Grandma's footsteps.

I'll begin by reprinting a sonnet I wrote after my 21st birthday party:

21

Good age. Good enough for a sonnet?
Of course nothing too glib or too fancy.
Just a short collection of warm snapshots.
A dark bar, some close friends, diesel drink.
Folky music, and home before midnight
To play poker not even for pennies.
A quick sleep then presents; casserole dish
Water colours, truffles, and an apron.
Blowing bubbles in the morning sunlight.
Saying goodbye again. I always have to.
Then baking and making - cakes and salad,
Far too many desserts for one party.
Grandma’s footsteps and murder in the dark.
No-one died - we just laughed and played old games.

Games in my little little sonnet are important. Because the games which feature are a method of expressing the passage of time. Childhood: playing playground games, Adulthood; turning twenty-one. And of course the inevitable death; murder in the dark. Grandma's footsteps the old woman stalked by successors. The title, of this poem 21, as pointed out by Emily, (she gave me a home made card with a queen and an ace glued to it and wrote pontoon on the inside) is a game as well as a birthday. Games are not as simple as they seem.

I forced my friends to play footsteps again this afternoon, we stood in the courtyard and stalked each other. Some people played others sat out, but everyone engaged. Those who weren't playing were watching, commenting, laughing. Games are infectious and terribly addictive.

Take for example Magic: The gathering a wickedly addictive game which is rightly known in York at least as cardboard crack. But the returns on magic can make it so worth the costs. Yes it is expensive and yes fate is a strumpet, but to win is to reap rewards big time. Likewise computer games offer this input. You pay the costs of money and time: (time in particular) and you reap the rewards of success and constant feedback. This can be dangerous. Games can be selfish as well as social.

I have little direction to this post. No real argument, just a desire to remind people that adulthood is in no way separate from games. No other activities offer the scope and stage for effective learning and the continuation of development. No other activity can potentially better simulate or analyse our cultures; by which I mean that games and these kinds of media could very easily over take literature; very easily be the next step to exploring cultures. Because games are not passive, they are involving.

Play on.