Category Archives: Game

Slender Man

Background: My informant was a young American male. He is a game design student studying at the University of Southern California and currently works as a VR Design Intern at Gadget-Bot.

Performance Context: According to my informant, he came to learn the story through viral media. Enough people had talked about it on platforms such as YouTube that he grew interested and looked into the story himself.

Main Piece: In 2009, a comedy website called Something Awful launched a Photoshop contest to create the “biggest creepy pasta”. Creepy pasta is a internet term for scary short-form horror tales that originate and spread on the internet. As part of this contest, some people photoshopped an original creature into some old photographs from a newspaper. The newspaper articles make reference to several children who have disappeared or vanished. My informant says that this is so that the creature could be passed of as even more real. Because of the use of the newspapers, people of the internet started to believe in this creature who became known as Slender Man, for his tall, skinny figure.

Slender Man has now become a legend about this mysterious creature with tentacles who comes, preys and steal children. He is a tall, slender figure with no hair, no face, and white skin. He is often depicted wearing a suit, appearing almost like a man in a morph suit with a business suit over that. Nobody knows why he does so as the origin comes only from photographs. Because people believed in the story so much as real, it spread as a viral internet phenomenon. Also, as a result, people began discussing ways to commercialize and spread the idea of Slender Man. Movies, games, short stories were produced en masse to explain this creature and his behaviors. One of the most famous of these is Slender: The 8 Pages, a horror game that became very popular on the internet through the game platform Steam. Sequels to the games and short films have also been produced and there are “even talks of a full-length feature film”. According to my informant, these derivative works are all a part of a large movement to “cash in” on the idea of this character. To them, they believe he was became so popular not just because people believed he was real, but also because to teh creature’s believers, how genuine and original he seemed. They said it was refreshing to see a story where the character seemed not only frightening, but also “genuinely original”. My informant says that people come up with myths all the time, but that a genuine modern myth that isn’t a rehash or remix of something else was interesting and made it all the more real.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it not only comes across the originality of ideas, but also the canonization and commercialization of these stories as products. To tell stories not only encourages the spread of those stories, but also the ways in which those that hear it want to capitalize and market that story in one or many forms. The way the story was turned from a photograph that had been photo shopped into all sorts of other media suggests that not only is the story can be spread in any or all formats, but that it can also be warped and changed to suit those need and strengths of those mediums. That the story itself has no need for origin as long as it retains the sense of originality and outside of that scope, can be warped to become whatever it needs to be to those that wish to indulge in that media. I think it’s interesting to ponder whether the original form of a story is necessary or perhaps that it might be just a stepping stone for the true potential of a story to deliver an experience to its viewers. It’s a sort of idea that suggests that mutation is inherently a part of the story and that variation should be encouraged rather than discouraged, unlike some other stories that we suggest should have a “proper”, “authentic” or “original form.

Spook Road

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Sioux Falls, SD
Performance Date: April 23rd, 2017
Primary Language: English

Background: My informant was young Caucasian man who was born and raised in Sioux Falls, South Dakota. He currently attends the University of Sioux Falls for Biology and History.

Main Piece: My informant made me aware of a historical location known as Spook Road, that exists just outside of the small town of Brandon, SD. Brandon is a suburb of the Sioux Falls Metropolitan area. In this area, there is a county road that is known as Spook Road to local residents. This is because there are many accounts of supernatural events occuring within this location. The most famous has to do with a ritual that many young people take, especially during Halloween. The idea is that there once was a girl there who hung herself on a bridge. What one is supposed to do is, during the middle of the night, you and your friends get in a car and drive down spook road between the main road and the highway. On the way through, you should pass over a series of bridges. You should count the bridges as you cross them going on way, turn around, and then do the same on the way back.  You should count 5 bridges on your way, one-way. However, it is said that if on your way back, you count 4 bridges, you should be very scared. There are various reports of strange happenings on this very long, very narrow road. However, this story has created strong cultural ties for the people. The road is long and narrow, so there have been many attempts to fix it and improve the road, to reduce traffic accidents. However, many in the community have slowed down this progress even to a halt, petitioning to protect the “historical landmark”. The informant also says that there are also old reports of witchcraft happening in the area, though they do not know how accurate or likely this is.

Performance Context: According to the informant, this road is particularly famous in Sioux Falls, especially since many Brandon youth visit the main city. The relative closeness to the main city means Brandon folklore is often spread through hearsay and most people know about Spook Road as a result.

My Thoughts: I think it is interesting because it has gone from being a spooky story to a sort of rite of passage of many of the youth. There is a ritualistic action that many take upon themselves due to the relative ease of access to the story and also the challenge it seems to prod at. It is also something that is very easy to drag your friends into on a cold Halloween night, where everyone is out trying to have a good time.

King’s Cup

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/9/17
Primary Language: English

Background Information: I came across the game King’s Cup at a party, and was immediately intrigued by how elaborate it was. I also noticed that different people were talking about different ways they had played it before, in different places or states, and this caught my attention. I interviewed Jack Runburg and Kevin Litman-Navarro, who are two college seniors. Jack learned to play the game during high school in Utah, where he grew up, while Kevin came across it at the beginning of college.

K: The game Kings cup is a game of skill and a game of luck… It requires a deck of cards, a group of people between four and eight, uh, a large… receptacle, in the middle of the table – a chalice, a goblet, whatever you’d like, and a beer for, uh, for each player. The game is played by fanning out the deck of cards around your goblets… your grail, if you’re into that… and they take turns pulling cards, and each card has a different rule assigned to it. So it’s like a bunch of mini-games within the larger game of King’s Cup

A: It has to be a beer?

K: It typically, if you wanna play the game properly, everyone has to be drinking the same thing, because at different points of the game you’re going to be pouring your drink into the large cup in the center, and drinking it all at the end.

A: Is it different playing it in high school and here? Since you’re from Utah, Jack?

J: Yeah generally like the first ten minutes of playing the game is trying to like, rectify, different people’s sets of rules, and choosing which ones to obey for that particular game.

A: Do you have any examples?

K: Jack, what was your typical rule for Queen?

J: Ok so, in high school I played Queen as Question Master, it’s different from the usual Question Master – it’s if, someone doesn’t speak in questions, meaning that if someone asks you a question and you don’t respond with a question, you lose.

K: Conversely in my version of Queen, it’s called Queen Mean, so when you pull Queen, everyone insults you.

A: Do you guys like the game?

J: It’s not really like a big party game, more of like a kickback… You need a small group, fewer than eight people… It’s fun because it’s dynamic, and not really repetitive.

A: Have you ever heard any stories or anything about where the game might have come from or something?

J: I have a sister who is ten years older than me, and I know that… well she grew up in San Diego and I grew up in Utah, and when I became of the age where I started to drink, she asked me, like ‘Oh, do you guys play King’s Cup?’ And I said yeah we do, and she said ‘What are your rules?’ And the only rules we differed on were Jacks and Aces, so it was cool that someone in like a completely different geographical area who was ten years older than me had like the same rules… I think it’s just been around for like really long.

Thoughts: I am very interested in how the game seems to transcend boundaries of both space and time within the US. Drinking games seem to serve an important function at parties, especially at college, where many might be seeing new faces or attempting to meet new friends. In these situations, games serve as a means of breaking the ice. King’s Cup adds another layer of complexity because of the variations, similar to the idea of oikotypes that we learned about in class – a piece of folklore having multiple regional and cultural variations. Playing King’s Cup perhaps adds a stimulus for conversation as well, as players discuss where they are from, and how or why their versions of the game might be different.

5 Gods of Smash

Nationality: Indian
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Performance Date: 4/20/17
Primary Language: English
Language: Gujarati

Informant DP is a 19-year-old male studying Biomedical Engineering at the University of Southern California. He thoroughly enjoys playing video games, specifically the Nintendo series Super Smash Brothers.

In this piece, the informant tells me about the “5 Gods of Smash” who are known as by far the 5 best players in competitive Super Smash Brothers Melee tournaments. They are aptly known as Gods because these five players are so much better than the rest of the competition that one of these players always wins the competitive tournaments. For more context, the competitive gaming scene around Super Smash Brothers Melee has grown substantially over the last decade. Although the game released nearly 15 years ago, the game is still being played competitively today.

DP: A God of Smash is considered someone who loses to no one else in tournament, other than other gods. Currently there are only 5 in the history of Smash. So I wanna say Mew2King or M2K was considered the first god of Smash. The reason he does so well in tournaments is because before computers were coded to count frame data for melee, Mew2King developed his own methods for counting the frames for moves. And he was able to precisely determine the lengths for which moves were out for. He memorized this data and he was able to play optimally and back then if you played optimally there’s no way you could lose. So he began to be known as a robot because he had so much data memorized. The way he learned all this data is by doing certain moves with a character and he’d keep pausing the game in between the move. If he could draw out the moves into 9 distinct pictures, then he knew that move took exactly 9 frames.

Moving on to the next god, Mango, he came out from SoCal and at an extremely young age he was very good at the game. He was known for using a very gimmicky character, jigglypuff. Even though he performed very well, people were chalking up his wins to gimmicks or not playing a fair game. So for a while, he got actually banned from playing in Southern California all together which kind of pissed him off but didn’t stop him from playing the game. Eventually, he decided to just change his appearance by growing a beard. He adopted a new tag called Scorpion Master so he would be unrecognizable.  His whole purpose of this was just to play a joke on Southern California because he was so upset that he was banned. He actually ended up winning with a lesser character, like a D-tier character. People eventually found out it was him, so he picked up two of the hardest characters in the game, Fox and Falco, and since then has remained a God of the game.

Now it makes the most logical sense to talk about HungryBox. HungryBox saw the way Mango used jigglypuff, and even though he knew jigglypuff was gimmicky, he adopted him as his new character. So HungryBox looked at all of Mango’s weaknesses, he actually corrected for this and made jigglypuff tournament viable. Hungrybox is also another God of melee.

Now we can talk about PPMD, he was the 4th god to come around. He noticed that HungryBox was kind of on a tear in the South Eastern part of the US. In Florida and Georgia and those states. And HungryBox would win everyone of those tournaments if he entered them. So PPMD picked up two characters, Falco and Marth, both were considered to have highly losing matchups to Jigglypuff at the time. He ended up creating the modern metagames for Falco and Marth as they are played today just to combat HungryBox’s jigglypuff. Even though it took 4 tournaments of them meeting in grand finals, once PPMD started to win with both falco and marth, HungryBox wasn’t able to win with the frequency he could before PPMD came around.

The last God is Armada. I guess all I have to say about him is that Armada. Let’s put it this way, Melee didn’t just arise in AMerica. Europe was also interested in Melee, but it wasn’t until Armada until a unified European champion was coined. Once Armada started playing, he almost never lost a set. He might have lost just 1 set in his 4 years of playing in Europe. He was undoubtedly the best in Europe so he decided to play in America. In America he got beat pretty frequently using what Americans thought was an inferior character. So in order to combat this, he picked up a better character. So he ended up developing the European style for playing Fox, which every other Fox player in Europe adopted the strategy for. Now not only is he the best in Europe, he’s also the best in the world by a fair margin. He hasn’t been knocked to the losers bracket in 3 years!

It was really interesting to hear about the folklore of a video game. My informant was clearly very knowledgeable about the folklore surrounding Super Smash Brothers, and it appears as though the community is actively creating its own folklore. It was really interesting to see that these 5 players had risen to god status within the game’s community for their incredible skill. In the gaming community, the word god is thrown around a lot, but it appears as though there is a significant meaning behind coining someone a god in this particular game.

Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Houston, TX
Performance Date: March 13, 2017
Primary Language: English
Language: Spanish

Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky

 

 

Subject: Childhood Game

 

 

Informant: Natalie Thurman

 

 

Background Information/Context: Natalie used to play this game called “Down by the Banks of the Hanky Panky” when she was younger with her friends.

 

The following is Natalie’s description of the game to me:

 

 

 

“I used to play this one all the time with my friends. We would all sit around in a circle, close, so that your knees are touching—you would sit criss-cross. And you would put your hands on the knees of the people sitting next to you, palms up. The hand on the knee of the person to your right would be over the hand of that person. The hand on the knee of the person to your left would be under the hand of that person. I feel like that was really confusing—did you understand that? [I say yes.] Ok good. So you have your hands like that—oh my God, this is giving me so many flashbacks—and you start the game. You all start singing the song. It goes like this: [singing]

 

 

Down by the banks of the hanky panky

Where the bullfrogs jump from bank to banky

Singing oops, opps, curly pops

Snap crack-a-doodle and a cur-plop

 

 

And while you’re singing it, you bring your left hand, that’s resting on the hand of the person on your left, over their knee—you bring that left hand over to your right side and slap the hand of the person on your right, whose hand is resting on your right hand, which is resting on their left knee, if that makes sense. And you try to go with the rhythm, but towards the end, everyone ends up going as fast as they can so that it doesn’t land on you.

 

 

So when the song ends, and you say cur-plop, on ‘plop,’ whosever hand is the last one to be slapped is out, and they’re removed from the circle. Then you just keep going until you get to the last person, and they win the game. It gets really intense though when there’s less and less people. Like, when it gets down to the last two people, it’s so intense, everyone’s energy goes up like times ten. It was really fun.”

 

 

When Natalie first started describing the game to me, I immediately knew what she was talking about. I also played this game often with my friends when I was little, but I had completely forgotten about it until she brought it back up. It was particularly interesting to me to hear her actually tell me the lyrics of the song because I remember being a kid and not knowing the exact words that we were supposed to say, so instead, I would just make something up that sort of sounded like what everyone else was saying. I wonder if Natalie did the same thing, or if she told me the lyrics of a version of the song that she and her friends consistently used. It was also humorous for me to watch her try to explain the circle formation, as I could tell how difficult it was to explain in words. I think it’s a game that is much better suited as oral and performance folklore instead of for writing down how the game works. Because of this, the game doesn’t have official instructions, and can change slightly each time someone introduces it to a new set of friends.