Press Conference

How to Explain It

"One of you is a public figure. You do not know who you are. Everyone else is a journalist with questions. The journalists know who the public figure is. Your questions reveal who they are without stating it directly. The person in the hot seat figures out their identity through the press conference."

Objectives

Press Conference develops character commitment, subtext reading, and authority under uncertainty. The deduction element creates genuine problem-solving within performance, requiring players to process information while simultaneously projecting confidence.

The celebrity variant (known identity) trains character specificity and the ability to inhabit a public figure's verbal register, status, and perspective without relying on caricature.

Running the Deduction Version

Keep the chosen figure and context achievable. Abstract or obscure figures defeat the game because the journalists cannot construct questions with enough specificity to help. Well-known public figures from recent decades work best.

Coach journalists before the game starts: "Your questions should hint, not reveal. Give one piece of information per question."

Common Coaching Notes

• "You already know who you are. Speak with that authority."
• "Don't answer questions with questions. Commit to an answer."
• "Journalists: your questions are the map. Make them useful."
• "When you guess wrong and commit fully, that's still good. Work with what you've got."

The Subject's Challenge

The subject faces a compound task: staying in character, projecting appropriate authority, and extracting information from questions without appearing to search for it. The most skilled players integrate all three: each answer does double duty, contributing to the scene while signaling how much of the situation has been decoded.

The subject should commit to specific, not generic, answers even when uncertain. A vague answer signals ignorance; a specific wrong answer is funnier and reveals more. If the subject guesses wrong, the wrong specificity becomes a character choice the journalists can play off.

Journalist Strategy

Journalists who ask questions too obvious defeat the game quickly; journalists who are too cryptic frustrate the subject and the audience. The sweet spot is questions that contain exactly one piece of new information, delivered with the appropriate journalistic register. A question that names the subject's opponent in an election, without saying "election," is perfect: specific enough to inform, oblique enough to require deduction.

Journalists should vary their angle: some ask about relationships, some about events, some about what the public figure stands for. A range of approaches gives the subject multiple vectors to triangulate from.

Press Conference appears in the TheatreSports tradition developed by Keith Johnstone, where it functions as a competitive short-form game. It belongs to the family of deduction games in which one player must identify a hidden situation while the other players provide clues through structured interaction.

The game's format has antecedents in Second City's early work: Jeff Sweet documents a performer at Compass doing a detailed JFK press conference impersonation in the 1960s, noting the effort to get inside the president's personality rather than rely on surface impression. This suggests the press conference format as character exercise was present in Chicago improvisational work before TheatreSports codified it as a competitive game.

Bill Hohn documents a variant called Celebrity Press Conference for online and applied improv contexts, in which the subject leaves the room, returns as a famous figure (living, dead, real, or fictional), and fields questions to determine their identity. This variant has been adopted widely in corporate facilitation for its accessibility and low barrier to participation.

Marcus Goteri documents a Press Conference variant in which the hidden information is a historical time period rather than a person, structurally similar to the Dating Game family of games.