Chris Welsh is the primary inventor of Chicken Lists. His inspiration was a book called Created in Darkness by Troubled Americans, a collection of humor-writing that first appeared on the McSweeney's web site (or maybe in its hard-copy sister publication). Many humorous lists are peppered throughout the book, with titles like "Not Very Scary Movies" and "Bad Names for Wrestlers". One afternoon, while Chris and I were hanging out at the New Deal Cafe, Chris suggested that we figure out how to play a McSweeney's-List Chicken Game. Our challenge was to come up with some way of generating list titles using random juxtapositions. We grabbed the book and started poring over its lists, looking for patterns. Some of the titles were so specific—"Several Phrases That Have Never Been Uttered in Human History"—that we found it hard to see how any general process could generate them. However, we were able to turn many of the titles into templates which would accept a wide variety of category-nouns. We created a list of templates, which included some of our own ideas. We also created a list of categories for use with these templates. Later that evening, John and Gina helped us test the idea. You'll find some of our results in the Chicken Lists Gallery.
I had a lot of fun with this game, and I expect to play it again. Our results were a little uneven—I didn't feel it was worth publishing our answers to "I Used To Name Westerns, Now I Name Pets" or "Sequels To Nightclubs". I guess I didn't resonate much with the categories "westerns" and "nightclubs".
In Chris' vision of this game, players create lists as holistic entities. You could (for instance) write an entire list in the voice of a guy who's obsessed with his ex-girlfriend. If you really work fast, you can write multiple lists, and turn them in as seperate entries.
I found that I didn't do much editing, reordering, or deleting of line items while working on my own lists; in hindsight, it was clear that I should have. We edited many of our lists before publishing them here in the Gallery. Maybe with practice we'll get better at doing this during the game.