'Guess Who?' The college edition

For his graduation present, my friend Rob's parents gave him "Guess Who? — Travel Edition". If the question was "Guess Who's getting a good graduation present," the answer was clearly "not you."

"Guess Who?" is a detective board game in the tradition of twenty questions. Though it comes with 25 "stock" characters to play with, last week Rob and I tried to increase the "fun factor" by replacing these characters with photos of friends from the Facebook. Like the XFL and New Coke before it, it was one of those things that seemed like such a good idea at the time.

Our first step was to cut and paste pictures from the Facebook onto the game board, a task that proved to be much harder than expected. Let me just say this: any product capable of sending a well-coordinated college student to the Emergency Room does not deserve to be called "safety scissors."

For the game board, we found pictures of shared acquaintances, former romantic interests, and, in a moment of stunning bravura, shared former romantic interests. For good measure, we included a couple of larger-than-life characters, well-known about the campus. We added then USG president elect, Leslie-Bernard Joseph: As Rob uncomfortably suggested, "this guy deserves all the play that he gets." The online Faculty Facebook received its first ever hit when we visited to get a picture of President Tilghman.

After the assembly, Rob and I began to play. The modified game was fun at first, a delightful twist to an old tradition. Before long though, things fell apart. Questions that had once seemed funny and lighthearted began to take on more serious tones.

"Is your character attractive?"

"Yeah, definitely."

"It's not Jennifer is it? Because I'm looking at Jennifer right here and she is definitely not that attractive."

"Like you've done better."

Before long, the game lost all the elements of detective work that made Guess Who so enjoyable before, and gained all the elements of verbal assault that make The O'Reilly factor suck. I lost interest in correctly guessing Rob's mystery character and focused on getting in the best insult. Although I didn't need to ask Rob three times if his character was an idiot named Rob who scored one point less on the math final than I did last semester, I did so anyway.

It's hard to know why "Facebook Guess Who" failed, but I think I have an idea. It was fun to mock the fictional characters from the original game, like Bill the redheaded felon, because he wasn't real. Bringing our classmates and ourselves into the game forced us into petty judgments and superficial conversation. Those were activities best left to the officers of Ivy.

Then I thought about it some more and realized that Guess Who was a children's game, recommended for boys and girls aged 6-8. Was it possible that Rob and I had simply grown weary of a game designed for children at least two to three years less mature than us? Was it time to close the box, so to speak, on an era of our lifetime, to bid farewell to our childhood?

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There was but one way to find out. We quickly dismantled Facebook Guess Who and started playing again with the original characters.

In an instant, the magic of the game returned. We struggled with the intricacies of strategy, firing questions at one another like so many arrows from a crossbow. When the loser — typically, if not always Rob — lost, he was congratulatory. When the winner achieved glorious victory, only five seconds of a victory dance were permitted.

If the question was now, "Guess Who the most popular, cool guys on the Princeton campus are?" the answer was clear: "not us." Tom Knight is a sophomore from San Juan Capistrano, CA. He can be reached at ttknight@princeton.edu.