Читать книгу Ting Tang Tommy - Simon Godwin - Страница 6

Introduction

Good games are like good jokes: they get remembered and passed on from person to person. But sometimes they get forgotten. This book is about remembering the best games we’ve ever known. Games are good for our souls. They are magic recipes for cooking up a good time. Once you know the rules you can bring any situation to life. People crave contact. People crave jollity. People crave games.

This book sets out to prove that you can play games anywhere—on the beach, having dinner with friends, at a barbecue, with your family at Christmas. It’s designed to equip you with loads of simple, memorable games that you can share at any moment of the day.

The Games Renaissance starts here.

Games and Me

I’ve been obsessed with games since I was ten, when I started a club with other kids living nearby. Our club was about one thing only: playing games. We had go-kart races, water fights and football matches that lasted long into the night. We built rafts that we sailed down the local river, sold junk on the street and played wide games in the local park, which was a grassed-over quarry with steep sides called the Brickie. It was a wild time of dusky evenings, confusing crushes and grazed knees. Throughout, being the bossy eldest of four, I got a taste for being in charge and a feeling for what makes the best games great.

As a teenager, I wanted to be an actor so, every Saturday morning, I commuted from St Albans to a drama school in Islington where I learnt ‘acting’ games. These were different from the Boy’s Own world of the Club. They were less about heroism and dousing your enemy with a water bomb and more about being spontaneous and inventive. These games encouraged creativity and collaboration. After each class I would practically run back to the station, flushed with hope and exhilaration. I was discovering how the theatre was another version of the Club. As a student I discovered the work of Théâtre de Complicité and saw how they used games to create imaginative and breathtaking works of theatre. Games were a force in their own right. After leaving university I became a theatre director and have been researching and playing games ever since.

A few years ago I started to share the games I had learnt with my friends and family. I discovered they were infectious. At the same time I began asking people to teach me gam es they knew. I slowly began to amass a collection and the result is this book.

My project is simple: to get grown-ups playing games.

Now, more than ever, we are looking for things to do that are active, communal and affordable: camping, ballroom dancing, knitting, home baking, wild swimming and roller discos are all on the up. People are searching for activities that are easy on the environment, big on fun and which have a whiff of nostalgia for a lost golden age. Games answer this need.

Most of the games in this book are short—fifteen, twenty minutes, half an hour. Played with large numbers of people they can take longer, but my aim is to show that games don’t need to be an ordeal. They can come from nowhere and can be played spontaneously with minimum preparation.

All the games in the book have been tested and many are prefaced with an account of how I came to know them, as well as things to watch out for when playing them and occasional references to their historical origin. There are hundreds, even thousands, of games in the world. There are many that I’ve been forced to leave out. The games that have made it into this book are in the Rolls-Royce category; they are games that I have played and that I know really work.

Where Do Games Come From?

Games are deeply lodged in our culture and history. They have always reflected the beliefs, fears and hopes of an age. Knucklebones grew out of the fortune-teller’s bag of tricks and hopscotch is a distant relation of forgotten legends describing labyrinths and mazes. The earliest record we have of game playing

can be found in the ancient palace of Medinet Haboo, at Thebes, in Upper Egypt. Here there is a wall painting showing Rameses III playing a board game with the goddess Isis, wife of Osiris, Lord of the Dead.

The word for play itself has enjoyed a variety of meanings across different cultures. Plato believed that the origin of play lay in the need of all young creatures to ‘leap’. Kridati is a Sanskrit word that means the play of animals, children and adults, but also refers to the movement of the wind or the waves. Our word for play comes from the Anglo-Saxon plega, which means to move fast, to grasp another’s hands, to clap and to play an instrument. The Indo-European root of game, ghem, means to ‘leap joyfully, to spring’ and was used originally to describe the movement of animals as well as people.

Ghem morphed as it was filtered through different European languages. In Old French it became jambe and in Italian it became gamba. Gradually, words developed that referred to people having fun in groups, such as jamboree and camp and campus. In German the word became gaman, in Hellenic it became kampe and in Old Norse it became gems, which meant ‘to come together and congregate as whales do’.

There is something ancient here conveying a sense of people coming together to generate a tribal happiness. This book reflects these visceral origins of playing by including games that are fast, furious and physical. The outdoor games in Chapter 3 revel in ancient ideas of the hunter and the hunted and the power and thrill of running in the landscape. Playing them today gives you a feeling of being part of a tradition that stretches back thousands of years. In Chapter 6 I describe games that have traditionally been played at particular times of the year. These games also stretch back centuries and combine fun with traces of lost rituals.

Many of the games in this book, however, were first written and collected into anthologies by the Victorians. Although many of these had been played for centuries, the Victorians were the first to make an industry out of them. They developed and invented a huge quantity of new games. During the nineteenth century a vast number of games books were published and games became a national obsession.

Why Was This?

Throughout the nineteenth century in Great Britain there was a mass migration to cities. Between 1841 and 1891 the population of London increased from two million to nearly four and a half million. In Scotland there was a comparable surge in Glasgow. The rise in industry and the increase in urban growth led to the formation of a new middle class. These people had left the old, established practices of rural areas to live and work in the city. The days of fairs, bullock running, pigeon flying, cock fighting and village wakes were over. These new communities needed new ways of having fun. They needed games.

And during the same century the new middle class fought for their rights. They achieved shorter working hours, longer holidays and better pay. These innovations, combined with better transport and communication links, freed up time for people to have fun. In the northern cities men joined brass bands; choral singing caught on in the Welsh valleys and pantomimes and music halls started to grip the public imagination. Whist drives, reading groups, picnics, circuses, billiard halls and working men’s clubs gained popularity as a new kind of organized fun took hold.

As well as going out and taking part in group activities, people wanted to make their own fun at home. And this appetite was fed by a radical change that was happening inside people’s homes: the birth of gas lighting. In our bright, modern homes it’s hard for us to imagine what life would have been like by candlelight. If you try counting the lights in the room where you are reading this, I estimate that you will find at least four or five, not including the ambient light that pours in through and around your curtains. At the beginning of the nineteenth century homes were still lit by candles, which were both expensive and of limited strength. Samuel Pepys had to give up writing his diary at only thirty-six because he was worried about going blind—‘and so to bed, being weary, sleepy, and my eyes begin to fail me, looking so long by candlelight upon white paper’—he wrote in 1663. In the centuries of darkness games were things to be played outdoors while inside people told stories, sang songs and played instruments. Pleasure came from the things you imagined rather than saw.

The social historian Dorothy Flanders gives a detailed account of the development of domestic gas lighting in her book The Victorian House. She explains how Friedrich Albert Winsor became one of the first popular exponents of gas lighting in the home, through a series of public lectures and brochures. In 1814 Winsor founded a company with a single gasometer. By 1852 there were forty-seven gasometers in Britain and a network of gas piping, stretching over two hundred miles. The craze for gas lighting spread fast. By 1816 gas was common in London and by 1823 fifty-three cities had gas companies. By the middle of the century, it had become a presence in most small towns and even in some villages. The contemporary journalist G. A. Sala provides a vivid insight into the difference it made to everyday life:

In broad long streets where the vista of lamps stretches far away into almost endless perspective; in courts and alleys, dark by day but lighted up by this incorruptible tell-tale; on the bridges; in the deserted parks; on wharfs and quays; in dreary suburban roads; in the halls of public buildings; in the windows of late-hour-keeping houses and offices, there is my gas—bright, silent, secret. Gas to teach me; gas to counsel me; gas to guide my footsteps.

As well as illuminating streets, gas changed how rooms were lit. The Argand Lamp became a popular innovation in middle-class homes. In stark contrast to the uneven light of candles, the Argand Lamp burned gas at a higher temperature, which created a purer flame. This new, brighter flame was also contained for the first time in a glass cylinder, which saved it from draughts and allowed the flame to be raised or lowered, rather like the modern dimmer switch. Brightness could now be controlled and modulated at will. It was also possible for gas to be run through pipes and tubes to special fittings in the ceilings and walls, even to tables. Wall sockets had flexible attachment points so that lights could be directed towards particular people or objects. The arrival of gas lighting meant that everyone—not just the rich—could now play games long into the night.

And so, for the Victorians, the stage was set for a games revolution to take hold. Is it time for us to discover once again the easy pleasure and communal happiness that only games can offer?