‽istis ponders game-changing (weekending December 30th
2023)
This weekending, as the Christmas season seems to meld liminally in to the New Year and we find ourselves in the twelve days surrounded
by the demands of French hens, leaping Lords (some newly 'ennobled'), geese that may not be laying
promised golden eggs - and with some people perhaps thinking that the refugees (multiplying
exponentially) from this traditional Christmas song should have stopped
coming here by now, ‽istis
has been wondering about games, game-playing, winning, losing and following the
rules.
For some perhaps it’s the Boxing Day football matches, for
others it’s possibly the lengthy games of ‘Monopoly’[i],
for some it’s maybe the latest computer game (downloading virtually replacing
unwrapping[ii]),
for others still it could be the ‘new Christmas board game’ ordered last minute and delivered the
next day from the ‘fulfilment’ centre re-located from the North Pole perhaps because of the melting ice?
‽istis’ very first blog in July 2019 (Pistis reclaims Sport
weekending 20th July 2019) https://pistisrec.blogspot.com/2019/07/pistis-reclaims-sport-weekending-20th.html) referenced Rudyard Kipling’s
poem ‘If’[iii]) and asked:
How different this weekend of sporting glory might have been if
‘triumph’ and ‘disaster’ were indeed both treated as imposters and treated the
same ~ and if ‘zero-sum-gain’ didn’t dominate the rules of so many sports and
games.
‽ if the Wimbledon prize money was the same whether you ‘won’ or
‘lost’ the Finals, because you had both played so blooming well
‽ if the cricket World Cup trophy was half the size and twice
the quantity, was held aloft by both the captains and both teams celebrated and
all the fans were elated ~ because counting back the boundaries just doesn’t
really seem like cricket
‽ if the clock that times the qualifying laps just couldn’t
count thousandths of a second
‽ if my win wasn’t utterly dependent on your loss
…then what else might be different for the so-called winners and
the so-called losers; and, perhaps, possibly, maybe of greater importance: what
would the men, my son, be like?
And now, three and a half years and some 230 blogs later, ‽istis
ponders a potentially game-changing shake-up, a radical re-think of the rules
for various sports and games – especially rules that govern the outcome, the win and the
loss. Here are a few suggestions (and as is often the way ‽istis invites you to
consider your own) with more or less elaboration.
·
Football:
the winning side is the one which swears and/or spits the least (close VAR
monitoring required).
·
Golf:
the winner is the person who, cumulatively, takes the least time choosing which
club to use, or has the nattiest ‘Pringle’ sleeveless jumper
·
Chess:
the winner is the player who furrows their brow the most, or uses the black squares
most
·
Monopoly:
the winner is the player who best moves their playing token around the board in the manner of
the item it represents (with sound effects as appropriate)
·
Jenga:
the winner is the player that generates the least friction as they remove their
pieces, or names the most public services (one for every brick removed) that
have been affected adversely by political/ideological decisions over recent
years (controversial?)
·
Rugby:
the winning team is the one whose shirts and shorts collectively remain the cleanest, to be assessed by a
panel comprising anyone in the crowd who has worked in a launderette at some
stage
·
Beach
volleyball: the winning side is the one which has the most modest kit and yet retains the largest fan base (sorry, is this even appropriate to consider?)
·
Tennis:
the winner is the player who bounces the ball least before serving, divided by
the number of grunts/shrieks, multiplied by the number of bites of a banana eaten during
the breaks between games, divided by the number of times the player picked up
the ball themselves after a point, multiplied by the number of autographed expensive
ginormous tennis balls, divided by the number of strawberries eaten by the
spectators - Wimbledon variation only. (OK, so that may be a bit too
complicated!)
·
Any
quiz game: the person who gets the right answer despite the least opportunity
to have been exposed to the information in the first place, divided by the
number of synapses fired in the brain during the retrieval process (OK, so this
may require the use of multiple electroencephalogram scanners that could be
beyond the resources of the average local pub on a ‘Friday night is quiz
night’)
·
‘Strictly
Come Dancing’: the judges scores are combined with the ‘phone votes of the
public according to an undisclosed formula, until the final where the winner is
decided by the public vote alone based on completely unknown criteria, some of which
may be to do with dancing ability, or the extent of ‘the journey’, the total
elevation of the rollercoaster ride, the contestant that people thought most didn’t want to go home yet, the 'celebrity' who people thought bore the most sequins around the dance floor during the entire series, etc...
Oh…!
So, admittedly some of these might be difficult to measure.
Some might work best if the criterion for winning is not known
by the players beforehand.
Some might be multipliers or dividers of the traditional scoring
method such as goals, shortest times, fastest time, numbers of shots, etc.
Perhaps there could be various criteria available for any game -
with the referee, or one of the team, or a randomly selected spectator (or in
the case of ‘Monopoly’, the relative who successfully got out of playing it
this time even if it meant promising to do the washing up) choosing or drawing
out of a hat (before, during or after) the particular criterion to be applied
for a particular game?
Ridiculous, you say – may be so, but ‽istis humbly suggests that
every now and then it might be worth:
‽ wondering about the rules, especially those that define who is
a winner (and may take it all) and who is a loser (and may go home with nothing)
‽ pondering who made the rules and why it was that they were in a position to do so
‽ wondering about who gets to referee and enforce the rules,
especially in games where discretion, interpretation and judgement may be
required
‽ pondering whether just because these have been the generally
accepted rules, they always need to be so…
Oh, and while we are at it, perhaps, possibly, maybe we might
wonder and ponder if any of this has anything to do with whether or not 2024
may be a happy new year - and for whom‽
©‽istis
NB: further reflections and comments linked to this week’s theme
and past blog entries to be found on X/Twitter: replies, retweets (which don’t
necessarily indicate approval, sometimes the very opposite!) and ‘likes’:
@Pistis_wonders. X/Twitter ‘follows’ and respectful comment and dialogue
welcome...
[i] https://monopoly.fandom.com/wiki/Fun_Facts
reports: Longest Monopoly game in a treehouse - 286 hours. Longest game
underground - 100 hours. Longest game in a bathtub - 99 hours. Longest game
upside down - 36 hours. Longest game ever played - 1680 hours/70 days (Not an
official world record)
