories to conflate.

I do know that abusive pictionary happened while we were undergrads. That much I'm confident of.

Mostly, anyway.

[tallou.livejournal.com]

I certainly recall abusive pictionary from early in my undergraduate career.

[katybeth]

Some folks out here have never heard of telephone pictionary but play an identical game called Cricket Cricket.

[fredrickegerman.livejournal.com]

I'm pretty sure there's no actual connection between the playing of abusive pictionary and the later playing of telephone pictionary. Except the central conceit of "draw stuff" of course.

That said, I recall some very specific person introducing it at some specific social occasion. But who, or when, is lost to me. Possibly some gathering at the Domain, in which case it might in fact have propagated from InTouch. But I'm convinced it must have been before summer 2000.