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Punctuation charades is a fun game that's hopelessly confusing to the uninitiated, and only marginally less confusing to the initiated. It's just like regular charades, only instead of miming, you type, and instead of not being allowed to talk, you're not allowed to use letters. If you were allowed to do that, it would just be called "Telling people the name of things", which is a lot less fun.

With the exception of letters, you're allowed to use numbers (so doing Nineteen Eighty-Four is easy), and any other character on the keyboard. Unless you've got some weird foreign keyboard, or something equally bizarre like a Mac, in which case who knows? I might tweak it later so you can use a few of the more useful non-keyboard characters, but for the time being you'll just have to make do.

Like the game that inspired it, there are certain protocols - you start by indicating the sort of thing it is (book, play, film), then the number of words, then the word and/or syllable you're going to mime first, and after that it pretty much descends into chaos.

\/	It's a book!
}_{	It's a play!
[ ]	It's a TV show!
.|.|	It's a song!
0_0	It's a film!
\/ .|.| [ ]	It's a book, a song and a TV show!
....	It has four words, or I'm about to mime the fourth word
..,,,	The second word has three syllables, or I'm about to mime the third syllable of the second word
>+0	Man
>+80	Woman
?	Sounds like	e.g. for pan:? >+0 Sounds like man
!	Not	e.g. for single:! >+0 + >+80 Not married
><	A shorter/truncated version of your previous guess, or a short word	e.g. for doll:>< $ Truncated 'dollar'
<>	A longer version of your previous guess

Get the idea? So for Death in Venice, you'd do something like this:

\/ 0_0	It's a book and a film
...	Three words
., .., ...,,	First word has one syllable, second word has one syllable, third word has two syllables
. >+0 ---> >    +      0	First word: a man transforming into dismembered parts (Death)
.. ---[->   ]	Second word: an arrow pointing into a box (In)
..., (  2  ( 3 5 7 11 13 17 )  9 15 )	Third word, first syllable: a Venn diagram of prime numbers and odd numbers (Ven)
...,, >< ~~~~~0 " "	Third word, second syllable: Truncated - a snake with quotation marks, meaning something a snake says, meaning hiss (ice)

See, it's easy!
When someone solves a charade, the someone who solved it and the someone who set it both get ten points! It's a massively flawed scoring system for many reasons, but I couldn't think of a way to make it in any way fair, so it will have to do.

And that's all you need to know. Now go and play!