Dear Bernie De Koven, I/we am/re pleased to inform you that your description of your game of Ping Pong (as found in your book, The Well-Played Game) has led to much delicious grazing in the infofields of earthly folklore here at Oaqui U. I/we are once again struck by how many similarities, and yet, how many subtle differences I/we find in this, albeit the first of your games to undergo such scrutiny, your so-called game of Table Tennis. For it is so very much like that of the original game of Oaqui Pong, and so very different, that conclusions inevitably had to be drawn.
Here, therefore, is my/our brief summary of my/our findings.
As you would expect, where there should be your Oaqui Pong Table(TM), your Oaqui Pong Paddles(TM), your O-aqui Pong Net(TM), and your Oaqui Pong Ball(TM), your game Tennis Tennis (a.k.a. Ping Pong) only provides a pale and far too-self-important echo of the Oaqui Oaay.
The actual, or Oaqui Pong Net, is, of course, as you would know from your familiarity with the Oaqui Bar(TM) and all that it stands for, diagonal. One end is considerably higher than the other. In fact, should we so wish, we could even make the net come to a point on one end and be a couple feet off the table on the other, and why wouldn’t we? The TT/PP Net, is absurdly horizontal. Too low for a ball to go under, and not high enough to make a ceiling shot worth trying.
The TT/PP Paddle is of only one kind, and is supposed to be exactly the same for both players and remain the same throughout the game. To add play-spiritual insult to play-spiritual injury, players of TT/PP are not allowed to use body parts as supplementary paddles.
Oddly enough TT/PP manages to incorporate a pale and bizarre half-truth when it comes to its definition of the TT/PPB Table Tennis/Ping Pong Ball). (That’s correct, BALL, singular!. Where there are of course at least two Oaqui Pong Balls used in the original master game of Oaqui Pong, each of its unique color and proper properties!)
Then it comes to the Table Tennis (Ping Pong) Table. The TT(PP)T is for some reason positioned so that it must remain isolated, unsupported, in open space, alone, instead of secure and connected, butting against a wall, or against another Table Tennis Table, which is butting against a wall, etc. Oddest of all, whilst in Oaqui Pong the OPT (Oaqui Pong Table) changes butting arrangements from time to time, during the whole game of TT/PP, the TT/PPT butts nothing.
Which makes it impossible, as well as illegal, for players of TT/PP to play “off the wall,” as it were. Whilst we of the Oaqui have hangings, pictures and other brac as well as bric that adorn the “lean wall” and must take skilled and deeply challenging care to make sure that all wall things remain undisturbed throughout the game, or at least until all balls are out of play or destroyed.
Then, when we arrive at the idea of the Serve, well, TT, bound as it to its OneBalledness, begins as a game in which one player has to Serve to the other, trying, can you imagine, not only to get the ball over the net and hit the other side of the table, but to make the other player MISS! It’s beyond odd, when you think about it, that a game would arise in which one player, in the name of SERVING, would try to make the other player lose! These are the consequences of UniBallistic thinking: SERVING each other by trying to make each other LOSE!
Which, of course, leads inevitably to the way they keep score. Here, TT, merely because of its MonoSpherical premise, makes the oddest of all leaps. Where as you, being sensitized to the Oaay of the Oaqui, would think BOTH players would LOSE a point every time the ball goes out of play, well, need I/we say more?
There is a great lesson to be learned here. Merely by playing a game likemTable Tennis/Ping Pong, and then contrasting that experience to the original, and far truer game of Oaqui Pong, much can be understood about why the non-Oaqui find it so difficult to laugh when they are playing.
Perhaps that it is why it is all the more remarkable that those who are ignorant of the Oaay ever have any fun at all. My/our personal/collective congratulations to you and your readers.
Sincerely,
Your friend and mine/ours,
The Oaqui