Category Archives: Game

争上游 “Struggling Upstream” Card Game

Folklore:
争上游 or translated as “Struggling Upstream” is a card game played with family and other guests, uses a normal 52 card deck with variations about the jokers. The game splits the deck into part depending on how many players playing with the goal of getting rid of them the fastest. To get rid of the cards, they must be placed in mostly numerical order as the strength of the card with 3 being the weakest card and 2 being the strongest. Pairs, Triples, or Fours (known as The Bomb) of the same number card increases the strength of the cards. Combos of cards can be combined to get rid of lesser cards faster. The first game starts with the 3 of Spades. A Joker works as a wild card and if placed alone is stronger than other cards.

Context:
The informant is a Chinese American student at USC. She plays this game with her family on trips with her family in China or in the greater Los Angeles area and enjoys teaching it to others to play. She found there are many variations on the game “vary like Egyptian War.” Her family enjoys playing with The Bomb, which is a combination of 4 of the same card. A joker could be used to replace one of the four, but if someone has a stronger number in four will beat other the pair. The informant notes the game is difficult at times due to the late game making it harder to get rid of weaker cards, so strategy is an important focus of the game.

Analysis:
The game helps connect her family in a shared strategy experience. The game challenges strategy and forward thinking with its mechanics on cleverness and knowledge of the rules. Playing the game, also invites the family and guests into partaking in a shared experience and play together. It also provides entertainment in possibly boring situations.

Star Wars Game

Text: When my mom was a kid she says she and the neighbor kids would play a lot of Star Wars. They would use finger guns and run around and chase after each other and shout. “I mean, it wasn’t very sophisticated.” She said there were probably at max 5 or 6 kids. I asked if they would pretend to be storm troopers and her memory of it was that they all wanted to be all the heroes, and so nobody was really the storm troopers. It wasn’t like a show and picking roles, it was kinda just climbing the fences and being weirdos. “What I remember most is kind of like running up on the dirt hill and leaping off of it. you know, kind of making noises and throwing your finger guns in the air. You know, I mean, it was just very… ridiculous and innocuous and probably look stupid as could be.” My mom was always resistant because she wanted to be Luke, but since she was a girl everyone wanted her to be Leia. 

Context: My mom is 49, white, and when this story was taking place lived in North Idaho (she moved to Washington when she was 9). I asked if when they played they would reenact the movie? Her response was that they had only seen it once, not the 82,000 times we can today, so someone would go “I think this happens, then someone else goes, no, it was this way, and no one really knows because you’ve only seen it once.” 

Analysis: In this childhood memory we see the folk taking back canonized culture. They had probably only seen the film one but that didn’t really matter. They took this commercial media and made it their own, creating a game that was inspired by the original media but took off on its own from there. They are active consumers in the decoding of this media, as Stuart Hall would say, even if they didn’t know it. My mother even used it to start negotiating identity, not wanting to be boxed into playing the princess because she was the only girl, something she has mentioned multiple times. The Frankfurt school was worried about cultural hegemony, and while there is a point to be made that this might be an example of a way that mass media can be used to influence children at a young age I would argue this is actually people at a young age taking media and turning it into something of their own. Creating their own personal variations of something they love even when they only saw the movie once.

The Class Rock

Text: The informant told me that there was a tradition their theatre teacher did. There was a specific rock that the teacher had that was like the class rock and on the closing show you’d have to find a place to put it on stage without people noticing it. Then it would be painted to match every show. Then after the closing show they’d go backstage, they think that it was something that people did but on that teacher’s last show the teacher did it, where’d they’d hold it up and everyone would chant “rock”. 

Context: My Informant, 21, white, is currently a college student who is from Southern California, though this story is from before college. They have done theatre for a long time and are still immersed in it. They said this tradition had gone on for a while because the drama teacher had been there a while. Informant also experienced the teachers last year there. 

Analysis: There are a lot of closing night rituals in theatre. I think it shows the limited nature of theatre, and how people deal with it. This is a ritual that marks the end of a show but the object, the symbol, also lives on beyond the show, gets used over and over, and is even called the class rock. It’s permanent among something that is impermanent thus used to say goodbye. I think that ritual of the chant is also a bit of performance used to up the energy, bond, and release some of the emotions that come with an ending. It very much showcases the community aspect and energy of theatre, and the permanent but impermanent nature of it.

The Floor is Lava (Yoan)

Context

My dad told me this story about a game that he played with his older brother as a part of their bedtime ritual when he was younger:

Dad: Ok, so, in our lifetime – shared lifetime – there’s been more of an awareness, of kids playing a game called “the floor is lava.” Like, there was a tv show, called the floor is lava, and people started talking about it, and actually, you know, whatever it was, 10 years ago, 12 years ago, we wrote – we: our little Marino family – wrote a story called “the mysterious floor” that’s essentially the floor is lava story in a new form.

Text

Dad: That came out of the fact that when I was growin’ up, my brother and I had bunk-beds in our room – we shared a room, we had bunk beds, and we had a little ritual. And the ritual was um, someone had to turn out the light, and I had the bottom bunk, so I- it was easier for me to go turn out the light, and then I would come back to the bed, but the game we played was was that our-our bunk-beds were a submarine, a submersible, and um, the minute you turned off the light, the-this was lava, but we called it yoan, which was a combination of the words yes and no for some reason *both chuckle* the minute you turned out the light, the yoan would start to rise, and so I had to hop back – I– there were apparently some yaon-proof, like little stones in the wa– in the yoan that didn’t get covered right away, so I had to hop back – hop on different rocks back into bed, and, um… before the yoan completely rose. And then it would rise and cover the submersible, and then we were, you know, all night long we were basically in a submersible underneath the yoan. But it wasn’t until… many many… many years later that I realized that there were… that lots of kids played some version of “the floor is lava” and that it was– it was like a thing, but, but again, I don–I can’t– I don’t have any recollection of anybody ever teaching us that game or telling us about it… or even playing the floor is lava with any of my other friends. It was just something that was– it was part of this night-time routine that my brother and I did that– that we kinda felt like we had made up and maybe we had, you know, absorbed from the culture. I don’t know. 

Interviewer: Did um… so the bunk-beds were the submersible, so you were safe in the bunk beds? 

Dad: Yeah, the-the bunk-beds had like– yeah, they sealed up like, like fully, you know, fully shielded up against yoan. Um, and… I think, you know, my brother was older, so he was like the captain of-of our submersible and then I– you know, I had some sort of yoaman’s job of like, i don’t know, ma-maybe I ran the engines or whatever like I– yeah. I was… you know, I was crew of our-of our submersible.

Interviewer: And you were safe in your bottom bunk…?

Dad: You were safe any– if you were on either b– you know, any… either of the two beds… maybe also on the ladder, I… we never really discussed that, but if, if you- I definitely had to get into bed, make it back to the bed to be- for us to put up the sh- I don’t know, close up the doors of the ship… You know, it was kinda sealable, the ship, so that it could be submersed in yoan for the night. It, you know, it could travel through the yoan too, like it would, it would sort of like, you know like-like a submarine, it could like explore different places and things like that. And I think we were able to see thro– even though the yoan, in my mind, even now is pretty opaque, and actually more of like a yellow color, for whatever reason, than a red, but the yoan w– you know… once we were fully submerged, we could see through the yoan as though it were, you know, a submarine under water. 

Anaylsis

This bedtime routine is a unique version of ‘the floor is lava’ game. It is interesting that my dad doesn’t remember learning this game from anyone else and did not know that it was a game people played until he was adult, but that is a common occurrence in folklore.

As my dad alluded to, it is likely that this game served as a way to get the young brothers into bed at night in a way that felt playful and fun. This behavior was also likely encouraged by their parents who appreciated a break from telling the wild kids to get back in bed

Competitive Pokémon Hax Chants

RF has been playing competitive Pokemon for years, starting with the folkier Smogon (singles 1v1) formats before transitioning to the official Video Game Competition (VGC) format in recent years.

The Text

Pokemon differs from most other turn-based games in that turns aren’t taken independently one after another but rather decisions for a particular turn are made from both players blind (like in game theory) and resolved simultaneously once all decisions are made. Because of this wait time, players are held in suspense after making a decision or even while making a decision, running through probabilities and the different possibilities the turn might resolve. As the game also employs an incredible amount random number generation (RNG), luck becomes a huge element in how a particular game turns out. Much of the game revolves around accounting for best and worst case scenario and, at time, betting on small odds in desperation. This lends itself to chants and prayers for good luck between turns while waiting for a turn to resolve.

The most common chants to shout are “Freeze” (referring to usually a 10% chance to render the opponent to be unable to act until they hit another 10% chance), “Flinch” (referring to the higher chance of rendering an opponent unable to act for the turn), “Dodge” (referring to the chance for an opponent’s attack to miss), and sometimes, as the informant explains that most competitive players are also “degenerate weebs,” “Chance Ball” (referring to the anime Haikyuu!! in referrence to an opportunity to score, or in the context of Pokemon, turn the momentum of the game in their favor).

“Deserved” is also sometimes said when RNG befalls an opponent “post-ironically” as the players know they’re “victim-blaming” the opponent, but also they sincerely mean it, or at least tongue-in-cheek do. Another variation is to say that the opponent was asking for it by putting themselves in a position to be haxed (the term for bad RNG happening to you, derived from “hax” which is a noun referring to the occurence of RNG-based effects.

This leads to the informant’s report of the rising sentiment in the community that luck is partially a skill to the degree that maximizing your odds of getting lucky or minimizing your odds of being haxed is a core skill of playing the game. When a player purposefully makes a play relying on hax in an attempt to turn around an otherwise unwinnable game, that can be somewhat respectable as “playing to your outs” while players who get hax on their side unintentionally are “lucky and bad” for “getting bailed.”

Spectators will join in a lot, rooting for their teammate or friend, but actual players don’t usually do so, only when desperate and no other obvious plays can be made. Naturally, this is because doing so in chat would be announcing your next move, though it’s not uncommon for players to chant it into a voice call or the text chatroot once the animation resolving the turn begins, even though by that point, the random numbers have already been generated. For the same reason, an opponent’s attack missing sometimes isn’t bad luck on their end but rather your own “skillful dodge.”

I then asked the informant whether they think this chant is an invocation or prayer, to which the informant responded that “it depends on the player.” While some players may desperately plea for luck, some other demand it with imperative authority in an attempt to manifest it into reality. The informant himself reports that he always utters it in an invocational form, the odds of willing it into existence proportional to the confidence they call it happening with, such as “watch this dodge right here” rather than desperately wishing with “please.”

I then asked if the informant has noticed differences between the folkier Smogon singles format and the VGC doubles (2v2) format, and while the informant suggests that there is a difference, it is apparently not due to the officialization of the format. The informant explains that smogon singles tend to be “harsher” due to the lower variance over a longer game (because less happen each turn with only two Pokemon on the field as opposed to four with odds that RNG evens out to the expected rates over a longer game), with more toxicity as the format has lower odds of RNG factors (because RNG effects don’t have two targets per instance of use) along with much more room for error (because each individual turn matters less in a longer singles game). Due to the option for players to play around RNG in singles that doubles formats don’t have, singles communities tend to be less forgiving when it happens while doubles communities have accepted that it’s almost inevitable within a game.

Analysis

Given the luck required of this game, the use of an incantation, sometimes even in imperative form as if manifesting it into reality reflects a form of contageous magic in verbally invoking an incident, as described by Frazer’s sympathetic magic. The difference between prayer and invocation is particularly interesting as prayer is more associated with blessings and curses, and prayers don’t dominate this chant over this invocations for the same reasons why English doesn’t have much curses and blessings, as the language and its societies have become less religious over the various historical events in the past such as the English reformation derparting from the Roman Catholic church and the Enlightenment era founding ideals of the United States. Coincidentally, invocations and “curses” in the imperative form seem to have overtaken in modern culture as people place more power into their own hands rather than an agnostic higher entity, similar to how people “manifest” something for themselves instead of praying for it or how people command others to “kill yourself” or “get cancer” in the imperative form instead of wishing them eternal suffering in hell in the subjunctive form. In the same vein, many players in the community opt to command hax to manifest for them in an imperative utterance of the chant rather than wishing for it in the subjunctive form.