How to run PowerPoint karaoke

The ten-minute setup

Do this before people arrive, not while they watch. A host debugging a projector in front of thirty people has already lost the first two rounds.

• Get a screen everybody can read. Stand at the back and read a line of body text; if you cannot, move the screen or shrink the room.
• Open the big screen and leave the room code and QR code visible. People arrive during the third talk and will want to join then.
• Join from your own phone first. It proves the network works before it matters.
• Decide the format out loud: how many slides, who advances them, whether there is scoring. Thirty seconds of rules beats a ruling halfway through round two.
• Line up the first presenter privately. This is the highest-value minute in the whole setup.
• Say that anybody can decline. Then mean it the first time somebody does.

When nobody volunteers

This is the normal case, not the failure case. A room of adults told they will improvise in front of colleagues sits very still, and waiting them out makes it worse: every silent second raises the cost of being the person who breaks it.

So do not ask for a volunteer at all for the first round. Name somebody with standing to lose, which usually means the most senior person present. Their round does two things at once: it shows the game is survivable, and it shows that being bad at it is the point rather than an embarrassment.

After that, let the wheel do the asking. A random pick is far easier to accept than a request, because nobody has been judged to be the funny one. If somebody declines, move on with no persuasion: the room is watching how you handle it and deciding whether to risk it themselves.

Scoring, and why to bother

Scoring is not about the winner. It is about giving the people sitting down something to do that is not judging quietly. A room that votes is a room paying attention, and the difference is visible from the front.

Score on three axes rather than one. Slide Roulette uses confidence, comedy and commitment, and the third is the useful one: it rewards the presenter who stayed in character over the one who got a lucky slide. A single score out of ten collapses into a popularity vote by round three.

Keep the ballot short; twelve seconds is enough. Announce a winner at the end or do not. Most rooms stop caring about the total around round three and keep playing anyway, which tells you what the scores were actually for.

Five ways it goes wrong

• The decks are jokes. If the slides are funny on their own, the presenter has nothing to do and the room laughs at the screen instead of the person. Good decks are straight-faced raw material.
• The talks run long. Eight slides with no clock becomes eleven minutes, and the fourth round never happens. Cap the slides or the time, and say which before round one.
• One person is hilarious and goes three times. Rotate strictly, and let the wheel refuse anybody who has already presented.
• The screen is unreadable from the back. Fixable in ninety seconds beforehand and unfixable during.
• It runs too long overall. Stop at three to five rounds while the room still wants another.

If you are running it with Slide Roulette

The wheel handles the rotation and the deck choice: it only lands on somebody who has not presented and a deck the room has not played. The presenter's phone is the clicker, so nobody stands next to a laptop.

As host you can name the presenter without the room seeing that you did, which is how you line up the first round. You can also decide which decks the room may deal, before it opens or between rounds.