Facebook has games. Why can’t Twitter? Andrea Phillips has posted a rulebook for playing charades in 140 characters or less. In case you are wondering how exactly you do play a game about pantomiming on a platform that is interfaced through a keyboard, the trick lies in hyperlinks.

When you are on stage, you may not type any words at all!  

1. You can link to images in place of pantomime.

2. The link must not have any tags or titles, and the word you’re trying to convey must not be in the URL. The suggested method for this is to use Google images search, and from the results page, right-click and go to ‘Copy Image URL.’ The result should look something like this:

http://t0.gstatic.com/images?q=tbn:ANd9GcTXUOJyjM8UbXsX9u8jDZLt15TjWYDUFnP70WaqJAznqoYvJpbS

3. The image can’t be directly from or of the phrase you’re conveying. So no using a still from the movie E.T. or a piece of E.T. fan art, for example, to convey E.T.

4. ASCII art and Unicode is also acceptable, ex. ? to indicate a song, or @-‘—,——- to indicate a rose. 

You can read the complete set of rules, including how to divide your followers and followings into teams, over at her blog.

[Deus Ex Machinatio, img: Alex Prager]

-Jason Johnson