Game of telephone
| Genre(s) | Children's games |
|---|---|
| Players | Three or more |
| Setup time | None |
| Playing time | User determined |
| Random chance | Medium |
| Skill(s) required | Speaking, listening |
Chinese whispers—known as telephone in the United States—is an internationally popular children's game, in which the players form a line and the first person in the line whispers a message to the ear of the next person in the line, and so on, until the last player is reached, who announces the message to the entire group. The first person then compares the original message with the final version. Although the objective is to pass around the message without it becoming garbled along the way, part of the enjoyment is that, regardless, this usually ends up happening. Errors typically accumulate in the retellings, so the statement announced by the last player differs significantly from that of the first player, usually with amusing or humorous effect. Reasons for changes include anxiousness or impatience, erroneous corrections, the difficult-to-understand mechanism of whispering, and that some players may deliberately alter what is being said to guarantee a changed message by the end of the line.
The game is often played by children as a party game or on the playground. It is often invoked as a metaphor for cumulative error, especially the inaccuracies as rumours or gossip spread, or, more generally, for the unreliability of human recollection or even oral traditions.
As the game is popular among children worldwide, it is also known under various other names depending on locality, such as Russian scandal,whisper down the lane, broken telephone, operator, grapevine, gossip, don't drink the milk, secret message, the messenger game, and pass the message among others. In France, it is called téléphone arabe (Arabic telephone) or – more politically correct – téléphone sans fil (wireless telephone). In Malaysia, this game is commonly referred to as telefon rosak, which translates to broken telephone. In the United States, the game is known under the name telephone – which in this use is never shortened to the colloquial and more common word phone.
Historians trace Westerners' use of the word Chinese to denote "confusion" and "incomprehensibility" to the earliest contacts between Europeans and Chinese people in the 17th century, and attribute it to Europeans' inability to understand China's culture and worldview. Using the phrase "Chinese whispers" suggested a belief that the Chinese language itself is not understandable. The more fundamental metonymic use of the name of a foreign language to represent a broader class of situations involving foreign languages or difficulty of understanding a language is also captured in older idioms, such as "It's all Greek to me".
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