The Hidden Secrets of Games and How to Live with More Play

Within ninety minutes of checking into our hotel, several rooms were already on their second and third games. The game? An elaborate one-on-one accuracy game played from the lofted balcony of each townhouse style hotel room. 

You see, my teammates and I were two thirds of the way through the 2007 season with record breaking wins and record breaking team chemistry to boot. Beyond the intensity in which a game that didn’t exist two hours early was played, I was most blown away by how quickly the rules emerged. 

The reason things started was because our hotel rooms were oddly large. They had an upstairs bed in a loft and a downstairs bed. The upstairs loft looked out over a small living room area. A large fan descended from the vaulted ceiling such that when you looked out over the banister on the loft, the fan blades spun between you and the living room below. One the perfectly made bed behind you when looking out over the living room was a set of towels for each “player”.

• 2x Body Towels
• 2x Mid Sized Towels
• 2x Hand Towels
• 2x Wash Cloths

A curious toss of a washcloth on the fan below, results in making half of a full rotation on the ceiling fan before being launched onto a lamp down below. After the giggles subsided, the infrastructure of the game was born. 

The body towels were obviously too much for the fan to safely “catch” and throw to its end point down below, so each player had three shots: a mid-sized towel, a hand towel, and a washcloth. A towel that ended up on the floor was zero points, the couch was on point, any elevated table surface was two points, and a lamp shot was good for five. 

Within minutes, games were happening in other rooms. Immense strategy was rolled out because naturally a heavier towel stays closer to room-center and where you toss in relation to the inside or outside of the blades affects how much time the towel will spend in rotation. You get it.. 

The point is games and play are critical elements of the human experience. While that might not be Earth shattering to you, the structure of how games are made and played is pretty fascinating. 

Games need constraints. 

It’s actually the rules that give games meaning and draw out remarkable effort and develop best practices. While it’s counter intuitive that rules and boundaries would be such a positive fun thing, the fact is they are required for this type of fun. 

Imagine playing tag. You know the rules, right? But, what if as you’re running around giggling and breathing hard that one of the players who is “it” decides that, well, you don’t actually have to physically touch you to be it. The game dissolves and it’s not fun any more. 

Imagine playing a basketball game and the kid you’re playing against stops dribbling and carries the ball to the hoop and makes her shot. You’d say, “Traveling!” If they protested and said, “You don’t need to dribble anymore. One point for me!” the game would lose its meaning and dissolve. 

I told you that ridiculous story above to inspire opportunity. However, I bet if you wanted to inject fun into your life that the first place you’d start wouldn’t be making rules. 

So, what are the rules of the game gunna be?