Pop Culture Word Game

Stacey taught me this game when we were driving with some other friends from USC to a concert in Irvine.  Stacey said to play the game you have to come up with a phrase or noun that has least two words or more and one of the words has to have part of a word from the previous phrase or noun that was said.  For example, if someone says House of Blues, the next person could say Blue Man Group, and the next person could say Mann’s Chinese Theater, and so on and so forth.  Notice how each word somehow incorporates a word form what the previous person said.  We played the game to pass the time and keep ourselves entertained during the long car ride.

Stacey said she learned the game when she went to Honduras with an organization on the USC campus called the Global Medical Brigades.  The Global Medical Brigades is a group of medical professionals and volunteers that travel to under developed cities and villages and lead a holistic model for sustainable health care.  They also conducts preliminary needs assessment, treats patients, provide medical materials and work to improve the water, sanitation, and economic infrastructures.  USC students can sign up to participate in the Global Medical Brigades as volunteers which is exactly what Stacey did during her spring break.  Stacey said during the trip that they would have to take long bus rides every where and sometimes the bus rides were as long as 4 hours.  So to pass the time and keep entertained her and the other students on the trip would play the games on the bus and this pop culture word game was one of the games she was introduced to.  The game is ideal because in theory it never really ends and is interesting because every time it is played it’s never the same since people are always coming up with different words and/or phrases.

I really enjoyed the game myself because it was fun to try to come up with some creative or really popular phrase and it was fun to hear others do the same.  Also, when I played the game, one of the people I was playing with was from Guam.  Normally I forget he is not from California or the United States for that matter, but it is brought to attention when he doesn’t know all the pop culture references that are being made.  For example, someone said Chick-Fil-A and he did not know that that was a chain fast food restaurant.  Therefore the people playing the game obviously bring up a lot of folklore that is shared between its participants (i.e. pop culture references) but it was also fun to play the game with someone I guess that was sort of out of the folklore group because then you learn other folklore from other people.