New Choice

How to Explain It

"You are in a scene. At any point, I will shout 'New Choice.' When I do, the last line that was spoken is replaced immediately. Say something different. Keep going. If I shout again, replace it again. There is no wrong answer. There is only: what else?"

Objectives

New Choice builds the muscle of non-attachment: the capacity to abandon an offer at the moment of maximum investment. Players who struggle with New Choice typically struggle with the same pattern in scenes: they hold to their own ideas rather than tracking what the scene requires. The game makes that pattern visible and provides repetitions for breaking it.

The exercise also addresses verbal agility and trains performers to access alternatives without editing them in advance.

Common Coaching Notes

• "Don't pause. Your first replacement is the right one."
• "Commit to the new line as fully as you committed to the one you just abandoned."
• "Callers: interrupt at the worst possible moment. That's the game."
• "If you find yourself making the same choices repeatedly, that's information about your defaults."

Applied Contexts

In applied settings, New Choice is used to build cognitive flexibility and tolerance of rapid change. Facilitators running New Choice in corporate or educational contexts should frame the debrief around what made it difficult to abandon choices: what assumptions about being "right" came up, and what the exercise reveals about habitual thinking under pressure.

Caller Strategy

The caller's skill determines the game's quality. Poor callers interrupt too uniformly (every other line) or too infrequently (once per minute). Strong callers wait for moments of commitment, then interrupt: the more invested the performer appears in a line, the more effective the "New Choice" lands for the audience.

The caller should also interrupt physical actions deliberately, not just verbal ones. Audiences respond strongly when a physical commitment is reversed mid-gesture.

Performer Strategy

The error that kills New Choice is the performer who pauses to think. The first impulse is nearly always the best choice under rapid-fire calls. Players who stall for a "better" idea produce dead air and signal to the audience that they are searching rather than playing.

The replacement must be committed to immediately: a new line delivered with the same conviction as the original. A half-hearted replacement looks like a mistake; a fully committed replacement looks like a game.

Pacing as Structure

The game has a natural arc: slow calls early to establish relationship and circumstance, accelerating calls at mid-game to build energy, a climactic rapid-fire sequence, and a clean end. A caller who sustains rapid fire for too long exhausts the game before its natural peak.

New Choice is associated with Whose Line Is It Anyway?, both the British series (1988-1999) and the American adaptation (1998-2007), where it appeared under the name Ding and used a bell or buzzer as the caller's instrument. The game's television exposure made it one of the most widely recognized short-form games outside of theatre settings.

The game belongs to a category of restriction games that impose external interruption on a scene to break habitual offers. Asaf Ronen categorizes New Choice alongside Forward Reverse, Ding, and Freeze Tag as restriction games that manipulate how time operates within a scene. The concept has also been called "Change" in some curricula.

Beyond short-form performance, New Choice has been adopted as an applied improvisation exercise. Theresa Dudeck documents it as Workbook exercise 4.3 in Applied Improvisation, framing it as a tool for remaking verbal and physical offers and building cognitive flexibility in non-performance contexts.

Matt Fotis identifies New Choice as useful for solo and collaborative writers as a creativity exercise: the forced replacement of offers breaks habitual thinking and generates alternatives the writer would not have reached through deliberate selection.