Something beginning with ‘apple’
… and a proposed new winning condition for Rattlesnake games
Or, what I learned about Rattlesnake Games and the alchemy of ideas by playing more than 100 games starting with ‘apple’ as a theme and ‘science’ and ‘music’ as the initial two contexts with people from different backgrounds and cultures over 4 days at the international games fair at Spiel Essen 2022
The title refers to a misstep my baby daughter made when playing I-Spy, starting the game with ‘something beginning with “car.”’ But Rattlesnake Games can begin with ‘car,’ though my demos of the game normally begin with ‘apple.’ ‘Just an ordinary apple,’ as magicians reassure us, which is then transformed through the variations of the game into ‘anything you want,’ as the early alchemist Mary the Jewess is reported to have claimed.
One group that resisted starting the game with ‘apple’ tried to suggest beginning with ‘pencil,’ which I opposed in turn. It could probably be done, and maybe one day I will as a challenge, but not easily and obviously in 5 minutes. Themes for ‘quickfire’ games need to be rich and flexible enough to be capable of reasonably obvious reexpression or reinterpretation across several different contexts, which is where the themes in the Variations card decks can be useful. This particular group game ended up instead on the agreed theme of ‘ice,’ and featured links to Mr Freeze and Batman in the context of movies, Ice Cube in the context of music, snowball fights in the context of games, and a certain scene from the movie ‘9½ Weeks’ in the context of sex.
Across the 100 or so different games which began on the ‘apple’ theme, players’ responses in the initial contexts of science and music were mostly predictable. Oldies linked ‘apple’ to the context of ‘music’ with the Beatles’ record label, boomers with the iPod, and millenials were far more likely to link to Apple Music or iTunes. One or two linked ‘music’ to specific songs: one of the most unexpected but memorable was an uncertain link to a half-remembered song ‘about having apple and a pen.’ Googling later identified it as ‘PPAP’ (Pen Pineapple Apple Pen) by Pikotaro, but having it sung and the hand gestures acted out during the game was much better than knowing these details at the time. All players choosing ‘science’ linked it to the story of Newton’s apple, without exception.
Religion was an added context I usually introduced early in the games, which was always linked in some way to the story of Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden, regardless of the background and ethnicity of the players. In ‘The Origins of the World’s Mythologies,’ Witzel mentions the Japanese and Chinese ‘motif of looking for the “apples/peaches of paradise.”’ Such wider influences never came up in games. Similarly, Snow White was always put forward in the context of ‘folk tales’ despite the varied cultural backgrounds of players, showing the strength of cultural diffusion of Western motifs in this international group of players. (A few other times I’ve played since then, the legend of William Tell has come up.)
Games developed differently according to each player’s own interests, and engaging new themes introduced and claimed by other players included ‘theatre’ (claimed with Stephen Schwartz’s musical ‘Pippin,’ recently revived in London), ‘dance’ (linked to the K-pop feelgood banger ‘Apple’ by GFRIEND, whose dance is apparently so much of a thing that there are YouTube tutorials about it), and ‘books’ (claimed by one player with ‘the golden apples of the sun’ from ‘The Song of Wandering Aengus’ by W.B. Yeats, also used as the title of a book of short stories by Ray Bradbury, and by another player using ‘Cider with Rosie,’ Laurie Lee’s bestselling memoir). I was particularly pleased to be able to claim for myself another player’s introduced theme of ‘anime’ with a link to ‘Death Note’ and the favourite fruit of its death god Ryuk.
Missteps can be rescued: the gentleman who hadn’t yet fully understood the game and gave me ‘pears’ as a context to use with the theme of ‘apples’ might have been rescued by a link using the Cockney rhyming slang for stairs — ‘apples and pears’ — or more cheekily the phrase ‘comparing apples and pears’ which is actually a metaphor for things that can’t or shouldn’t be linked. Setting the scene in an early chapter of ‘The Origins,’ Witzel states: ‘Any comparison involves the linking, correlation, or identification of two items on (roughly) the same plane of existence or thought.’ His footnote elaborates: ‘I leave aside those comparisons that popular speech calls comparison of apples and pears: items that are not closely linked, as it appears to the common sense of a particular culture.’ The problem with including ‘pears’ as a context for a theme for ‘apples’ is exactly because it is in the same category as the theme — it’s already too close.
The idea of ‘an apple’ can get boring and repetitive after a while in a single game, especially in a game played with ‘internet off.’ One game played for a longer period across two sheets of A5 started to generate secondary links to the same source, for example linking both ‘shame’ and ‘religion’ to the same story of Adam and Eve. That said, I never tired of seeing where the theme led other players in different games.
Surprisingly few people asked about scoring and winning conditions, being satisfied instead with the experience of play involving collaborative exploration and understanding. But those who did ask were adamant about the need for one player to be able to win. As usual, at the time, I disagreed.
But the experience as a whole made me think that guessing and writing someone else’s predictably obvious response to a context beforehand might deserve to win a point, or even immediately win the game, on revealing a correct guess. Playing the game to win in this way, you would have to try to predict how your co-players will connect to a given context in their moves, and you would try to avoid easily predictable connections in your own moves. It opens up a new dimension of play in the game, and should make moves more surprising and creative.
