Category Archives: Game

Rattlin’ Bog

Nationality: American
Age: 25
Occupation: Real Estate Developer
Residence: New York City
Performance Date: 2/21/23
Primary Language: English

Text: SW explained his favorite drinking game, “Rattlin’ Bog” to me: A group of people gather in a circle, sitting around a table. Each person has a drink in their hand (and usually one or two more in case they finish their first one) and the song “The Rattlin’ Bog” is played, most commonly through a speaker connected to someone’s phone. This song has a chorus that repeats in between verses, and each successive verse adds another line to the last one, so that the verses get continuously longer as the song progresses. One member of the group drinks for the entire length of a verse, then after the chorus, the person sitting beside them in the circle drinks for the next verse, and this continues in a clockwise direction around the circle until the song’s completion. Thus, as the verses get continuously longer and build upon themselves, the successive people in the circle drink for longer. SW claimed that, by the last verse, it becomes a relatively difficult task. 

Minor Genre: Game

Context: SW is a 25 year old man who graduated from USC in 2021 and now lives in New York City. He told me that he first played this game when he was a senior at USC, and that he learned it from a friend who had known about the game for quite some time. This friend had told SW that the game supposedly originated in America, but that the song Rattlin’ Bog was a traditional Irish tune. 


Analysis: After hearing this, I thought of another drinking game called Thunder. The premise of Thunder is almost the same as Rattlin’ Bog, but it is set to the song Thunderstruck by AC/DC. Thunderstruck was released in 1990, while The Rattlin’ Bog is a traditional Irish folk song, in the Roud Folk Song Index as number 129. Thus, I wonder which game originated first, where each game originated, and finally, why SW’s friend postulates that Rattlin’ Bog the game was first invented in America – how could this be, and furthermore how could he know this? How one culture borrows from another and creates a new folk game out of an old folk song is fascinating. Generally speaking, this made me think of how drinking games tend to create their own cultures in the act of gathering, drinking, and playing a game with other people. Though there are two different national cultures supposedly concerned here (American and Irish), any drinking game also creates its own new folk group every time it is played, just with the people present. There are certainly variations between individual games (SW said that some people bang their fists on the table during the chorus, others clap for the drinker during the verses), and these small variations create folk groups of people who now play this specific way.

Playground Diss

Nationality: American
Age: 21
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: Feb 2023
Primary Language: English
Language: None

Text: 

Q:Ok so what was the saying.

R: Its, there’s like a saying and you do a couple movements but its:

Brick Wall Water Fall

Girl-you-think-you-got-it-all

You don’t, I do 

So boom with that attitude

Reeses pieces, Butter Cup

You mess with me I mess you up

Elbow elbow wrist wrist

Hush up girl you just got dissed

Context: This was a saying from middle school that was common among kids at the time (2015-16), and was in this case not used for any purpose than to have a cool rhyme. 

Analysis: To me, this seems like a variation on many childhood “playground” dites I have heard before. Of course, this one has more of an aggressive tone so I would assume that it was used in a more confrontational manner as a sort of playground mic drop, so to speak. Another form I could see this taking is a jump rope rhyme as it has a good rhythm to it when told orally.

Kid-Friendly Beer-Pong

Nationality: Asian-American
Age: 18
Occupation: Student
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 2/14/2023
Primary Language: English

My informant (18), from Maryland, describes what she calls “Kid-Friendly Beer-Pong”. “So this actually a game that my older cousins and I always like create for ourselves. We play a lot of ping-pong but once we get bored of ping-pong, we take off the net and put ping-pong paddles all over the table and basically like stand from like a far distance from the table and throw the ping-pong ball and try to hit the paddles. And this is like a challenge we would do”

“This is like basically an appropriate beer-pong kinda thing, where you’re aiming for the ping pong paddles. And this is them telling me they’re preparing me for college. So we used to play this like when I was in middle and high school, and they’re like ‘you’re gonna be the best when you play beer pong in college’. And I didn’t know what they meant, but now that I’m in college I see that, like, beer-pong’s a game that a lot of people play and they were like preparing me. And i noticed that just in general my cousins are always preparing me for what life throws at me, for college, they’re always giving me advice for like social aspects and these little games also prepare me for what to expect in like a college environment.”

This game could be interpreted as a coming of age ritual, in a way, as it is information that the informant’s cousins passed on to her to prepare her for her next stage of life. We can expect that in this extended family, college is seen as an important step in development, both for the educational purposes, but also as a new social environment that the informant must prepare for.

Electricity Riddle

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: USC Student Housing
Performance Date: 2/20/23
Primary Language: English

Main Performance:

HG: Basically you’re in this, like, house that’s like a labyrinth, or whatever. Um… and there’s no electricity and its like dark and whatever, and there’s these doors. There’s these three doors, um… I’m gonna tell you the doors and you pick, actually.

Me: Ok.

HG: So the first one, there’s Red Door, Blue Door, and Green Door. Which one do you pick?

Me: Blue Door.

HG: Ok, um… and then there’s door one, two and three. Which one do you pick?

Me: One.

HG: One? Ok, and then there’s pink door, white door, and black door. Which one do you pick?

Me: White.

HG: White? Ok, um… then there’s five doors. One with a picture of a giraffe and the other four are just one, two, three, and four.

Me: Three.

HG: Ok… Lotta people pick the giraffe door but that’s ok.

Me: *Laughing*

HG: And then finally there’s three more, its just sky door, grass door and moon door.

M: I’ll go with moon door.

HG: And then you’re presented with three options, you finally enter this room and um… they are all ways to die, basically. The first way is to enter a cage with a lion in it. The next is you have to hang yourself. And then the last one is an electric chair. Which one are you picking?

Me: The electric chair.

HG: Aw yeah why’s that

ME: *Laughing* Because there’s no electricity in the house!

HG: *Laughing* Aw f*ck you


Background: The respondent heard the riddle in middle school to the best of his memory. He is from New York City.

Thoughts/Analysis: I had definitely heard a riddle with the same sort of punchline before the informant had told me his riddle, but I didn’t realize it until he said the last option. To someone who hasn’t heard the riddle before, it is supposed to rely on the complex steps that the riddler walks the subject through before arriving at the final decision. You are thinking about so many things throughout the course of the riddle that you forget one of the basic things about the house. In the performance of the riddle, the informant took many “thinking” pauses between each of my decisions to try and signal to me that he was thinking about the path that I was taking in order to throw me off.

Secret Santa, but make it competitive

C is 32, he was born in Visalia, California. He grew up with a foster family in California’s San Joaquin Valley. He told me about his foster family’s take on secret Santa.

“There was a family tradition I had with my foster family… every Thanksgiving we would put names in a hat and we would draw names on Thanksgiving and it’s like secret Santa… and we buy that person a gift… whoever’s name we got… and everyone would try and guess who got who and if they guess the person that drew their name, they could have their gift but if they didn’t they would have to wait until Christmas Eve. It got really competitive (laughs)”

Secret Santa is widely credited in America to a philanthropist named Larry Dean Stewart. Stewart struggled in his younger years, and reportedly was giving help and hope by the generous contributions of strangers at low points in his life. When he became a millionaire in the cable and telephone business, he decided to “pay it forward” by handing out $100 bills and large anonymous cash donations (https://www.nbcnews.com/id/wbna15751409). Secret Santa, however, is a tradition that goes back much further. One Scandinavian tradition known as Julklapp, involves throwing presents into people’s doorways and running away after knocking (https://encyclopedia2.thefreedictionary.com/Julklapp). Around the world, other anonymous gift traditions exist around various holidays, like Amigo Secreto or Angelito on Valentine’s Day in Latin Countries (https://blog.willamette.edu/worldnews/2010/02/22/amigo-secreto/).