One evening, my friends John Cooper, Chris Welsh and I were walking along Research Road—you know, the part by the agricultural center where there are no cars after 6:30pm—when I suddenly asked them each to come up with a random noun. They did so, and then I used the two nouns to create an analogy problem. I don't remember now exactly what the resulting problem was, but it was something like "What's the mechanic of gravity?" We each came up with an answer to this weird question, and then we spent the rest of the walk creating more random analogies and discussing what the goal of this new proto-game might be. When we got back to John's place, we told his wife Gina about the idea, and the four of us sat down to try a game. We wrote down a bunch of nouns on slips of paper, and we used them to generate analogy questions. For each question, we each wrote a single answer and then picked our favorite from among the other answers. It became clear by the end of the session that the winning answers tended to be the funny ones. That was okay by me; I liked the idea of a game that you could win by being funny.
Soon after this, I went to Michigan to attend a playtesting and design convention called Protospiel, where I met Mike Petty for the first time. I learned that Mike had been working on a game that was very similar in structure to my analogy game. He had a bunch of cards with funny questions on them, and you'd plug player's names into them to get stuff like, "If Stephen was a superhero, what would his name be?" Just like in the analogy game, the idea was that everyone would write down an answer, and then we'd somehow award points to one or more of them. Mike and I discussed whether it would be better to have a group-voting system or an individual-judge system; we decided to start with the individual-judge system.
We gathered a group and playtested both of our games. Afterwards, we discussed the pros and cons of each system. We both liked the random noun-juxtapositions of the analogies game, but we also liked the straightforward comic element of Mike's questions. Mike suggested that we come up with some additional question-templates that worked with random nouns. After Protospiel ended, Mike and I (via email) brainstormed a list of templates to try. Many of them reminded me of the old nonsense riddles we all learned when we were kids, so I began to focus on that element. I axed the analogy template (which didn't fit so well into this conception), and started calling the game "Why Did the Chicken...?" Mike and I began to play versions of this game with our respective playtesting groups. Many of the players here in Maryland—including Jacob Davenport, Kristin Matherly, John Cooper, Gina Mai Denn, Chris Welsh, Liam Bryan, and Rich Potter—became actively involved in developing the idea into a finished product. In particular, Kristin Matherly suggested adding a timer and allowing multiple answers per player, which greatly improved the game. Eventually, Jacob and his wife Lisa started a company and published a commercial version of it.
While Mike and I were discussing the early versions of WDtC, he mentioned that he'd come up with a haiku-writing game that used similar mechanisms. It became clear to me that we could abstract our rule-set into a very general framework which would support all sorts of different specific games. We already had some working examples—Mike's original "roast" game, my analogies game, Mike's haiku game, and WDtC. Even at Protospiel, people had suggested using things like cartoons or clay sculptures as prompts. Chris, John, Gina, and I tested the cartoon idea, writing dialogue and captions for randomly-juxtaposed cartoon-panels that we'd drawn. I thought the game was hilarious, and at that point there was no question in my mind that the framework was strong enough to support many different games. Later, Mike and I worked up a written version of this "creativity-game system". The most current version is presented here on this site.
Assigning credit for the design of individual Exquisite Chicken games is a tricky business. Once the basic framework began to take shape, many of the possible variations were more or less "obvious". In order to determine authorship for particular games, I ask the following questions:
In the case of Cartoon Chicken, the idea of using cartoon panels as prompts was an obvious one, and it required virtually no extra development-work to turn it into a playable game. Multiple people suggested the idea, and Mike Petty and I tested it independently. This game doesn't really have a designer—it just grew.
The idea of writing poetry (limericks, haiku, free-verse) is also an obvious one, but it requires a bit more development-work, because it's not obvious what the prompt-system should be. Different groups have experimented with different systems for various kinds of poetry-writing. Mike's early haiku work helped us formulate the idea for the Exquisite Chicken framework itself.
The ideas behind games like Get Paul That Promotion, Ask Dr. Smartypants, and Chicken Lists weren't so obvious to start with, and they all required some non-obvious development-work as well, so I tend to view those games as having official "designers".
I've described some of WDtC's complex design history earlier on this page.
For a surprisingly long time, we had no name for this general creativity-game framework. None of the suggestions we came up with (including my own) worked for me. Eventually, Chris Welsh suggested The Exquisite Chicken, which I liked immediately. Since I had to have some name to pin on this website, that's the one I chose.
As it turns out, Chris' suggestion was just a joke. Apropos, no?