PowerPoint karaoke

What it actually is

PowerPoint karaoke, also called battle decks or improv slides, is an improvisation game built out of the most ordinary object in office life. The presenter is given a deck of slides they have never opened. They have to speak over it convincingly, keep going when a slide makes no sense, and land an ending they could not have planned.

The comedy does not come from the slides. It comes from a person trying to be competent in front of material that will not cooperate, which is a situation every single person in the room recognises from work. That is why it plays to an audience who would never sit through an improv show.

The rules

• The presenter has not seen the deck. Nobody who made or chose the deck presents it.
• The deck advances one slide at a time, and the presenter controls the advance. Reading ahead is the only way to cheat, and there is nothing to read ahead on.
• There is a clock, or there is a slide count, and everybody knows which before it starts. Five to eight slides is a talk; twenty is a hostage situation.
• The presenter stays in character as somebody who meant to give this talk. Breaking to say the deck is ridiculous is the one move that kills it.
• The audience reacts out loud. It is not a polite format, and a silent room makes it much harder than it needs to be.
• Scoring is optional, and a room with scoring plays more rounds than a room without.

Where it came from

The format is generally traced to Berlin around 2006, where it ran as Pecha Kucha's disreputable sibling and spread through improv theatres and tech conferences under a dozen names. It reached offices the way office games always do: somebody ran it at a Christmas party, and it was the only part anybody remembered in January.

How to run one

You need three things: a screen everybody can read, a set of decks nobody in the room has seen, and a way to pick who is next that is not a volunteer call into silence. The third is the one that decides whether the evening happens, and it is the one most write-ups skip.

Pick the first presenter yourself, and pick somebody senior enough to survive it. Once one person has done it badly and had a good time, the rest volunteer. Say out loud at the start that anybody can decline, because a game you can opt out of is a game more people opt into.

• Five to eight slides per deck, advanced by the presenter.
• Three to five rounds in an evening. Stop while people still want another.
• Have the audience score, or at least react, so the people sitting down have a job.
• Never run it without a rehearsal of the technology. A projector that will not connect is where the evening dies.

How Slide Roulette runs it

Slide Roulette is this game with the three hard parts removed. The big screen is a web page: open it on any television with a browser, and it shows a four-letter code and a QR code. Everybody in the room joins on their own phone with no app and no account.

A wheel picks the presenter and the deck. It only lands on somebody who has not presented yet and a deck the room has not played, so nobody is picked twice while somebody else has been skipped. The presenter's phone becomes the clicker, so they advance their own slides and never have to ask somebody at a laptop.

While the talk runs, the room reacts from their phones and the reactions appear on the screen. After the last slide the audience scores confidence, comedy and commitment, and the room keeps the slide people reacted to most as a highlight card the presenter can share.