A bored man sitting in his sterile cubicle talks to another such man in another such place:
"The Lattice-Work Gun-stinging Insect...Book title...That's the only clue i'm giving you."
From this, the respondent must find the answer to score the points and keep his chart rating up.
"Lattice work...Network...Stinging Insect...Wasp? Bee. Gun-bee. Heater-bee. Laser-bee. Rod-bee. Gat. Gat-wasp. Gat-bee. Gatsby. Lattice-work. That would be a grating. Grate. The Great Gatsby"
The riddle is formed by passing the original title through Japanese translation computers into Japanese then back to English again.
This version of 'The Game' is from Galactic Pot Healer, a science-fiction novel by Philip K. Dick. The novel contains futuristic technology, but it seems the translation computers have not got linguistics down to perfection, and loose spelling rules. This makes for interesting translations.
I tried to emulate this riddle-creating method by putting various phrases into Google translation services.
I passed 'Can flies be made bigger to help reduce waste'
from English to German to French back to English a few times over, which offered me 'The crate flies can with the loss on the assistance reduce to be to a large extent always made'.
Not quite so colourful, but strange all the same