# 18 - Senior-worthyness

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Question of the day: so what, if anything, makes a game "Senior-worthy"?

Answer of the day: it depends.

Sooner or later, we all outgrow our bodies. It's a long process. We do it bit by bit (though bit-size may vary). We can never tell which bit's next. If we're lucky, we'll hardly notice the last bit that went missing.

When I made my selection of "Senior-worthy Games" for the Major Fun award, I chose board and party games for the Mildly Outgrown - games that didn't have a lot of really little pieces and small print; that didn't require very fast reflexes, or any significant use of short-term memory, or precision dexterity.

Since the games I chose were already Major Fun, regardless of their senior-worthiness, they reflected the most senior-worthy aspects of the award: games that are easy to learn, that can be played in maybe 10 minutes, or maybe all night. Pretty games - well-made, well-presented, feel good, look good, store easily. Games that are interesting - offering some new way of playing, of thinking, some unique challenge. And especially, being Major Fun games, games that make you laugh.

As to why I'm this whole Senior-Worthy Games thing? Because I want to be sure that noone I know has to spend their final days in a place where the only game around is BINGO.

As to what's next? I'm waiting to hear from you.

#17 - The Major Fun Senior Hall of Game Fame

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Last Newsletter I wrote talked about that article in Newsday - Racing to Play. I've been mulling and stewing and then, from Jac Rongen, came these wonderfully affirming photos. And from George Platts, long time friend and renown artist of fun, who coined the term "Everlasting Games:" this: "I've been playing and inventing wacky games for groups of seniors to play for over ten years. 'Seated Hockey' almost got out of hand it was SO physical. The other hospital staff could not believe it (how fun it was). The seniors really enjoyed it. We played hard. We played fair. Nobody was hurt. That's easy, if you have the know how."

Spurred to action, I, your local Defender of the Playful, have created yet another Major Fun award - for games that are good enough to interest the grown-up mind, without making too many demands of a somewhat outgrown body.

I am calling this award the "Major Fun for Grown-ups" awards. It does say "senior" on the award, but we're not the people who call ourselves that. We are the grown-ups, maybe. But seniors? Not as long as we keep playing!

So I started with games that have already been recognized in a Major-funlike manner, and singled out those games that don't require too much speed or dexterity. Each and all a genuine challenge to mind and wit, all and each an invitation to mature, skilled, grown-up play.

#16 - Senior Games - Mah Jong and Tumblin-Dice

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Games Seniors Play

I don't know if you saw this article in Newsday - Racing to Play - ? It's about the kinds of games seniors play. You know what kinds they are? The Mah Jong, Scrabble, Bingo kinds. The reporter actually interviewed me. She had already done a lot of research and was convinced that she had a fundamental grasp of what seniors (that's me, too, you know) play.

Me, I was horrified. Here's the only quote she got out of me:

"Fun is "noble" in the eyes of California-based game-maker and guru Bernie DeKoven, 64. "I think a lot of older people are reclaiming their need to play," he said, "and they're looking for opportunity and finding places that foster a certain amount of playfulness."

You can almost hear the horror.

Anyhow, all this led me to thinking about games and seniors, which reminded me of a game I recently reviewed, a game as senior-worthy as Mah Jong, believe me. Which, in turn, got me thinking about all those other senior-worthy Major Fun games, and my spirits lifted, in deed they did.

Let me tell you about this game, just as an example. It's called Tumblin-Dice.
Think of perhaps shuffleboard with dice. Think, for example, of a shuffleboard that is on five levels, with, where there were once pucks to slide, dice to, well, slide perhaps or flick or shove. A shuffleboard looking pretty much exactly like this.

Think further of the role, or roll, of luck - how the dice, even though you try to slide them everso carefully, tend to change faces when they descend a level. There's an intimation of the possibility that one could control all of this, making the die land 6-up even by the time it reaches the X4 level after having knocked all the opponents' dice to off-table oblivion. On the other hand, there's an unavoidable element of luck which makes a 7-year-old often as successful as a 77-year-old. Think of this, and you'll understand, almost immediately, why Tumblin' Dice has received a Major Fun Family Game award.

If you know shuffleboard, you'll know how to play Tumblin' Dice. When I introduced the game at the Tasting, I asked my fellow Tasters to play the game without looking at the rules. With almost no discussion, they played almost exactly the way the designer had intended them to. Because the game was so easy to figure out, it is exceptionally welcome in a variety of settings, especially recreation centers, classrooms and my house.

Speaking of classrooms, the game requires enough arithmetical calculations to make it actually useful in almost any elementary school setting. When a die lands in special scoring sections of the board, the face value of the die is multiplied by a given factor. So, in figuring out a total score players exercise both additional and multiplication, and, one might argue, even algebraic skills.

But don't let its educational implications fool you. Tumblin-Dice is an invitation to minutes or hours of play, for kids, for adults, for seniors, for the whole darn community. Did I mention adults? The kind of adults who might be interested in playing for, um, beer, or perhaps beer money?

It's made as well as it plays - a big, polished, two-piece all wood, table-worthy game that you might never put away. Ever.

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P.S. If you have a game that you think is Major Fun Award-worthy, and that you'd like us to consider before my "Best of" article for Knucklebones, send it to me, pronto-ly.

#15 - Ordinary Fun

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Ordinary Fun

Last week's FunCast was about at least two kinds of fun - extreme fun, and ordinary fun. It turns out that ordinary fun has: a) little or no commercial appeal, and 2) the power to sustain life. Here's an extract from the essay:

Extreme fun is, well, extreme. Fun that is so much fun that we are willing to risk life and limb to taste it, even if only for a second. It's the fun of sky diving, bungee jumping, rock climbing, snow boarding.

Ordinary fun is the chewing gum kind of fun, even the washing dishes kind of fun that comes with the warm water and emerging sparkle and the meditation-like expanse of timelessness that ends when the sink is empty.

The problem is that it's the extreme kinds of fun that get all the press. That's the kind of fun that soft drink commercials are made of. The other, the ordinary kind of fun goes for the most part unnoticed, barely felt.

Which is precisely why so many of us think that we aren't having fun. Which is precisely why so many of us really aren't having fun - because even when we are, we think we're not, if you know what I mean.

So all the commercial dollars that go into making it perfectly clear how this car or these shoes or those sunglasses lead inevitably to the ultimate expression of all-consumingly extreme fun - leave us, for the most part, in the shadows of despair, feeling that everything else we do is dreary, funless.

Which has the effect of raising the fun threshold to the point that hardly anything ever feels fun enough. Which is fine for the commercial powers, but not so good for us, the fun-seeking many, who buy and buy in to the belief that ordinary fun is not fun enough to be considered fun at all.

You can read more here, if more is what you need to read.

#14 - Junkyard Golf re-imagined

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Junkyard Golf, re-imagined

A fellow named Ray Fox wrote me recently about his own version of Junkyard Golf.  A friend of his, he explains: "had given me a copy of Junkyard Golf information more than a year ago. I put it away thinking that there might someday be a way for me to use it as an asset-building activity with kids...The time schedule...did not permit me to do junk yard golf the way the article was written. So I decided to use the name and to develop 3 miniature golf holes using junk."

Ray's interpretation of Junkyard Golf is inspiring, and instructive. He uses junk to transform a playground into a miniature golf course. Gets clubs and golf balls. And invites kids to play. Me, I get the kids, and the teachers and anyone else around involved in getting the junk and in making the entire golf game out of the junk they gather -  course, tees, holes, fairways, obstacles, clubs, balls.

And as different as our approaches are, both Ray and I seem to be succeeding in bringing a little more fun into the world.

Read on:
" Well, the junk became old aluminum cans from soda, old plastic water bottles, some rolled up newspapers and three practice putting cups I got at a golf store. For about a month, I saved cans and bottles. Then I bought some rolls of duct tape and started taping them together. I had about 190 feet of this "junk" in my garage (separated in 10 foot sections, so that I could transport them). I also had some old rolls of carpet for remodeling jobs in my house. This became more important once I found out that my location was on the paved school playground. The golf balls came from my supply of practice balls and were colored with markers. The golf clubs were borrowed from a local miniature golf course.

"...The first hole was the easiest and was all carpet. There were about 4 hole in ones during the day. The second hole was harder because it started on blacktop and had a dog leg to it. Scores ranged from 2 on up. The third hole was very hard because it had several turns and ended up on carpet. Again the best score was a 2 but many scores were much higher. I was surprised by the large number of students who had never played miniature golf before.

"Based on feedback from the students, staff and principal, I would say it was a big hit. Many of them were very excited about this opportunity to do something new and exciting. Some of their comments included:
" Thanks for making this, it's really fun."
" I play golf with my dad and can't wait to tell him about this."
" I'm really good at this."
" This was real fun. Who made this?"
" When my family goes on vacation, we always play this."

"Almost every student in the school stopped by to play each hole. There were a few who played only one hole and left. On the other hand, there were some who either stayed for a long time or came back after doing other activities. I had 2 boys who were not happy until they got a hole in one on the first hole and just kept playing it over and over again."

#13 - The Keeper Award

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Introducing the Keeper Award

When you think of all the fun that you can have getting to try out (we call it "Tasting") new games, for free... When you think of how much you can learn, and how interesting it can be to decide whether a game is actually and also truly Major Fun... award-worthily-speaking...  And how you get to help the people who make good games get the appreciation they deserve.... Well, you can see why people want to be part of one our Games Tastings.

On the other hand, this award-giving thing isn't that easy. And the Tastings aren't that fool-proof, or fool-worthy. Because some of the games that a lot of us thought were actually Major Fun, on first Tasting, turned out to be at least just as fun, in at least just as major a way, just about every time we played, with just about anyone we played with.

So major did these games prove to be that whenever we played them everyone would say something like: "this is the kind of game the Major Fun Award was meant for."

These games were at first a bit hard to classify, in so far as they already had a Major Fun award. And so the question was asked: what could be even majorer?

After long periods of reflection and verbal verisimilitude, we came upon the realization that these very games are exactly the kinds of games.you tend not to lend out, if you know what I mean. To anyone. Even a family member. Some you play maybe a couple times a week. Some maybe a couple times a year. But when the time comes around, the right people, the right moment, it's exactly and only the one game you want to play, These are the games one might call "keepers."

Hence, the Major Fun Keeper Award. Click on the link. Get to know what Major Fun really stands for.

#12 - The Changing Game

The Changing Game

The focus of today's Occasional Newsletter is a kind of game I call a "changing game."

Why would today's Occasional Newsletter focus on "the changing game" and what would it have to do with my work as a game designer or anything else?

Because I am also an advocate of social change. I want the world to be more fun. I have come to understand that the idea of games that are actually supposed to be changed is an idea that is equally radical. Because as long as people believe that games aren't supposed to be changed, that there's only one way to play anything that is packaged like a game or even just looks like a game, they find themselves too easily believing that life isn't supposed to be fun Even if they really, really try to make it that so.

Here's an example of one of my more successful changing game designs. I often call it  "Panther, Person, Porcupine." (If you click on the link, you'll even find a video of me explaining and playing it. How do you like that?). I didn't design it as much as modify it. I modified it into a game that can get easily modified.

Ipso quoto, I share with you, in particular, the last part of the Panther, Person, Porcupine article:

I first learned of this game as "Tiger, Man, Gun" - a South American children's game played by two teams. (For more two-team variations, see this.) Over the years, the game became "Panther, Person, Pistol" (more fun to say). I developed the three-team variation for larger groups, and as a springboard for extending the game into a simulation. After we'd play a few rounds, I'd introduce an opportunity for teams to send representatives to other teams and make deals (we'll be Panthers if you'll be Panthers, too). This became a powerful little simulation of the politics of bargaining and negotiation strategies, and, because everyone knew that everyone else was probably lying, a lot of fun. Later, the Pistol became a Python, a Porcupine and even a Persimmon.

In the video of the game, when the players go to assume the "person position," they do so by hugging each other - what they considered to be uniquely personal, so to speak.