Added: 11/20/2005 |
Play Pictionary to Keep Your Party RollingEvery host and guest has experienced it, and every host and guest can feel it coming but very few hosts or guests know how to stop it. "It" is the dreaded awkward silence which can kill a party in full swing and send everybody home early, as the fun suddenly stops for no discernable reason. The dreaded awkward silence can be caused by a variety of factors. Often, an intentionally rude or accidentally insensitive comment from one guest to another can throw a hush over all the attendees. Sometimes, the host makes a social gaffe, brings on the dreaded awkward silence, and cannot recover in time to save the party. Sometimes, the dreaded awkward silence is caused not by any single action or rupture in the social fabric but merely by an unfortunate meeting of circumstances. Sometimes the background record stops playing just as the food runs out and the keg is drained, and the dreaded awkward silence suddenly descends. However, there is a simple way to recover from the dreaded awkward silence before it kills your party: play Pictionary.
You would never ever want to interrupt the flow of a lively party by stepping into the middle of the room and announcing "Let's Play Pictionary" through a megaphone, or any similarly awkward gesture. However, once the dreaded awkward silence has descended over the party with its dull, dooming fog, you have nothing to lose by suggesting a game. In all likelihood, several guests will be relieved that you have come up with a graceful solution to continue the evening and will immediately take up your suggestion and want to play Pictionary with you. Once you have enough people interested to get the game started, Pictionary playing will spread like wildfire through your party and everyone will want to join in.
Even if you worry that your hip guests may initially scoff at a "family" game like Pictionary, once you have a few people going you will find that others will start to join in and want to play Pictionary with you. Even if it starts as a joke, once the game is rolling everyone will want to play Pictionary because it is so lively and raucous. Pictionary playing lends itself to growing teams of people, so you will not have to tell anyone who wants to join up and play Pictionary to "wait until the next round" unless you are a real stickler for competition. Pictionary is a great casual game which can accommodate any number of players, making it ideal for a party scenario.
Even if not all of your guests want to play Pictionary, those who do will make enough noise and provide enough distraction from the dreaded awkward silence that the rest of the guests who are not playing will probably be able to pick the party back up as well. The lively background noise which playing Pictionary provides will allow your other guests to hold conversations without feeling like everybody can overhear what they are saying, which means that you have overcome one of the major reasons why dreaded awkward silences tend to continue and cannot be easily stopped.
If you can save your party from the dreaded awkward silence by playing Pictionary, you will find that people forget about the awkward moment and will mostly remember how much fun they had at your bash, which is what every host desires when throwing a party.
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