If you’re at a dinner party, it sometimes happens that the conversation can be a little stilted, especially when people don’t know each other so well.
The conversation topics will revolve around a neutral subject such as work, and the energy levels will be low. It will almost seem like an interview is going on, with one person asking a few questions, and nodding but not seeming truly interested in the answers being given. And the answers will sound a little superficial, too.
One way to raise the energy levels is by introducing a game. Anyone who has ever been at a party where a game has been played will have noticed that the participants become a lot more animated afterwards, and levels of formality between them drop considerably. Because they’ve had fun together, it’s as if they were old friends.
There are three types of game to play:
1) Word games: These would include guessing games like Twenty Questions, or memory games, like I Went To Market And I Bought, where everyone has to remember what everyone before them has purchased before adding an item of their own. (A variation on this is the game Truly, Madly, Deeply played by the actors in the movie of the same name)
2) Puzzles: these would include those Mensa-influenced puzzles about things like a man found dead with a parcel in a field, surrounded by snow or mud with no footprints in it – how did he die? Or riddles like the Man on his way to St Ives. There are clever puzzles that look like they’re mathematical problems, too, but in fact the numbers refer to something else: a crude example would be 0,7,7,3 and the next number would be 4, because when you look at them upside down they spell HELLO
3) Physical games like charades, or Pictionary .
It’s best to start with the first two kinds before moving onto physical games. After people have smiled and laughed a few times, they become much more open to the idea of doing more active things.
Time will fly while these activities are in progress, and w
hen normal conversation resumes, the topics will be a lot livelier.
For more on the key conversation skills, go here
