About Pointlessness

"The Sound and the Fury," the game I wrote about in my previous post, is what one might call an archetypically pointless game, similar in archetypical pointlessness to the games in a collection I have named "More Games of Dubious Purpose," insofar as a secondary characteristic of pointlessness is in fact purposelessness, as I describe with pointed obscurity in The Well-Played Game.

What originally attracted me to the word "pointless" was, naturally, the play on words. "Pointlessness" not only describes the reason for playing the games (no point, no reason, actually, other than the sheer fun of it all), but also something about the nature of the games themselves. Pointless games are not played for points, or, if they are, the score doesn't matter.

There's no way to predict what will make a pointless game fun. It's too open-ended. Without score, without even a goal, pretty much anything goes. It's the players who make the game fun. The absolute pointlessness of the game does something to people. It gives them a chance to take responsibility for making the game fun. Sooner or later, somebody does something so unpredictably funny, that you just have to laugh.

Pointless Games tend to put people into silly situations. For no reason. In the Sound and Fury game, people can really do anything they feel like doing - make any kind of sound, any kind of motion - and everyone else not only accepts whatever is done, but they do it, too. And so people make the game funny. Because they can. Because it's more fun. They do things that are funny. They make funny noises. Everyone does them too. And everyone laughs. In Ha Ha Numbers (the game in the photo) you lie on someone's stomach while calling out someone else's number while trying not to forget to respond when someone calls your number. In Hand Land people find themselves lying in a strange position (on their backs, ear-to-ear), looking at a funny world of disembodied hands. And they start playing around. Acting out. Wiggling fingers, touching thumbs, making their hands talk to each other, making it fun. The very pointlessness of the games shifts the responsibility from the leaders to the players, from following the rules to the play itself.

Which probably explains something about the origins of my interest in Pointless Games. The play itself. The theater. The improvisation. Masters degree, don't you know, in Theater, as a matter of fact. Villanova. 1968.

It was during the workshop I gave for the Laughter Leaders in Israel, some 15 years after I first started using the term "pointless," that I began to realize just how deeply the very pointlessness of pointless games can reach - all the way into bomb shelters, all the way into the actual dark night of the veritable soul. What could be more pointless than having to wait out something like a permanent war? More pointless than trying to get people to play when they are all so very far from fun?

Most of the people who call themselves Laughter Leaders have had training in Laughter Yoga. Laughter Yoga is a discipline, pursued for the sake of spiritual, physical and mental health. Like all forms of Yoga. In Laughter Yoga people laugh, not because they think things are funny, but because it's "good" for them. It's a wacky idea - laughing when you don't really feel like laughing. Which is probably why it works so well.

Many of the Laughter Leaders who found their way to my workshop had already discovered that Laughter Yoga was not enough. In places like the Middle East where there is so much to fear and so much more to be angry about, laughter is very hard to sustain. It takes too much effort to keep going. It's very hard to find a reason to laugh, even when it's just for the health of it.

Playing a game - especially a pointless game, when there is no reason, no score, no purpose - is somehow more appropriate, reflecting more accurately the wackiness of it all. It's better than boredom. Much more fun than wondering when and where the next bomb will fall.



from Bernie DeKoven, funsmith