gameschildrenrules
The rules according to a six year old
I sat down to teach a card game and was taught, firmly and at length, that I had been playing it wrong my whole life.
We were waiting for the pasta to cook, which is roughly eleven minutes, which is exactly one game of the sort you can teach a six year old at a kitchen table. I had a pack of cards gone soft at the corners and a plan to teach Snap, a game with, I would have said, one rule. You will already have guessed that I was wrong about the number of rules.
We got through the dealing. She wanted her pile squared off so the edges were perfect, which took most of minute two, and she counted her cards twice to be sure I had not given myself more, which is the correct instinct and I respected it. Then we turned our cards over, one and one, the small slap of them on the table, and when the first match came she got there ahead of me and shouted the word with such force that the cat left the room.
Here is where the game I brought and the game she was playing began to part company. In her version, which she explained to me with the patience you use for someone slightly slow, you did not have to match the number. You had to match the feeling. Two cards were a Snap if they looked like they went together, and whether they went together was a matter she would decide, having considered it, and there was no appeal. A red four and a red seven went together because they were both, and I quote, the friendly ones. The two kings did not go together because they were cross with each other. I lost every hand. I lost them fairly, by her lights, which were the only lights the table was lit by.
I could have corrected her. I am, technically, the one who knows how Snap works, and there is a version of the eleven minutes where I use them to explain about numbers and matching and taking turns, and it is a perfectly good version and the pasta still cooks. But she was not getting it wrong. She was building something, right there between the salt and the draining board, a whole system with a logic I could almost see the shape of, and my job in that moment was not to be right. It was to lose to the friendly ones, and to ask, when a new match came, why those two, and to listen to the answer as though it mattered, because to her it was the entire matter.
The timer went. The pasta was ready and the game was abandoned mid rule, the way the best games always are, and she will not remember it by Thursday. But I have been thinking about it since, about how certain a person can be about rules they invented ninety seconds ago, and how much of the good stuff in this world got built by exactly that kind of person, refusing, cheerfully, to play it your way.
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House rules
- Sign how you like, but be one person. You may use the name on your account, a name of your own choosing, or none at all. What you may not do is wear somebody else's: no pen name of ours, no member's name but your own, and nothing that reads as the studio or its staff.
- Argue with the point, not the person. Robust disagreement is welcome; contempt is not.
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What a chosen name is and is not
A chosen name hides you from the room, not from us. Every remark stays linked to the account that wrote it, and the studio can see that link whenever it needs to. Please treat it as a way to speak freely, not as a way to say something you would not put your name to.
Where responsibility sits
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