The Random Game

My daughter and I have a game we play.

I sort of pulled it out of the blue one day while we were sitting at the kitchen table and introduced it to her without telling her what I was doing.  I looked at her and said a word aloud and then sat there obviously waiting for a reply.  She would say something and I would reply, “Bzzt.  No.  Wrong.  You lose.”  Occasionally I would just say another word, and get another reply from her.

There wasn’t any real pattern at first.  It was yet another random act of dad-ness.

But then I had to start coming up with some rules in my head, just to make sure it wasn’t totally random.  It was initially just saying something and trying to get her to say something unrelated to what I just said.  Then it became nouns.  And then it was nouns, but they could not be related to what I said or her previous answer.  Oh, and you could not repeat any words previously used.

She started to figure out the game and we ended up talking about the rules, or at least where the boundaries might be.  There are few hard and fast rules.  For example, to “lose” the other person has to call you out on repeats or declare that your last response was too much like the previous two and why.  But if you can explain your way out of the challenge, then the person calling you out loses.

It isn’t a game you can effectively play in a hyper-competitive mind set.  Arguments would be constant if you did. For me it is just more fun to see if I can follow the thought process… both mine and hers… and then how the mind falls into patterns.  Over time it becomes difficult to NOT say something related to the last two things that were said.  And I totally lose track of what was already said and whether it was in the current match or a previous match.

As one of my parental experiments, it was a success.

Or, it was certainly a bigger success then when I got it into my head to simulate what having a sibling was like by following my daughter around the house and repeating everything she said in a high pitched whiny voice.  That made her (and my wife) angry and cranky, which I would count as a huge success at achieving the desired simulation, but which did nothing to improve my stature in the household.  I think even the cats shunned me for the rest of the evening.

I was kind of done with the game after a couple of tries, when the rules were finally discovered and mostly agreed upon.  But my daughter still likes to play.  We rarely ever say, “Let’s play the random game.”  It just starts with one of us saying a word.  Ad she likes to do this in front of other people, so that we appear to be just saying totally random words, often with accompanying nods of the head as though a clever move was just made.  That adds a whole new dynamic to things, and we try for really odd words.

Mostly we play it in the car together when it is just the two of us. Though the last couple of times we did this, it became quite obvious that we were both drawing our next word from things that were going by on the side of the road.  We’re random, but “dry cleaner” rarely comes up in our conversations just by chance.

I am thinking of introducing a new rule where you lose if the other person immediately spots the source of your word.  And so the game evolves and goes on.