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Drawception
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Drawception (Website)

Drawception is a Web Game which can be described as the classic game of Telephone but with drawings. The players participate in creating a chain of drawings and captions, with each participant only seeing the previous player's phrase or picture to illustrate or describe. Once the predefined number of players takes part, the entire chain is publicly revealed, usually with hilarious results.

It was created in March 2012 by Jeremiah "Reed" Freyholtz, and quickly developed a vibrant community.

The website as a whole contains examples of the following tropes:

  • Anti-Trolling Features:
    • You can get banned for "derailing" games; i.e. drawing or writing something that doesn't interpret the previous drawing or caption.
    • You can only play a certain amount of games a day (anywhere from 8 to 32, depending on how many games you have completed), so that trolls can only do a limited amount of trolling per day.
  • Author Avatar: In the early years of the game, it was common for the player to insert their avatar (i.e. a character resembling their profile picture) into the games. Eventually they made an unwritten rule against it, because these avatar insertions derailed the games from their original theme.
  • Ascended Meme: Bee Week - an annual tradition among players - eventually became an official site event which was promoted on the news bar, and the Bee palette was created in its honor. The Bee palette is even a seasonal palette which becomes cheaper around the same time of year when Bee Week takes place.
  • Anthropomorphic Typography: The site's mascot is a blue capital 'D' with arms and legs, holding a pencil.
  • Bee Afraid: Some of the artwork during Bee Week may contain evil or dangerous bees. However, this trope is Averted with the majority of Bee Week games, where bees are presented as pleasant.
  • Black Comedy: Quite common, as players aren't afraid to put their darkly-twisted ideas into their panels, whether be gratuitous Those Wacky Nazis, kids' favorite characters doing adult things, an unexpected acid trip, or Bloody Hilarious happenings.
  • Bowdlerise: The website used to have an NSFW mode, but it was removed in 2019 for how it defeated its purpose of being a simply more mature version of a game and ended up slipping into SFW territory regularly, regularly needed shoehorns for NSFW content, disrupting the intended gameplay, and especially being rife with extremely controversial content. However, NSFW games are still available to see on the site with a Content Warning and NSFW content is still allowed in private games (there's a forum thread for such links, but it was closed for being questionable, as well as having links to lolicon games).
  • Crossover: A significant portion of the games are about characters from different works encountering each other. Sometimes becomes Crossover Ship.
  • Deliberately Monochrome: Any game created with the B&W, Grayscale, The Blues or Sepia themes.
  • Early Game Hell: New players are very limited in what they can do. They can play up to 8 games at a time, follow other players, and that's about it. Until 4 games are completed, they can't post in the forums or comments. Until 24 games are completed, they can't start games. The hardest part is that players cannot complete games on their own unless they are lucky enough to receive the final prompt in a game. Otherwise, they will have to wait for other players to finish each game. As more games are completed, Drawception eventually unlocks more features for the player (such as the ability to play more than 8 games at a time) and even gives them Ducks to spend in the store. The website states that this is done to prevent trolls and ensure quality content in each game. However, being a new player on Drawception with good intentions still requires a lot of patience.
  • Easter Egg: Several artists tend to hide a "Subliminal Batman" in their pictures, i.e. a hidden portrait of Batman that is subtle enough not to be spotted by those who don't intentionally look for it.
  • Freemium: Buying any set of Ducks with real money will upgrade your account to Gold, which grants you unlimited Draw First games and an exclusive palette.
  • Grossout Fakeout: Seeing as the game is similar to the Telephone game, it's no surprise that some of the misinterpretations involve mistaking a drawing of some innocuous substance like chocolate for another, grosser one like poop. This even led to the unofficial site rule: "Even if it's brown, it's probably not poo".
  • It Makes Sense in Context: Lampshaded whenever the site promotes a forum post showcasing no-context Drawception games. Screenshots of games in which all panels beside the first and last are shown, also high-lighting how much a single game can change from start to finish.
  • Joke Item: For a contest on April Fools 2019, Drawception added the Retina Burn palette, which is a painful combination of bright red and purple. On April 7th, it went on sale and costs 1500 ducks (about $20) when out of season.
  • Mascot: "Drawception D", a blue letter D with arms and legs, holding a pencil.
  • Round Robin: Any of the "Tell a Story PIO" (Pass It On) games, where each participant adds a new part of the story and instructs the next player to do likewise.
  • Running Gag: Particularly funny games are prone to Memetic Mutation, with a lot of people trying to recreate it or make variants of it. They can easily become an Overused Running Gag. Some of the more iconic ones:
  • "Running Out of Time" Warning: If the time is about to run out, the number on the timer will turn red and pulsate.
  • Scunthorpe Problem: At some point, a word filter was installed to help keep the games clean. The filter is overzealous however, preventing users from properly describing images of things such as therapists, basements and skyscrapers as it blocks the associated words, forcing users to use other words and possibly derail the game or overcomplicate the caption if there's no alternative word that can be used. As a result, it was reported as a bug due to its disruptive nature.
  • Start My Own: Drawception was inspired by an earlier game known as Broken Picture Telephone, which featured a nearly similar concept. Around 2010, Broken Picture Telephone went on hiatus. Believing the project was abandoned and that no one else had attempted a similar revival, Reed began working on his own version. His initial concept, titled World Pictory, was put on hold due to his full-time work in the games industry. After leaving that job to pursue an indie career, Reed resumed work on the project and officially launched Drawception as a beta on March 25, 2012.
  • Videogame Perversity Potential: Trolls sometimes randomly derail games by drawing unrelated pornographic pictures or putting down crude dirty texts when describing a picture. The latter is especially sour when the previous picture was exceptionally well drawn.

Tropes for individual Drawception games:

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