I never intend to watch "Deal or No Deal", but since it's on some network every moment of every day, I happen to catch small bits and pieces of the show. I've never seen one episode start-to-finish - it just doesn't hold my attention that long. But the show is unquestionably popular, which surprises me. After all, it's just watching other people play a completely random guessing game, spiced up only by hot women and money. Would you watch a show where I put either two or three fingers behind my back, and you guess, and if you guess right, you get $100? Maybe we could even get family members on stage too. "Think about this one Roger - $50 is a LOT of money, we can buy 3 or 4 Zagat guides with that kind of cash - don’t be reckless now!" "I know, I know! But I just have SUCH a good feeling about the number 3 - I have THREE sisters - my birthday is on October THIRD - I have THREE nipples - it just feels so right, I don’t know what to do!!!!" At least "Deal or No Deal" has hot chicks (but there are far better ways to see hot chicks) - I can't fathom why women would enjoy the show.Anyways, in thinking about why this game show might be popular, I decided to go back to my roots, and explore some popular childhood classroom games - you know, investigate the core of what we want in our games. Really, I'm just talking about childhood games for the hell of it, but I wanted to get that "Deal or No Deal" thing off my chest too, and that's my best effort at tying the two together.
Heads Up, Seven Up
I never liked this game until I started cheating and looking down at the shoes of my thumb-tapper. Seems I'm not the only one. Yesterday, I logged on to Facebook, and learned that 5,278 people are members of a group that admits they cheated at Heads Up, Seven Up as kids. An identical (but somehow less successful group) has another 588 members. The "I Never Cheated at Heads Up, Seven Up" group? An astoundingly low 12 members. I could start a "I like to wear metallic gold body paint on my legs instead of wearing pants" group on Facebook and get 12 members in a few hours.
Of course, with so many people cheating, once you were a chooser, you had to work hard to avoid tapping the thumb of someone else who was cheating. Once you deduced who the sucker was, you were golden. Weird that I didn't learn to cheat earlier - I definitely enjoyed utter dominance better than helpless paranoia.
Red Rover
You remember this right? "Red Rover Red Rover have Jason come over!" And then Jason barrels into a line of kids who are holding hands, attempting to break through the line. What I think is interesting here is that ultimately, everyone winds up as part of the same line - so everyone wins, or, if you're a bit more cynical, no one wins. There was absolutely no sense of loyalty to your original team, which seems like a bad lesson for kids. If you couldn't break through and had to join the opposite line, you were expected to suddenly fight to hold that new line against your former teammate? Where is the trust? Where is the loyalty? You JUST held that guy's hand, united with a clear mission. Now at the first sign of things going wrong, you immediately betray everyone you were with before. Not the kind of game I want my kids playing one day.Duck Duck Goose
Pretty much just rewarded the speedsters in the class. (Being a fast kid - huge advantage - tag, hide-and-go-seek, duck duck goose, steal the bacon - one of the best traits to have if you're a young kid is quickness) I wasn't a particularly fast kid, so if I wound up being the chaser, I normally picked a slow fattie, to eliminate the embarrassment of having to be the chaser several times in a row. But the fattie often couldn't catch anyone else, and it became a little awkward when they had to go over and over and over. I found that duck duck goose often ended poorly because of that.
Dodgeball
Not "Nation Ball", which is kind of what we called what most people call Dodgeball, with two opposing sides, as seen in the Ben Stiller-Vince Vaughn epic. In elementary school, we'd just stand in a huge circle, and people threw two red four-square balls at your feet, and you tried to dance and dodge and not have the ball hit you for as long as possible. Tons of fun. We should not have stopped playing this game as we got older. I suppose the whole problem is that when you're older, the temptation to just nail someone in the face is too strong.
Four Corners
Not four-square, with the ball. I'm talking about when it's a rainy day, and each corner is the classroom is designated with a number, 1 through 4. You'd stand in one corner, and hopefully the blindfolded "picker" didn't call out the corner you were in - if so, you were out. I used to LOVE this game. Thinking back on it, I have no idea why - it feels just like the random guessing of "Deal or No Deal". I somehow vaguely recall that I was excellent at Four Corners, even though I don't know what would cause someone to be good at the game. But winning feels good, and my Four Corners memories are lovely ones.
6 comments:
Dude, you left out Get Beaned!
Okay, okay - Get Beaned
Get Beaned is this game where we throw the official "Get Beaned" ball (a small yellow plastic football) in an increasingly bigger circle - you must throw and catch with one hand. If you drop it, or throw what is deemed an uncatchable pass, all other players take turns beaning you with the ball. It was actually a pretty solid game. I didn't bring it up for the following reasons:
1) Since no one else has the official Get Beaned ball, no one else has ever officially played the game other than the one time I played it
2) I was focused on childhood games - I think I was at least in the 8th grade when this happened, maybe older
I think Nation Ball deserves its own post. At least at my elementary school, it was an epic battle every recess that ocassionally led to fights. We even had a teacher-student meeting one time because the boys wouldn't let the girls play. Of course, they forced us to let the girls play, which made the guys not throw the ball hard at them, but then one of the girls got nailed by a wayward throw, leading to crying and another teacher-student conference.
I also remember a move called the "Kenny Jump," named after a kid named Kenny who would take the risk of jumping OVER your throw, usually aimed at your legs, when he was trapped at point-blank range. Of course, if the thrower happened to anticipate this move, and throw a little too high...agony.
Finally, there was "one foot" rule that caused controversy every day. For some reason, we invented a rule that any player was allowed to cross the out-of-bounds line as long as one of his feet was in-bounds. This led to Patrick Choi being the absolute best at stealing passes from the other teams, while Jason Goh would scream "Two feet! Two feet!" at him from the other team.
Truly epic.
Sadly enough get beaned took place our senior year of high school second semester. While the majority of our classmates were getting high, drunk, or sexed up I thought it was a good idea to invent a new game that would sweep the nation. Unforunately it brought only shame and ridicule for me to endure for the rest of the year.
second semester senior year and i was not part of this? i think get beaned is my kind of game. can we play next week?
Assuming your version of Nation Ball is like the movie Dodgeball, I have to agree that game kicks butt. Our school had a version called Witchdoctor. We'd have two gym classes play each other (25 vs 25 or something crazy) and each side had a witch doctor that stayed at home base (a circle at the back center of their side). Players that get hit sit/lie down and can't come back into play unless the witch doctor drags them back to base. It just brought another layer to the game because sometimes you would want to sit back and protect someone instead of trying to knock people's block off.
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