https://www.youtube.com/user/JustKiddingParty

A popular Youtube channel that I constantly watch is JustKiddingParty. I also watch their other channels such as JustKiddingNews and JustKiddingFilms, but that’s irrelevant.

The premise of JustKiddingParty is simple – play games and have a good time. They seriously just play a number of different party games, and that’s literally all to it. But that’s not the reason why I watch them. The energy and vibes that their little group gives off provides a sense of community, and always keeps me coming back for more.

So why the title? How can something so simple such as JustKiddingParty have anything to do with semiotics – the study of signs and symbols and their use in interpretation. Well one of their videos titled ‘Write & Draw’, is a way of seeing the effects of symbols and signs in action when producing interpretations. Now before you watch the video below, allow me to explain the idea of the game. Basically, players take turns interpreting what’s on the board. The first player will draw what is written, which in this case is ‘taste the rainbow’. The next player will then write what they think the previous player was trying to draw. Then the next player will try to draw the previous player’s interpretation of the previous drawing was. And it continues on in that alternating fashion until the last player has their turn. Here’s the video:

Now if we analyse the video on a deeper level, we can see how the original message gets skewed and twisted as each person comes up to the board. The message starts off with ‘taste the rainbow’ and ends with ‘bruddah is playing da ukelele over da wainbow’. Each persons mindset alters the way they write or draw up their answer. Some of the players were more serious than others, and tried to write/draw in order to best convey the message across. Some others didn’t take the game too seriously, and ended up purposely ruining the game for the others.

If we look at the first message as well – ‘taste the rainbow’, this message relies upon the knowledge of the skittles slogan to understand clearly. What if someone; who didn’t know what a skittle was, was the first player in this game? They most likely would have misinterpreted it and would have drawn the literal meaning of tasting a rainbow.

Interpretations are altered by a number of factors, and frankly, we don’t even realise it most of the time. What this video does perfectly is help to visualize the idea of signs and symbols producing different interpretations, while also entertaining their audience. Although, they probably didn’t even mean to show the idea of semiotics in the first place.