Website / Drawception

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.
  • Reed's avatar is a blue link holding a pencil sword and shield with the site's logo.
• 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.
• 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.
• Exactly What It Says on the Tin: The majority of captions describe precisely what is on the previous picture.
• 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:
  • Adolf Hitler occasionally appears in games, usually in hilarious situations.
  • This game originated not one, but two of them: "Sonic Rainboom", a term originating from My Little Pony: Friendship Is Magic, turning into a picture of Sonic the Hedgehog blowing up a raincloud with a Kamehame Hadouken, and "PlayStation 3 controls intuitive enough for seal", followed by a picture of Seal playing a game on PlayStation 3. It is the example game shown to unregistered users on the front page, helping the popularity of these gags.
  • Trouble Muffin: an anthropomorphic muffin looking for trouble. Following some Early-Installment Weirdness, he gained an iconic look with blueberries and an Eyepatch of Power.
  • Yellmo: Elmo's weird cousin, originating from this game. A deranged yellow muppet that is constantly yelling.
  • Legdad: A humanoid figure with six to eight limbs who originated with no clothes and was a creative interpretation of a "Daddy long legs".
  • Shark Jesus a.k.a. Jawsus: Jesus Christ as a shark.
• 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:

• Accessory-Wearing Cartoon Animal:
  • Any game featuring the "ducks with hats" Running Gag, starting with this one.
  • For that matter, Western Chicken, who is a chicken wearing a cowboy hat.
• Animal Superheroes:
  • Spiderman is a bat and Batman is a spider.
  • This game features Spider-Man as a bear.
• Art Initiates Life: "Pencil to drawn boy: I am your maker"
• Bowdlerise: This game starts out as a fairly accurate depiction of Scarface (1983), but about halfway it turns into a G-rated version, with the guns replaced with cute animals, candy, and balloons.
• Cute Kitten:
  • This game features a few, before they turn into - equally cute - foxes.
  • One replaces the Tyrannosaurus rex from Jurassic Park in "Jurassic Kitty".
  • A few more appear in this game.
• Cute Monster Girl:
  • Cute Medusa, to be specific. Doubles as Gorgeous Gorgon.
  • Moethulhu, a Moe Personification of Cthulhu.
• Dope Slap: Batman gives one to a fish in "Batman slaps a fish!"
• Eagle Land: Fuck Yeah!
• Forced Meme: "Start A New Drawception Trend". The "new Drawception trend" the game tried to start, "ducks with hats", actually managed to catch on briefly.
• Foul Flower: What starts out with Flowey turns into "Flower debates murdering family◊." Coincidentally, that really is part of Flowey's plan.
• Foul Waterfowl: In this game the Drawception Duck is thirsty for human blood.
• Gender Flip: Happens to Mario, Luigi and Peach in this game.
• Goths Have It Hard: This game starts out with an emo who's an amputee and wants to cut himself but has no hands... then, it devolves into an emo who's an amputee and wants to cut vegetables but has no hands.
• Interspecies Romance:
  • Dragon and wizard making out in a wardrobe.
  • "A shark falls in love with a human."
  • One develops between Rapunzel and a platypus.
• Judicial Wig: Yellmo wears a fairly long, white wig in a game while acting as a judge.
• Kamehame Hadouken: Sonic hadoukens a rain cloud. Although on the original drawing, Sonic is shooting the projectile upwards like a shoryuken rather than a hadouken.
• Kung-Fu Jesus: Action Hero Jesus says "Don't cross me."
• Long Neck: In this game, Mulan got depicted with a slightly longer-than-natural neck - which then got turned up to eleven with this game and the meme it spawned.
• Love Triangle: Ariel, Aquaman and Namor form one in this game.
• Luke, You Are My Father: The classic scene from The Empire Strikes Back gets flipped around in this game.
• Major Injury Underreaction: "persons eye is on fire, they don't care"
• Maniac Monkeys: In this game, three monkeys, initially in a Monkey Morality Pose, gradually attack and brutally devour a human.
• Mix-and-Match Critter: "cat-shark hybrid"
• Non-Mammal Mammaries:
  • Sharkira has a humanoid body, including breasts, despite being a shark.
  • Beautiful frog princess also has human-like breasts.
• Ominous Owl: In this game, an owl is said to be "haunted" and have "untold power".
• Pirate Parrot: Replaced by a lobster in this game.
• Planimal: Lemon Crab is half-lemon, half-crab.
• Potty Emergency: "Dragon doing a potty dance." has this happen to a dragon... and a tornado, of all things.
• Russian Reversal: In this game, the PlayStation 3 plays Seal rather than the other way around.
• Space Pirates: "Just confuse the person describing your panel." has both regular-looking pirates floating in space, and astronaut pirates.
• Space Whale Aesop: The results of this "steps" game are summed up as thus:
  "This is why you dont (sic) fart kids, you'll become a fish and blub for the remainder of your short sad life."
• Subverted Kids' Show: Games that feature children's franchises like Sesame Street, Teletubbies or Barney & Friends are likely to turn into something horrifying. A few examples:
  • "Teletubbies in the hood"
  • "Teletubbies Spiral into Deep Depression"
  • Any game featuring Yellmo is automatically this.
• Threatening Shark: This game has fire-breathing sharks, laser-eyed sharks, and sharks in space!
• Your Costume Needs Work: This game had one of the pictures described as "a bad imitation" of another user's drawing style. Guess who actually drew it.

---