The stories older people tell reflect their wide and often interesting experience (and social reminiscing is good for mental health) but sometimes they can be repeated too often -to the same people.
Today’s invention is a game in the form of an iphone app. which makes the best use of their stories for everyone’s enjoyment whilst minimising the unwanted repeats.
A group of storytellers sits down and notes, using a pulldown menu of the names of their friends and relations, everyone who is present. Each player has prerecorded some short stories, jokes etc into their machine (together with a rough transcript of each -or just keywords).
One player starts playing his recorded story (he can only choose one that the others present have heard no more than x times in the last y years, for example). The machines are networked and so the currently speaking one passes its transcript wirelessly to the others in the group and keywords within it prime some of their stored stories to be ready to be played next. When one is finished, the other players attempt to play their next related story. The fastest to press ‘play’ then proceeds. This helps tune people’s reflexes and the playback approach avoids the embarrassment of forgetting punchlines etc.
Whoever is the last one with stories still to tell is the winner. There might even be a way for stories to be rated so that only the most interesting and popular are available for frequent reuse.
