How to Play Existentialist Charades

Caption: you are here, you are free to do something, and unfortunately nobody is going to tell you what that something ought to be.

Existentialist Charades follows the ordinary rules of charades, except that everyone involved must quietly accept that meaning is unstable, communication is inadequate, and the person pretending to be a toaster strudel is ultimately alone.

Divide the group into two teams. This creates an immediate tension between individual freedom and collective identity. Sartre objects to being assigned a team, but joins anyway because refusing to choose is itself a choice. Camus asks whether keeping score is absurd. Kierkegaard has already become anxious about disappointing his teammates.

Write words, titles, people, objects, or phrases on slips of paper and place them in a bowl. The bowl represents existence. The slips represent possibilities. Nobody chose to be placed in the bowl.

One player draws a slip. That player must communicate what is written without speaking, mouthing words, spelling with the hands, or directly pointing to the answer. The player therefore confronts the central problem of human existence: possessing an internal truth while being condemned to express it through an imperfect physical form.

The timer begins.

Traditional charades gestures remain permitted. Holding up fingers may indicate the number of words. Tugging the ear may indicate “sounds like.” Pretending to open a book may indicate a literary work. None of these gestures possesses inherent meaning. Their significance exists only because everyone has collectively agreed to behave as though it does. Heidegger finds this interesting and brings the game to a temporary halt.

Teammates shout guesses while the performer acts out the clue. The performer may nod, shake their head, gesture wildly, collapse onto the carpet, or stare into the middle distance as circumstances require. Speaking remains forbidden. Screaming internally is unrestricted.

If the team guesses correctly before time expires, it receives one point. Sartre insists that the performer is responsible for having made themselves intelligible. Beauvoir points out that communication occurs between situated freedoms and that perhaps everyone could stop blaming the person who had to act out The Brothers Karamazov in sixty seconds.

If time expires without a correct answer, the opposing team may attempt a final guess. Camus considers this strangely beautiful: one struggles against an arbitrary deadline, knowing failure is possible, yet continues flapping one’s arms because the answer is The Albatross.

Play continues until every slip has been drawn or the group becomes distracted by whether the rules of the game existed before the players agreed to obey them.

The team with the most points wins.

This victory confers no objective meaning upon existence.

Nevertheless, congratulations 🎉