Emoji Story Prompt

This game is inspired by physical games that prompt players to create stories based on visual symbols or imagery on dice or cards. Stories can be spoken, written, or signed. For educational settings, I recommend making a recording of spoken or signed narratives, and then looking at, thinking about, and working with the language or narrative devices used. After focusing on the language or narrative, the learners can then try retelling the story.

• Play alone or in groups.  
• To play, click "Generate story prompt" to get a set of nine emoji. 
• Use those emoji to inspire a story from beginning to end. 
  • If in groups, work together to make a story.
  • Take turns telling the story, or whoever has an idea can tell the next part.
• Copy and paste the emoji, re-arranging them as you use them, to help keep track of the narrative. 
• Note: "Copy to clipboard" button currently not working on Chrome, but you can manually highlight to copy and paste. May work properly in other browsers.

Example story (written): 

👩‍🦰🤾‍♀️🥭🍾🍂🚐🧟🏳️🩲

Once upon a time there was a lady named Jam who loved to play dodgeball. She was enjoying a lovely persimmon wine with her three teammates in a beautiful autumn forest clearing after a particularly wild match against the team from the next town over. One of her friends, Pat, who had already had a few drinks was going to get in her van and drive home. Jam told her to wait, because drinking and driving was a bad idea. Pat wasn’t so easily persuaded though and tried to push her way to the van. All of a sudden a horde of zombies appeared around the dodgeball players. Jam and her friend made peace, jumped in the van together and drove it around, running over the zombies one after another. One teammate, Michelle, was facing off with a particularly gruesome member of the undead. Pat opened the sliding side door of the van as they drove alongside and told Michelle to jump in! She did, but the zombie had grabbed hold of her underpants and was trying to pull her back out of the van. While the zombie was occupied, Grace, their team captain, smashed the zombie in the head with the bottle of persimmon wine. It gave them just enough time for Michelle and Grace to jump in the van and drive off. The four of them managed to get away from that first wave of zombie attackers, but who could tell what would happen next. The end?

Feel free to share any stories you develop by pasting them into the comments below.  I would love to know how you use this. I would also strongly recommend the same activity with any physical game pieces that might inspire narrative creation. It's great to have dice or cards that you can manipulate physically.

Disclaimer: I'm not much of a programmer, so I collaborated with ChatGPT to produce the code for this game. I do hope though, that this game encourages many flesh and blood people to exercise their own creativity and explore that very fundamental part of their humanity. The source code is fully open (as it's part of the downloadable .html file) and you're welcome to study it, modify it, remix it, or otherwise learn from it. I sure did!