Web Video / Ten Words of Wisdom

The place where a picture is worth a thousand words, so you get... um... one percent of the picture.

Ten Words Of Wisdom, or TWOW, is a competitive YouTube game created and by Cary Huang (carykh), of Battle for Dream Island fame, notable for its massive scale (It began with 491 contestants). The game is about answering various prompts (e.g. Write a haiku about plants) in 10 words or fewer. The responses have to be witty, poetic and funny, but a pun or two doesn't hurt. These responses are judged by viewers (which includes contestants) anonymously, eliminating the lowest ranked contestants.

A sequel, Eleven Words of Wisdom, is current running. This season has several new mechanics, including a lives system and prompts now being 11 words or fewer. In contrast to TWOW, there are now 16,506 contestants, along with 100 A.I. contestants and Cary himself, for a total of 16,607 contestants.

The mechanics in more detail

Answering the prompt:

As stated earlier, the prompt has to be answered in at most 10 words, and it also has to abide by any restrictions (for example, only using one-syllable words). There are no direct penalties for breaking the rules, but the mistake gets highlighted, so the viewers can notice the mistake and can punish it accordingly by lowering its ranking.

Voting:

To make voting for 491 entries possible, the voting system is somewhat complicated. Each episode of TWOW is composed of two parts, part A and part B. During part A, Cary shows the contestant's responses from part B. In part B, the contestants score from the Part A voting is revealed, and the new prompt is given. In part B, the contestants with the 20% lowest scores are eliminated. This continues until there's only one contestant left, the winner of TWOW!

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TWOW contains examples of...

• 1-Up: If a contestant's response is in the top 5% in EWOW, they will gain an extra life.
• The Ace: Cary has mentioned a few.
  • Juhmatok in the early rounds, nicknamed the "Power T.W.O.W.er". Unfortunately, amid cheating accusations with regards to her high performances and some other reasons, she quit in 12A.
  • Tak Ajnin, labelled the "Front-Runner", was eliminated in 19B.
  • Joseph Howard, the first person to top a round twice in a row, got eliminated in 23B, placing 4th.
  • Meester Tweester is the most likely person to win TWOW based on simulation predictions as of 23B, with a 35.50% chance. ^note  Ironically, he was nearly eliminated in TWOW 4A due to a PM glitch.
  • Most if not all of the top 17 are held in rather high regard.
• Ascend to a Higher Plane of Existence:
  • The four gods of TWOW: GreenTree, xxBombs_Awayxx, Riley and some_nerd (The Pi Guy). Subverted when they were eliminated in 17B, 13B, 14B and 15B respectively.
  • OlliKnot also counts, as Spicy changed his book to represent her, then reverted to his original book the episode before he was eliminated. Cary then mocked him after his eimination by saying:
  Cary: THIS is why you never leave the church of Ollism.
• Audience Participation: The contestants were recruited from the audience, and anyone in the audience, viewers and contestants alike, can vote.
• Back from the Dead: Defied, Cary had stated multiple times that if a contestant is eliminated, they aren't going to bring them back.
  • Double subverted, if someone is eliminated by mistake, Cary will bring them back. This happened to Jacoub the Person, edtringgaming and Mar View in TWOW 3B, and Meester Tweester in TWOW 4B.
• Breakout Character: A.N.9K got several mentions in multiple episodes despite the fact he was eliminated in 1B, achieving last place!
• Censor Bar: Played for Laughs somewhat when in 17B, Cary highlights how Spicyman33 got mad at Midnight Light for not acronymizing Ping Pong Cup Shots's name. The screenshot of the conversation contains several censor bars and a large censor block that reads "HOLY MOLY THAT NEEDS TO BE CENSORED".
• Darker and Edgier: TWOW 14B Part 2's elimination animation of fryUaj, Riley and alexlion0511 is darker, edgier, sadder and longer than the elimination animations of the other episodes.
• Eliminated from the Race: In every TWOW part B, the fifth of contestants with the lowest ranking responses are eliminated from the game.
• Formula-Breaking Episode: TWOW 18A, a "low budget TWOW episode", recorded in a live and uncut video rather than prerecorded (Cary was busy that week).
• Freeze-Frame Bonus: Happens frequently, notably when Cary says "also" with "Sofia" quickly flashing by.
• Fun with Acronyms: TWOW's 8th prompt. Repeated in TWOW 17. The top 10 contestants (except for Midnight Light) made confessionals with acronyms of other contestants' names as well.
• I Am a Humanitarian: GreenTree was nicknamed the "Cannibalistic God" due to the parentheses prompt responses.
• Innocent Swearing: At one point, Cary suggested "Twat" as a portmanteau for "TWOW chat", not knowing it was an offensive word. He atoned to this in the following episode with some new portmanteaus.
• Non-Gameplay Elimination:
  • Juhmatok chose to quit in TWOW 12A due to cheating allegations.
  • Sam Billinge was eliminated in TWOW 14A by Cary due to being an alternate account of Sam Billinge.
• One-Steve Limit: Averted in EWOW. Due to the sheer number of contestants, some of them have similar or even the same names. In the case of the latter, they can be differentiated by what nickname their use or the appearance of their booksona.
• Overly Long Gag: In TWOW 18B, Crafty7 uses Tennis Ball to bounce back from the ground and avoid elimination. Throughout the rest of the video, Crafty7 can be seen bouncing on the ground. Eighteen days later, in TWOW 19A, Cary finally ends the gag by using a magnet to attract Tennis Ball's magnet. Crafty7 finally falls through the ground.
• Portmanteau:
  • From 6B: Twowth (TWOW + death)
  • From 10B: Twompt (TWOW + prompt)
  • From 13B: Twat (TWOW + chat), announcing the then-new Discord server.
    • Due to the offensive nature of the word, 14A gave us two new portmanteau names for the server, CHOW (chat + TWOW) and HUAT (Huang + chat).
  • From 20A: Twitter (TWOW + bitter), announcing Cary's then-new Twitter account^note his account was created in April 2016, but his first tweet wasn't until November 10, the day before TWOW 20A came out
  • From 20B (part 1): Twart (TWOW + smart)
  • From 22A: Twama (TWOW + drama)
• Refuge in Audacity: In TWOW 6, Mike Ramsay wrote the lyrics of Ice Ice Baby as his answer, breaking the ten word rule. However, he won the sidekick prize in the previous episode, so he got pulled up to under the top 10. But even if he didn't have a sidekick, he would've been barely safe.
  • Had he got a Double Response Prize before elimination, he would have made his extra response the recipe for vanilla ice cream.
• Rhymes on a Dime: Exaggerated with the "Juhmatok - Power Twower" song in 6B.
  • This trope is also the new trend contestants use in their responses.
• Running Gag:
  • Shiny cowards, who are people who vote a ridiculously large amount of times. One example is the anonymous TWOWgeoisie, who voted over 100,000 times!
  • Also (Sofia).
    • Double subverted once, when someone wrote "Also (dont you dare write sofia here...) and Cary then wrote Also (sofia).
• Self-Deprecation: Cary does that to himself often.
• Shout-Out: Contestants like referencing BFDI(A) in their responses. Cary also references BFDI(A) with "so" (A thread going through Needle, captioned with the word "sew"), "boible" (Bubble's strange way of pronouncing vowels), and Tennis Ball's magnet.
  • Cary also references Bee Movie in 20B, as a reference to Spicyman33's reading of the Bee Movie Script.
  Cary: Welcome to TWOW (flips paper) twenty (flips paper) B. (flips paper, reveling BEE MOVIE SCRIPT).
• Stick Figure Animation: Throughout the TWOW series, carykh is represented by a yellow stick figure.
  • And now he has an Evil Twin, who is orange instead of yellow.
  • Rarely a purple twin appears.
  • Michael's twins. Dubbed as Scary Cary.
• Take That!: Many for Donald Trump in the earlier episodes.
  • Being the only one mentioning Trump in 3B, then causing more to talk about him in 4B, xXBombs_AwayXx has been called the Trump Epicenter.
• Tempting Fate: The "Efficiency Curse," in which Cary mentions the most "efficient" contestant^note those who manage to consistently grab the last safe spot in one episode, only for the contestant to be eliminated shortly after...
  • The final efficient twower was The Mighty Midge, eliminated in 5th.
• Video-Game Lives: In EWOW, every contestant start with three lives. A contestant loses a life if their response perform poorly. If they lose all their lives, they get eliminated.
• Vocal Evolution: Cary's voice is much more clear later in the series. It's especially noticeable since he uses his old voice clips to explain how to vote and summarize the remaining TWOWers.
• World of Pun: TWOW responses is filled to the brim with puns. This is due to the players realizing that they can succeed using them.
  • Currently zig-zagged. In the latter stages, pun-based responses lost out in originality after contestants tried to emulate their popularity and charm which received mixed results.