Parlour Games for Christmas by Judith Allnatt

Like many people in these difficult times, I've turned to light reading as a bit of escapism and my most recent choice  has been to reread The Diary of  a Nobody by George and Weedon Grossmith, published in 1892.  The 'nobody' in question is Mr Charlie Pooter, Edwardian bank clerk: a comic creation who tells  terrible jokes yet takes himself rather too seriously.  He dutifully records his household woes, for instance his threat  to walk out if the same blancmange is served up again after seeing it 'for every meal since Wednesday'. He and his wife Carrie are often visited by two friends: Cummings and Gowing (of course he makes a joke about that). Their entertainments include cards, singing, and impressions but also parlour games such as Cutlets.

Cutlets involves one person sitting down, and everyone else being asked in turn to sit on the lap of the person before them until they are arranged one on top of another in a pile, provoking general hilarity. Then, they are asked 'Are you a believer in the great Mogul?' to which they have to answer all together 'Yes, oh yes!' when unexpectedly,  the person on the bottom gets up, resulting in a toppling of the pile.  The game was clearly perceived as a little risqué, as Grossmith presents the husbands as insisting that the wives sit on their spouses' laps and not anyone else's! 

This made me think about how grownup  'play' often involves  a challenge to the propriety of the day: the rules of the game  temporarily replacing the normal rules of staid adult mores to allow behaviour that, in the parlance of the day, is a little 'naughty' or 'daring’.

Readers may remember playing Blind Man's Buff  as a child at parties. My memory of the game includes being spun around until you were dizzy when being the 'blind man' and the aim of the game being to catch one of the kids who were calling out and poking you, so that they would have to take over the role and you could escape. However, for centuries the game has clearly been played not only by children but by adults. Tennyson mentions playing it in 1855 and the painting below, by Pietro Longhi  shows it being played in an eighteenth century scene. The original version of the game had a further element that our childish version lacked, which is that the blind man  has to identify, by touch, the person they have captured, before they are allowed to swap roles. Like Cutlets, Blind Man's Buff involves physical contact normally outside the realm of polite behaviour, providing both humour and flirtatious opportunity.

Reverand Crawley's Circle demands that all the players hold hands, but not with the people immediately next to them. The resulting knot then has to be untangled by twisting, turning and stepping through gaps, without letting go, resulting in contortions much like the modern game of Twister. The identity of Reverand Crawley has long ago been lost. Was he even a real person? Or was the name chosen to give a spurious permission from religious authority to get 'up close and personal’?

Sardines is another game that involves close physical contact. The game is a back-to-front version of Hide-and -Seek. Only one player hides, then as each seeker finds them they have to join them in their hiding place so that it becomes progressively more 'cozy' or 'cramped', depending on one's attitude to the person  in close quarters next to you. 

Some games, rather than making mischief with polite gender norms, allow a playful expression of aggression. Where are you Moriarty? is a game that presumably makes reference to the longstanding enmity between Holmes and the criminal mastermind. It requires two players, both blindfolded, and each holding a rolled up newspaper, to lie on the floor head to head, with a gap of around a metre between them. One asks the question and when the other answers 'Here!' the first attempts to hit them with the newspaper whilst they roll about trying to avoid getting bashed.

More modern games sometimes have elements of older ones. Killer is a game played at Christmas in our household because it works for almost all age groups, including the elderly, who might prefer to sit. It starts with everyone receiving a piece of paper, only one of which has the word 'Killer' written upon it. The players then sit in a circle while the killer seeks to catch a person's eye and 'kill' them by winking. The victims have to count to twenty before they expire, to give the killer the chance to perform a further massacre before anyone can accuse them. The winner is the person who manages to level a correct  accusation before being winked to death and a wrong accusation results in exclusion from the game. The Victorian game If you Love me Dearest, Smile worked on a similar principle but was far more innocent. It required  a nominated person to smile at the other players to get them to smile in turn, the winner being the last one to hold out against smiling - a gift to a young lady  looking for an excuse  to catch the eye of a particular gentleman . . .

Parlour games may seem rather tame to us today when we're used to more sophisticated entertainment. However, over a Christmas that, at the time of writing, may well be constrained by Covid regulations, they have something to recommend them as a way to entertain the members of a single household, who may have a wide spread of ages. What they all have in common is that they tend to end in one thing - laughter - and we could all do with some of that.

Chat with me about this post @JudithAllnatt or read more about my writing and more blogposts here

The first gamers: and the end of history - by Manda Scott

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World of Warcraft: the biggest MMORPG in the world

I have a confession to make: I play World of Warcraft.   I have a battleground healer who has in her time, been an undead shadow priest called Kyst, and a night-elf discipline priest called Warfaryn. I have a shaman called Saffyk and when nobody in the player world got it, I created a healer monk called Sapphic. They still don’t get it.  But that’s not the point.  The point is in the community and the competition. 

Arathi Basin battleground

I play, I discover, at what is generally termed semi-hard-core levels, which is to say I give it fair amounts of time (10pm – midnight most nights) but I don’t compete at the super-high levels. I am, though, in a rated battle ground team and the work required to stay there is significant: I have to keep my gear up to scratch which means doing a lot of sub-optimal fighting, but when it’s right, and the team is working well, there’s nothing like it.

Actually, there are a few things like it: climbing was one – that sense of absolute partnership with whoever’s holding the rope and who does, quite literally, hold your life in their hands: if you climb regularly together, you develop the kinds of intense relationships that tend otherwise only to happen in high pressure jobs like surgery or theatrical acting, where people take risks together on a daily (or nightly) basis.   Battle re-enactment had a similar effect: the team work, the practice it took to reach a good standard, that sense of all the pieces coming together when we won a particularly hard battle: and yes, the sense of being able to defend someone’s ‘life’ and of having them defend me.

Scoreboard: a vital part of gaming feedback

Game designers define these bonding experiences as some of the most intense in human emotional evolution.  They have words for the pride we feel when our side wins (Fiero), or the almost equally powerful pride we feel when someone we have coached and helped also wins (Naches).  They name the sense of everything coming together as ‘flow’ and they list the four components of gaming that make it so addictive: games have an attainable goal (that often pushes us to the edges of our competence, where we are most in flow), games have clear, succinct rules, games have voluntary participation, games have a feedback system.

Arena competition 2vs2

By combining all of these, a game – defined as any voluntary activity involving the solving of unnecessary obstacles – has the potential to provide us with massive positive emotion, as opposed to the outside world which often provides less than obvious goals – certainly not goals that are theoretically attainable and for which we are given clear, regularly irregular, obvious feedback.  In short, we have the chance to excel in a social context that matters to us: when I heal the flag carrier in Warsong Gulch and my team caps, there is a moment’s peak experience that is the same whether I have ‘died’ or survived (and in any case, I’ll resurrect fairly soon, so dying is not too much of a problem, it just removes me from the game for a bit, thus depriving me of my chance to throw game changing heals).

The evolution of games is one of the most interesting historical stories – this is, after all, an historical blog, so this is the history:   It is widely held that the Lydians were the first to engage in serious gaming as a culture.  Herodotus tells us that in the reign of king Atys, there was such a famine as the Lydian people were in danger of starvation.  So he set up a law, by which the entire population would eat one day and on the next day, they would play games that were so immersive, they wouldn’t notice they weren’t eating, They played dice, knucklebones, ball games and ‘in this way,’ Herodotus said, ‘they invented all the games that are common.’ 

They passed the time this way for eighteen years and at the end of it, when the famine still gripped the land, they played one last, ‘epic’ game, in which the ‘winners’ – half the population – took to boats and sailed off to find a land free of famine, while the remaining half stayed behind and had enough food to sustain them.  Current archaeological theory, backed by DNA evidence, suggests that the Lydians were the fore-runners to the Etruscans who were in turn, the biological ancestors of those who founded Rome: and went on to make the public slow death of other people the most gripping set of games their culture could imagine. 

All of which leads us to examine games rather hard, because the current generation of children is the first to grow up with immediate access to all that digital games can offer.

I was very struck reading an original Grimm Brothers fairy tale recently, which described the young princess ‘amusing herself by playing with a golden ball: she threw it up and caught it and in this way kept herself happy for days on end’. Until the ball fell into the well and was found by a frog and we slide into psychosexual allusion rather fast.

But I am trying to imagine any of the children of my acquaintance finding amusement in throwing a ball of any colour at all into the air for hours on end and catching it, when they could be playing Warcraft. Or Halo4. Or Angry Birds. Or on-line Scrabble. Or Chore Wars (yes, you can turn your household chores into a game. It works.  Details here: http://www.chorewars.com/)

Modern kids spend roughly 20 hours per week at school – and another 24 hours per week playing games.  That will rise as games available on mobile phones become more immersive and more multi-player.   So the children of today know that ‘work’ can be fun, can provide flow, can provide tangible evidence of success and social bonding. Or it can be dull, repetitive, with high stress levels and no obviously attainable goals.

Our educators are only lately catching onto this. I have read of one school in the US where the entire school experience is structured as a game: a pupil might discover a ‘secret code’ hidden in the library which takes quite advanced mathematical skills to solve, and she’ll get extra points if she solves it ahead of her team mates (aka class mates). She might have to bring in two or three of them to help, because some have higher maths-scores than she does, but they will discover ‘fiero’ and ‘naches’ in the success of the ‘secrete mission’ and in the helping of others.  At other times in the day, our hypothetical student will spend time teaching a computer how to do some more basic maths – because teaching others is the best way to learn, at other times, she’ll be powering up her language skills in order to help others find their way out of a labyrinth.  She’ll come home full of self-created projects she wants to get done before the next day and, because the whole of school is one big, epic game, she won’t need or want to spend time on Warcraft or Halo or Call of Duty.

So: history is useful when it teaches us how we can be, if it shows us mistakes we can avoid (we never do, but that’s a different post), if it helps us to understand ourselves.  But we are on the brink of the singularity and games are becoming an increasing part of the world we inhabit.  We as writers and readers are the last generation who will have grown in a world where we created our own games.  We, as readers and writers, need to understand the realities of the world that is evolving, and step into it.

One way to do that is to create games of the world around us: Chore Wars is one.  SuperBetter is another (https://www.superbetter.com/)  which helps people recover from acute or chronic illness.

We can work out how to survive without oil (http://worldwithoutoil.org/metaabout.htm), or we can generate our own games based around, perhaps, discovering the folding of proteins that may one day help biologists to understand the causes of cancer.  (http://www.gamesforchange.org/play/foldit/)

The possibilities are without end and probably beyond our current imagination. Which is why we are at the threshold of ‘beyond history’ .  Never, not even in ancient Lydia, have we had an entire generation that understood games as a way of life.  How that will shape our future is also beyond our imagining.  But very probably not beyond theirs.