Curiouser and Curiouser

G-1: A Most Ridiculous Game

Invent a new game. It could be the most nonsensical or sensical as long as two or more players can participate in it. It should come with rules and guidelines on how its to be played. (<1000 words)

When I was young, my sister and I (the one who lives in Mississippi, now, who is just two years younger than me) used to play a game that involved the attic. The one we weren't supposed to visit because it wasn't finished, and besides, the stairs were off my parent's bedroom, and we were only four and two at the time. Our next sister was not quite born yet, at the time, which means this is a story from when we lived in Pittsburgh and my father was working on his Masters in computer engineering. I don't remember all the rules, but it always began with my sister up in the attic. She would call down to me:

“Ballerina!”

And I would call from down stairs. “Coming, Kendra Joyce!”

It should be explained that these aren't our names. In fact, I'm not sure if we thought that Ballerina was a name or an occupation. We'd just picked names that sounded good to us. At this point, I'd climb the stairs and we'd play.

It was always a story game. In other words, we'd imagine that we were these two girls, Ballerina and Kendra Joyce who weren't us, and we'd be dragons or adventurers or space explorers, or anything that made sense to us in our very young heads and probably influenced heavily by the books we'd read most recently.

As we grew, we continued to play the game, even though Ballerina and Kendra Joyce were no longer part or it, and we no longer had to play in the attic (which was equipped with an enormous beam, just the right height for a table). Instead, when we wanted to start a story game, one of us would ask the other in our secret language (which was pig latin): “Utway ooday ooyay antway oootay ayplay?” And that was the signal that we were going to sail off in a giant pie plate or colonize the moon or any of the stories that we had in our heads.

We had to come up with a character who was our main voice, and mostly they interacted with each other, but if we needed another voice to enter play, we had to agree what they would say and do to make the story progress.

We're so much older now. It's been more than forty years since Ballerina climbed the stairs to meet Kendra Joyce and start the story. My sister is married and has grandchildren. But sometimes, we call each other up just so we can talk through the game some more.

Rules:

Begin with the question. The questioner must defer to the questioned to determine the nature of the story you will tell together.

Create characters to populate the story. The creator of a character will play that character in all significant ways.

Cooperate. This is not a game of win or lose. There is no end to the story. If needed, pause for mealtime or bedtime or quiet time with Daddy, but there's always the option of coming back to the game in that story again.

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eyestar~*


I wondered if there were any more specific rules like who gets to begin, how do you win, etc.*Wink* Sounds like fun and I like the pig latin!