A silly ice-breaker game I had the misfortune of being involved in last night.

One person volunteers or is chosen to be the Psychologist. It is vitally important that he or she has never heard of the game before. The rest of the group, the patients, sits in a circle, and the Psychologist is supposed to ask people questions one at a time, trying to figure out what their "sickness" is. Everyone has the same ailment, which is that whenever they are posed a question, they must answer it as if they were the person sitting, for example, three seats to the left of them. Of course, since not everyone in the room knows everything about everyone else, if someone is asked a question to which they don't know the answer, they must try their best to guess the answer. If they're wrong, the person sitting three seats to the left calls out "Switch", and all the patients randomly switch seats.

Problems arise when the rules are not described to the patients very clearly: last night, for example, some people thought that they were to respond to their own name, while others assumed that they took on the name of the person they were answering for, resulting in huge inconsistencies. Also, since the Psychologist sat in the same circle as the patients, many people weren't clear on whether or not they were to include him in counting out the three people. The result was that whenever the Psychologist asked questions of people sitting directly to his right, they would continue spouting out bogus answers, while the people to his left whispered to each other, trying to debate which one of them was supposed to say "Switch". It also doesn't help when the Psychologist is an idiot, and takes over an hour and a half to figure out what's going on. While it's funny to see the Psychologist's expressions of utter bafflement at what is going on at first, the game gets old pretty quickly, even for the patients. Never choose an impatient person to be the Psychologist.