Category Archives: Game

12th night

Nationality: British
Age: 75
Occupation: Retired
Residence: Los Angeles, California.
Performance Date: 04/18/16
Primary Language: English

Subject: 12th Night

Informant:

 Liz was born in a traditional English household but grew up traveling around Southern England and the middle east because her father was in the Royal Air force. Her mother was a Nurse and her father a serving officer. She had two siblings a brother and a sister. Her family was not religious but consider themselves members of the Church of England.

Original script: “On the 6th of January a cake is bake usually a fruit cake and inside the cake a bean was hidden, and the person who received the bean in their cake became the lord of misrule for the night. It was a general practice in Britain at the time. My father always got the bean and we were always disappointed because we were so looking forward to being in charge. I don’t know where they learned it from, just tradition.

Background Information about the Piece by the informant: Preformed on January sixth or the last day of Christmas in the Church of England and usually coincided with taking Christmas decorations down.

Context of the Performance: Preformed on the sixth of January.

 

 

 

Cicada 3301

Nationality: American
Age: 33
Occupation: Photographer
Residence: Los Angeles, California.
Performance Date: 04/17/16
Primary Language: English

Informant:

 Zack was born in Boston Massachusetts and grew up in a house in rural Norwell Massachusetts in a secular family. His father is a musician and his mother a homemaker. Zack is a photographer who works with musicians and has traveled extensively both in his childhood following his father on tour and in his current occupation.

Original Script: “I learned about it on a web form from being posted to a form I was on. When they post a puzzle they basically come out and say solve this puzzle it will lead to the next riddle and so on and so forth. A lot of highly skilled cryptographers would sort of docu-blog on there progress as they were trying to figure out. The more they progress the more serious it began to seem, people where literarily flying places to solve clues, it was very Dan Brown. Most people who get close to solving disappear. Some people think they have succeeded and ended up requited into an intelligence organization. While it could be a hoax the difficulty of the challenges is genuine. It’s a total Mr. Robot”

Background Information about the Piece by the informant: Cicada 3301 is an Internet puzzles that appear mysteriously on various online chat forms annually. That focus on data security cryptography and steganography.

Context of the Performance: Annual online puzzle.

Thoughts about the piece: It seems to me that the Cicada 3301 is similar to the newer folkloric tales and myths that develop and are spread on the Internet. At the heart of this is the mistrust for the Internet and the mystery that comes with the anonymity one can find on the Internet. The informant is a member of multiple conspiracy theory forms that analyze myths, stories and other mysterious happenings so he is connected to forms that share stories like Cicada 3301.

Throw the handkerchief

Nationality: China
Age: 48
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Shenzhen, China
Performance Date: January 27, 2016
Primary Language: Chinese
My informant is a 48 year-old woman who has lived her whole life in China by now.

"This a game we have all played in kindergarten. Several people sit in a circle. 
except for one stands outside of the circle; they are in charge of throwing a 
handkerchief. After running around the circle, the person will drop the 
handkerchief behind someone’s back. That person must now get up quickly and chase
the person who dropped the handkerchief. If the chaser catches the person, 
then they are winner. If not, they are the loser and will have to pay a penalty. 
The game is played until each person has had a chance to throw the handkerchief. "

丢手绢
(diu-shou-juan)
Throw the handkerchief
丢手绢
(diu-shou-juan)
Throw the handkerchief
轻轻地丢在小朋友的后边
(ching-ching-de-diu-zai-shiao-peng-yoo-de-ho-mian)
Put it back of our friends quietly
大家不要告诉他
(da-gia-boo-yiao-gao-soo-ta)
We all do not tell her
快点快点捉住他
(kuai-dian-kuai-dian-zhuo-zhoo-ta)
Quikely,quikely catch her
快点快点捉住他
(kuai-dian-kuai-dian-zhuo-zhoo-ta)
Quikely,quikely catch her



She thinks kids are taught to play this game along with singing this song at 
kindergarten is a good outdoor activity for them to interact and get along well 
with each other.

I've also played that game in my childhood, I think it's really much more fun to 
play with each other face to face back to those times, comparing to nowadays kids
just each holding an iPad alone.

Play house game

Nationality: China
Age: 48
Occupation: Housewife
Residence: Shenzhen, China
Performance Date: January 27, 2016
Primary Language: Chinese

My informant is a 48 year-old woman who has lived her whole life in China by now.

“Girls always like to play the ‘play house game’ in a group of two or more when they’re little. We usually play it at home. Hold a doll in arms like our baby, and we also have role playing, like mom and dad. And we even have teacher, doctor or nurse sometimes. It’s funny that we feed food to those babies, take them to ‘doctors’, and tell stories to them. All like the scenario of taking care of kids, pretending that we were adults.”

“I think we just learnt this from girls older than us, saw them playing and we imitated. I think this shall be the game that almost every girl all over the world has played before haha.”

I find it really interesting that people always want to grow up faster when they’re kids, whereas many adults feel nostalgic to their childhood when they were much happier with less stress. Actually, I’m wondering is there really a clear line between kid and adult? Maybe people won’t really become adult until they have kids.

 

Kicking the lamppost on gameday

Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles, CA / Denver, CO
Performance Date: 4/18/16
Primary Language: English

DK is a junior at the University of Southern California, and is originally from Denver, CO.

DK had some more USC folklore to share with me:

“Football season is a huge production at USC, and probably the most obvious time when the whole school gets together…on gamedays, everyone usually tailgates on campus, setting up tents and hanging out together hours before the game even starts. Once kickoff is approaching, everyone sort of migrates away from campus to cross Exposition and head to the Coliseum…if you go with everyone else through the south entrance of campus, there are these huge light posts at the exit, and for some reason everyone has to kick the base before they keep heading to the Coliseum. Honestly, I have no idea why people do it, and no one I talk to seems to know either. But there’s always backup once you get there, because everyone’s standing around this lamppost waiting to kick it.”

I asked DK what her best guess was as to the origin of the ritual:

“Maybe we’re kicking at our opponents? I don’t know how threatening that is.”

My analysis:

Sports rituals are very common for college and professional teams, and are probably even more prevalent during home games. The entire process of gathering together on campus to tailgate, then migrating together to head to the game, and stopping to perform this ritual without even knowing the meaning demonstrates the strength of USC pride and how it indoctrinates us best on days like gamedays. When school spirit is running high we’re more willing to participate in the most random of activities, because all of it is bringing us together.