The technical aspects of charade are easy. Charade is a game of pantomimes: you have to "act out" a phrase or character without speaking, while the other members of your team try to guess what the phrase is. The objective is for your team to guess the phrase as quickly as possible. Discounting the "team concept", don't we try to convince the person in front of us of who we want them to believe we are? Of course we do. It doesn't matter if we're in a nightclub, or out on a date. Our gestures and mannerisms - our verbal/non-verbal way of speaking - that is what we depend on to get that message across. Our life really is a charade. Consider these interesting parallels between real life and when you play charades:
When you play charades, you generally divide the players into two teams, preferably of equal size. Don't we do the same thing in real life? Your teams consist of you and the other person. Or you and the other group you're confronting. In the charade game you divide the slips of paper between the two teams. Select a neutral timekeeper/scorekeeper, or pick members from each team to take turns. Agree on how many rounds to play. Review the gestures and hand signals and invent any others you deem appropriate. The teams temporarily adjourn to separate rooms, to come up with phrases to put on their pieces of paper.These phrases may either be individuals, quotations or titles of books, movies, plays, television shows, and songs. Once they have finished writing their phrases, the teams come back to the same room.
Granted we don't have the same options in real life. When you see the man or woman of your dreams staring back at you across a crowded room, you don't have the option to explain to them the ground rules of your hopeful encounter. But the charades idea comes across when you meet: how you move, how you smile, how you carry your weight. They are all hints included in the real-life charade. All crucial elements in the message you send to the receiver. A message you hope will be interpreted as an invitation to meet later.
Returning to play charades: a player from Team A draws a phrase slip from Team B's basket. Team A then has three minutes to guess the phrase. If they figure it out, the timekeeper records how long it took. If they do not figure it out in three minutes, the timekeeper announces that the time is up, and records a time of three minutes. A player from Team B draws a phrase slip from Team A's basket, and the game proceeds as descripted above. Normally the game continues until every player has had a chance to "act out" a phrase.
Three minutes to get your message across. The similarities are astounding. I'd venture to say that in our "I want it yesterday" society, you probably have even less than 3 minutes to get your message across. Your charades ideas need to be conveyed in a matter of seconds rather than minutes. To act out a phrase, one usually starts by indicating what category the phrase is in, and how many words are there in the phrase. From then on, the usual procedure is to act out the words one at a time (although not necessarily in the order that they appear in the phrase). In some cases, however, it may make more sense to try to act out the "entire concept" of the phrase at once.
In the real encounter, you win the charade when the receiver understands your hints and deciphers your message. Like I said, there are a lot of parallels between the game charade and real life. Simple rules of playing a game that may make the chance meeting between you and that special someone a memorable encounter.