Happy 10-Year Anniversary to Ten Words of Wisdom!

Exactly a decade ago to the minute of this post being released, on December 13, 2015, 12:01 AM UTC, Carykh uploaded the first episode of a brand new series: Ten Words of Wisdom.

This was a YouTube camp, which is a game played by actual people via YouTube! This type of game has been incredibly popular in the Object Show Community since basically the very start, with the earliest surviving example — and one of the most famous — being Battle For Space Palace.

Cary had previously made one himself, called BAGUETTE, which started on September 2012, however it was abandoned after episode 6B in April 2023, lasting only 7 months. Over 2 years later, though, Cary would take a stab at another YouTube camp, with what was at the time an extremely unique idea, and that was this show!

Ten Words of Wisdom (or TWOW for short) was a game where each episode Cary would give the contestants a prompt, such as "What happened to the 31st of November?", and then all the contestants must submit a clever response to that question made of ten words or fewer. After people submit their answers, they would be displayed for voting to all of the viewers, and they could then vote for them from best to worst, with the contestants with the lowest scoring responses each round getting eliminated.

This continued until there was just one person left, who won the entire show! I could go into more detail, but I'd just recommend watching the original video for that.

The series was extremely fun! And I am so glad that it did as well as it did.

It did some unique things for camps of this kind, such as having just one type of challenge throughout the whole thing, having an almost-anonymous voting system, and having an indefinite number of contestants at the starts rather than a set one!

The show serves as a very interesting time capsule of sorts on the general internet culture of the time, or at least I like to think of it that way. Most of the episodes were created before 2017, so a huge chunk of the show was just filled with 2015/2016 humour. From unserious Trump jokes, to references to Vine, and other memes from that era.

Aside from that, though, the show was very fun, as it ended up being a creative outlet, not just for Cary, but for other people as well! Aside from their responses, contestants could also customize their look and submit fun confessionals, and even viewers submitted tonnes of fanart which appeared in the episodes, and other fun stuff such as the famous Spreadsheet were also created!

For me, personally, the show was one of the things that made me super interested in statistics and data visualization!

As early as Episodes 2A and 2B, Cary would feature some very fun data-visualizations of statistics regarding the show! From where people voted, to the placements of contestants throughout episodes. This eventually led to the first big statistics display from the game, shown in Episode 6A, which were the normalized ranks! Which showed the average ranking of contestants across all episodes.

These would continue to pop up more and more throughout the series, but my personal favourite was the one for TWOW 16. This was a very special episode, as the prompt was made in such a way that responses could affect each other! Cary made an extremely cool analysis of that, which Michael then made into a beautiful diagram!

They even made merch for it, and I have a poster!

I could go on and on and on about how much I love this show, but I don't want to get into too much detail, so I'll just say some more general things.

I loved the look of the show. I did so much that it directly inspired the look that I use for most of my infographics, amongst other things I've done!

It helped me become more fluent in English from how often I watched it, and I learned a lot of literary and statistical concepts way before I learnt them in school! These include alliteration, palindromes, lipograms, percentiles, standard deviation, and probably more.

I've been a fan of this show literally since the start, and I have the proof! I literally left a comment in TWOW 0A within 2 days of the video releasing. Yeah… I wasn't really used to speaking English at the time.

And I even made my own fanart with crayons! I only ended up uploading them publicly in 2021 for the final episode, but they were made around the time of TWOW 15A, if I recall correctly.

This show meant, and still means a lot to me, and I am so glad that I can still look back and happily talk about this very special show a whole decade later. :)

… OH NO I WENT 830 WORDS OVER THE LIMIT