Category Archives: Game

Spicy Uno

Nationality: American
Age: 23
Occupation: American
Residence: Los Angeles
Performance Date: 4/15/21
Primary Language: English

BACKGROUND: JM is the interviewer’s friend. Spicy Uno is a variation on the popular Uno card game, one that we’ve played many times as friends, and a game that can get quite heated at times.


TRANSCRIPT:
JM: “Here are our rules:
Play a 4, no talking. Whoever talks has to draw 1 card for each word they say.Play a 6, all hands need to go in the middle of the table. Last hand draws 3.Person who plays 0 chooses 2 people to swap hands (can include themselves).+2 cards and +4 cards can stack, but not on each other.You can ask for help and can help someone, but you can’t show them the card before.You can skip to yourself by playing an exact match of what’s on top of the pile.If you have UNO and someone else calls UNO for you, draw 6.
There’s the famous moment when we were playing, someone drew 4, and then someone knocked on the door. You went ‘it’s all good, we’re taking a break, we don’t need to be quiet anymore. The game is paused, the game is paused.’ Watching you draw 22 cards was maybe the greatest time I’ve ever played the game.”


ANALYSIS: The Spicy Uno variation of the Uno card game is a popular one among Millenials and Gen Z, one that qualifies as folklore since there are no exact rules and no known origin — everyone plays it slightly differently. It’s a modern folk tradition, one that can forge friendships and break them apart in the same round. For another version of Spicy Uno, see:

“How to Play Spicy Uno.” Crazy Little Projects, 30 Jul. 2020, https://crazylittleprojects.com/how-to-play-spicy-uno/.

PICKLE IN THE CHRISTMAS TREE

Nationality: German-American
Age: 22
Occupation: Graduate Student
Residence: Vail, CO
Performance Date: April 27, 2021
Primary Language: English

MAIN PIECE: 

Informant: So like a German tradition is you hide like a pickle––or, the parents hide a pickle––like, in the Christmas tree… And then like all the kids have to find it in the tree. And like, whoever wins––like in the olden days, they used to get like an orange. Or they might get an ornament. But that was in like the 1800s. 

INFORMANT’S RELATIONSHIP TO THE PIECE:

Informant: Um… But so my grandma was like, “That’s gross.” So my uncle was like, “We have to do it!” And so then they got a pickle ornament instead. So they hide the ornament in the tree, and a lot of people do that now instead of getting like a real pickle.  And we like don’t give an orange cause that’s like… Boring. So it’s more like… You get like a little extra sweet or something, but it’s more like bragging rights… And I know that my German family does it too, but I don’t know if we’ve like Americanized it at all though. 

Interviewer: Did you like it as a kid?

Informant: Yeeeeah! You know, what’s a little competition on Christmas? It spices things up! Cause it’s like, “Who’s gonna win?” So it was always me and my cousin, ‘cause my sister and my little cousins were like babies. But then they started hiding it like lower down. Like that was annoying ‘cause then the little ones had a better chance of winning. 

REFLECTION:

The informant expressed that the pickle tradition has been modernized, with her family replacing an orange with a sweet, and a real pickle with a pickle ornament. The tradition has undergone variation over time. However, the fun it brings to the children remains the same, allowing the tradition to continue. Engaging in a tradition will always be a contemporary activity; traditions happen and are upheld in the present moment. The informant’s family is engaging in the tradition in the modern day, and so adjusts it to modern sensibilities. Tradition does not replicate the past, it just connects us to the past.

123 Shakespeare

Nationality: American
Age: 19
Occupation: Student
Residence: Bay Area, California
Performance Date: May 2nd, 20201
Primary Language: English
Language: N/A

Main Piece: 

Everyone comes early to rehearsal and they play 123 Shakespeare. What that is is there’s one person who starts, and you have to try— its in a field—  and the goal is to run away from the field without getting, I guess, eliminated and once you are, you join the eliminators. So it starts with one person. To eliminate them you have to drag them out of the zone of the field, and then they join your team, and you work together to get more people. And then once you have a couple more people, you have to start lifting people up and shouting “123 SHAKESPEARE!” while no part of them touches the ground. And then you have eliminated them. And you’re allowed to do whatever you’re comfortable with to be the last one standing, and that happened before every show. 

Background: 

My informant is one of my friends from high school,  and was very involved in our school’s theater department. As he told me, 123 Shakespeare is a ritual game that’s done before the opening of every show, and was one of the most anticipated traditions of our theater department. However, it was also kept secret; only the cast and crew of the show knew about it, not the general rest of the school. It was additionally kept secret from anyone who was participating in a show for the first time. What would happen is that people would be told to come to rehearsal early, “not explaining anything, but [we had] the decency to say ‘bring a change of clothes you don’t mind getting dirty.'” Upperclassmen in the theater department would make up ridiculous rules as a prank, like telling newcomers “No tool boxes allowed,” “Guys, make sure you leave your hoverboards at home!”, and then reveal the actual rules of the game once everyone arrived on the day 123 Shakespeare would be played.

Context: 

This came up when my informant and I were trying to remember traditions that happened in our theater department during high school. While I was involved in a few shows, my friend had more experience than I did, so I asked him what events he could remember, and he described 123 Shakespeare for the archives. 

Thoughts: 

I remember participating in 123 Shakespeare when I was in high school right before the spring musical, and it went exactly as my informant described it. Looking back on it now and knowing what I know about peer groups and folklore, I thought it was fascinating that this tradition was both a ritual, and a bit of an initiation for people who are getting involved with the theater department for the first time. The upperclassman keeping the secrecy of what 123 Shakespeare is establishes the social hierarchy of the theater department, and the joke of making up nonsensical rules can be viewed as a display of that status, and simultaneously accepting the new members into the peer group by initiating playful behavior with them. Similar to the wedding tradition of pulling pranks on the groom by the bride’s family, I think this game of 123 Shakespeare demonstrates a liminal space that new cast and crew members must cross before they can be fully accepted into the peer group of the theater department. This game stands between the tireless rehearsals and the opening night of the show, so this is the point in which they are invited to participate in a longtime tradition passed down through the generations of the theater department. 

How Do You Want To Do This?

Nationality: Caucasian
Age: 19
Occupation: College Student
Residence: Oregon
Performance Date: 4/24/21
Primary Language: English

Intro

The following is a folk rule that my friend added to the game of Dungeons and Dragons. We both went to school together in Oregon, from middle school through high school so I’ve known him for a while. He had been the DM for a group for around three years. My friend is still at home so I asked him to explain some of the homebrew rules he has while I recorded him. This is a direct transcribed script of what was said in the story, with the various “umm’s” and “uhh’s” omitted.

Rules

“Okay so you just want me to talk about homebrew stuff we use?”

Me: Ya, but things that you took from other places. Like from Critical Role.

“Ohh, okay. I guess one of the bigger things that we use when we play is the phrase ‘how do you want to do this?’ We pretty much stole this directly from Matt Mercer (the DM on the youtube show Critical Role) except lately we put our own twist on it. Instead of saying… “

Me: Wait, hold on, say what it is first, like what you do when that comes up.

“Ya that’s fine, interrupt me. Okay, so when you’re in combat in D&D, and everyone is super hurt from the fight and the monster is about to kill everyone and that player lands that final killing blow that you see as a DM, you don’t want to just say ‘it dies.’ That’s boring. So Matt Mercer, and now we do it and a bunch of other DM’s, we say ‘how do you want to do this?’ Then the player that killed it gets to epically describe how they kill the monster. So what we do, instead of just stealing it from Matt… well I play Mortal Kombat a lot, and they have a thing where when you win you can do a fatality, which is like to embarrass your opponent. And the game has this deep voice go ‘Finish Him’ and then you do the thing which is super gory and stuff and you kill the guy. So we’ve started saying ‘Finish Him’ instead of ‘how do you want to do this’ because for us that’s more epic I guess. And then one of you goes and says your whole spiel on how you behead or whatever the monster.”

Analysis

This explanation was quite interesting to me, even though I already knew about it. As he said, this thing only comes up every so often when a big monster gets killed while we are playing D&D. Homebrew rules like this one should definitely be considered as folklore because of how they get passed along and changed to better fit specific groups. I am not sure if the line ‘how do you want to do this’ originated from Matt Mercer or not, but I know many groups like ours take the idea and build on it. 

The game of D&D is a great base for spreading folklore because of its very loose rules. In the Dungeon Master’s Guide, it even says that what the DM says goes, allowing for the game’s fundamental rules to change along with the groups playstyle. This often appears in D&D as homebrew, which is generally anything used in the game that isn’t explicitly in the rules. DM’s share their homebrew online leading it to be taken and changed in many different games across the world. ‘How do you want to do this’ is just one example of the various folk-rule changes implemented in the game of D&D.

Dungeons and Dragons Ritual: “How Do You Want to do This?”

Nationality: American
Age: 17
Occupation: Student
Residence: Staunton, VA
Performance Date: April 21st, 2021
Primary Language: English

Main Piece: 

“Oh! Yeah, so ‘How do you want to do this?’ is a thing that’s been picked up since it’s been become used by Matt Mercer in Critical Role where like if a person gets a sufficiently good kill at like, say, the end of a combat, the DM will go ‘How do you want to do this?’ And then the player will describe how they eviscerate their enemies.”

Background:

A little pop culture background is necessary to understanding this folklore. After the release of the 5th edition of the table-top role-playing game Dungeons and Dragons, D&D live-play shows became a popular form of entertainment. The most famous and successful of these shows is Critical Role. This is a practice that the Dungeon Master of Critical Role, Matt Mercer, employs that others have picked up. It’s been proliferated to the point that despite not being part of any official D&D material, Dungeon Masters may say “How do you want to do this?” at the end of an encounter because they know that’s the common thing to do even if they’ve never seen the show or don’t know from where the phrase originates. My informant saw this practice as a way to get players involved with the “theatre of the mind” portion of D&D and increase “coolness.”

Thoughts:

What’s interesting about this example is that it’s very recent and fast-moving folklore. There’s even an argument to be made that it could count as having authorship to some degree, as its origins can be traced back to a singular figure, but there’s no ownership. 

Besides the interpretation that my informant offered- that it helps increase player engagement -there’s another possible function of this phrase. It signals that combat has come to an end. Dungeons and Dragons has a signal for the beginning of combat baked into the rule set. Everyone rolls “initiative” to see in what order they take their turns. There is no instituted method to exit combat. This phrase helps bridge that awkward gap. Within the game, there is a liminal space that isn’t naturally bridged. The way this new unofficial ritual is constructed, there’s a set way that the players and the DM end combat. When that ritual is complete, the liminality has been bridged and the mode of play changes.