when Discord makes a pop-up suggesting I might want to play a game called Know What I Meme?.
It's... more or less exactly the level of quality that one would expect from something called Know What I Meme?. Notably as far as I can tell it has nothing to do with the very similarly named card game What Do You Meme?. If anything it seems to be mostly inspired by Jackbox. You vote on which of two prompts to use, everybody has to find a gif with Tenor's gif search to reply to it with (disappointingly you cannot use your Favourited gifs), you all vote on which is best, votes give you points, the game... doesn't end? We played four full rounds, each with five prompts, which let me tell you takes an excruciatingly long time, and the game gave no sense of stopping or even ever moving on to some special final round. I got the sense that you could just play it forever. Like some sort of meme purgatory.
I suspect I don't have to say it but the game is not very good. Jackbox-style games often live or die on their prompts, and these ones aren't... great... There are a lot of prompts that use player names, which in any game range from hit-or-miss to libellous, and a few of them seem almost risqué when there's no "18+" toggle or anything of the sort. At least getting to pick between two prompts lets you navigate around the worst ones. There aren't even that many prompts, we saw a lot of repeats, so there's no reason for them to be this bad. Here are some examples:
When you realize wearing socks with sandals is actually one the greatest things [sic]
Your face when you scroll through [player]'s camera roll
When [player] has to borrow [player]'s clothes
Weirdos sliding into [player]'s DMs after they set up a Tinder profile
Playing the game the way it's intended clearly wasn't working for us so as a group we found two places for emergent gameplay. The first was to put some random word into the Tenor search, and then scroll down for about 30 seconds until you get to the really incomprehensible gifs with foreign-language captions. Tenor search is a scary place. The other thing was to try to submit the same joke as everybody else. A few of the prompts don't give you a lot to go off, and as a group we mostly share the same terrible sense of humour, so when given something like "[player] when they have to read a long, boring book for study" a majority of the group submitted gifs of somebody eating paper.
Okay no I lied. There were three things and the third was to submit this lemon at every opportunity. What I'm saying is that the game is actually kind of fun if you have a group with a shared sense of humour, but that's because everything is kind of fun if you have a group with a shared sense of humour. Or, it's fun the first time, and we are absolutely not going to play Know What I Meme? again. I just can't figure out who the target audience is meant to be for this game. Who does Discord think uses their app, that might sincerely appreciate being given a prompt to play this? Okay I mean we played it but. That doesn't count. That was out of curiosity. It was ironic, I swear.
