A SILLY GAME TO SAVE THE WORLD
CARDS FOR HUMANITY
I’m not just a poet who likes games.
I believe profoundly in the ethos of games as a good thing for the world, and I’m a poet in my spare time.
Yes, it’s BEST DAY EVER, the simple card-game I made up with my niece, and yes it’s for sale through this link along with all the fun and games we’ve had along the way, and yes, buy a deck right now or you and me are finished - but…
I called this Substack what I called it for a reason.
The guys who made Cards Against Humanity aren’t against humanity any more than Silly Games To Save The World will save the world, but like those guys we only mean that PLAY - what we play, how we play, those we play with - is directly connected to how we see EVERYTHING.
In the field of Affective Neuroscience pioneered by Jaak Panksepp, PLAY is one of the seven primary systems of emotion (capitalised like they all are to distinguish them from ordinary language) along with SEEKING, FEAR, RAGE, LUST, CARE and LOSS.
Which means it’s in every mammal. Panksepp is the guy who guessed, rightly, that some of the ultrasound noises rats were making were laughter.
The urge to PLAY is one of the seven essential emotions - or feelings - we possess. Or, as the late great Jaak always put it:
‘We have feelings because they tell us what supports our survival and what detracts from our survival.’
Playing a good game supports your survival.
[People supporting their survival.]
I think Cards Against Humanity is a fine game. In the timeless world of card-games you don’t argue with success. We thought about CAH a lot when we were making Best Day Ever. It’s rude and scurrilous and you win by being filthy and funny. The first dealer is the last one to have taken a shit. Pretty damn creaturely and that’s okay with me.
Best Day Ever can be filthy and gossipy and funny too, it’s up to its players, like the way the world goes is up to its inhabitants, but in our game you spend most of the time thinking
how to make each other happy…
[people making people happy]
Friends, family, strangers, celebrities, whoever you’ve written in your deck, the cards offer you choices, and you present these to the Player whose day it is.
Well, the rules and gameplay are all in the link. Here below is a cute little essay I wrote about it years ago, long before Silly Games or this Substack or, indeed, any Substack.
***
The Thinking
The Village of Best Day Ever is whatever you make it.
You may make a deck of people you know, or a deck of celebrities, or a deck of fictional characters.
So a normal day in your Village could be anything from:
UNUSUAL (for some of us do still live in places where we know everyone)
UNLIKELY (celebrities tend to live somewhere else)
Or DOWNRIGHT MIRACULOUS (fictional characters don’t live next door).
But whatever the situation, it resembles a place we do know, and have all passed through, a realm we make versions of every night or early morning. It’s the kind of place we dream. And our dreams may shock us, but they shouldn’t surprise us: anything could happen and something will.
What is dream but yet another hand dealt from your mind’s own deck of cards?
Our dreams, whatever they are, mean well. They are trying to make sense of the multitude and madness of our lives by wishing, or by warning, or by some mysterious weaving of strands, like the three Norns of Norse mythology, spirits of Past, Present, and Future.
Not so unlike a Guide in Best Day Ever! The Guides appear at dawn, like clockwork, with their fine ideas for your Best Morning Ever. They are hapless angels, agents of goodwill. Their only care is to make the Visitor happy. Their silly proposals may be thwarted or defeated, but they were meant well. Even the maddest offer was ready and waiting to be conjured into play.
The word silly itself descends from the Old English seely, meaning ‘happy’, ‘blissful’, ‘lucky’ or ‘blessed’. It later came to mean ‘innocent’, or ‘deserving of compassion’.
Anyone stranded at dawn in a strange place is deserving of compassion.
A Guide in Best Day Ever thinks only in such terms, for Visitors have their one day here, their bright passage through the light: what will make the time pass most blissfully, sweetly, or riotously for them?
The Guides see nothing odd about the Village. Of course these peculiar folks are here, strolling across the green towards you with innocent daft suggestions. Of course they want your time. Of course they seek your company. And when you consider the odds against your existence in the real world – whether you think yourself summoned into light by a deity or by a dice-roll of DNA – it’s a pretty towering number. You ought maybe to expand your sense of the unlikely.
Why a village? Why the classic locale of green, pub, shop, church, humble hall for meetings, river running by? We write what we know. We all carry memories from generations back, decorated by our earliest fictions, the nursery rhyme or fairy tale or ballad: the shape of the dream-village persists like our first melodies. All our social and psychological instincts can be drawn from that early sense of living somewhere small and safe, with a warm bright place to gather in, and a cold dark place beyond.
When we were very young we knew everyone, and we miss that. Our souls are wondering where everyone has gone.
What is celebrity culture but old village gossip running on helplessly?
Some days every face we see is a stranger’s, but deep in our minds we still live in a place where anyone’s business was our business, and everyone sometimes wondered where we were.
The Village of Best Day Ever isn’t the kind that the world turns hard or cold, that congeals into ghettoes, makes slogans out of proverbs, bolts its gates. The Village of Best Day Ever is ever welcoming, never judging, all forgiving, and it flies no flags. Dream as hope, as well as gentle chaos.
Life as a deck of cards? That works for the believer, with the Deity as dealer, and it works for the agnostic, the atheist, the humanist, with form and chance and suits and numbers in infinitely changing step. A deck of cards gives you the thrill of infinite possibility along with the security of containment. Alice called the whole of Wonderland nothing but a pack of cards when the dream turned nightmare, but she didn’t half play the game while it was good, and came back through the Looking-Glass to have another go.
And in Best Day Ever all sorts of things go wrong. The Village has a trickster spirit, there are ghosts in this machine. As a Guide, you may have nothing but the Visitor’s happiness in mind, but you’re still competing with the other Guides, jostling past your rival angels to press your ludicrous case, and the effect of your Hitches and Rainchecks may derail the day entirely.
But how many of our real-world Best Days Ever seem to include some accident, coincidence, or cross-purpose – someone who wasn’t meant to be there, some weird change of plan, some combining of elements that couldn’t have been foreseen? This is the grit that makes the pearl in the oyster, the oddity that makes some special day bob on the surface of your memory while others sink into the ocean.
[Sliding doors in action.]
In any case, the object is laughter, not points on the board. Sports and games have been cheerfully disarming warriors for centuries, and we on these British Isles made more than our fair share.
Here then is ours, a game you play by imagining the happiness of others. Or merrily wrecking the efforts of your rivals. Either way a fun game, a silly game for friends, a flowering of honest nonsense, sport for fair players.
