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“The last of the players who remains hidden can outsmart the seeker and call out ‘Free stone for everyone’ as she touches home base. When this happens, the seeker will have to start over and count again. Of course, it can already be inferred that the participant who manages to successfully pull off this move will earn the admiration and respect of everyone.” Alejandro Dolina, Crónicas del Angel Gris, 1988.1
Games make heroes out of anyone
In some variants of the game hide-and-seek, it is in the endgame where the seeker will face the highest stakes. When there is only one player left hiding, the seeker enters an all-or-nothing showdown against her: if the last player reaches home base and calls out “free stone for everyone!”, then everyone who lost because they were found will return to the game, and the seeker will have to start over. The result is that losing this last stretch will nullify all of the seeker’s previous successes.
It is then no surprise that this last player will be conceded a moment of glory for having saved the day (or in Dolina’s words: ”the admiration and respect of everyone”).
Games have that transmutative power of giving a fair chance to everyone in a group to be a hero. Even if it is in a ludic context, anyone can win regardless of how much life has been knocking them around lately.
The magic circle that momentarily makes the ordinary world strange
A game is a kind of magic circle, what in Ancient Greek was termed a témenos2: an arbitrarily delimited space in “which special rules apply and (thus) extraordinary events can freely occur”. The magic circle enables the occurrence of extraordinary events because, by being wholly governed by a clear and rigid set of consciously pre-established rules, it excludes all rules from the ordinary world, which limit us with their unfathomable complexities and instabilities.
In this magic circle of hide-and-seek, a group of friends becomes a refuge for the arbitrariness of the “ordinary world” by generating possibilities for experiencing a genuine feeling of deserved triumph, and for being the moment’s object of admiration. In some sense, the ordinary world is itself a game with its own obscure rules. It is a game which happened to take prevalence upon all other possible games. Some of these friends might have been better placed to fit into this ordinary world game, while others, defined by other natural affinities and backgrounds, might have been the ideal prototype for other moments in history, be they in the past, the future, or simply elsewhere in the world.
Our hearts find relief within the space where our friendship resides
Part of friendship is to see the real person behind what a historical context does to them, and together build a sanctuary within which every party in this relationship can be according to their genuine selves, instead of the masks everyone develops to survive in that external ordinary world game and its many times nonsensical-yet-ineludible rules. In the friendship sanctuary our identities are the product of how we react to the contents of our hearts. We do not tamper our enthusiasm when something truly moves us, and we do not substitute our sincere expressions with draining impostures which are born as reactions to the demands of external forces. These forces do not have much to do with that “me and you” space delineating the bond between two friends.
Play is an essential part of friendship, and more broadly, of true human fellowship. It levels the field for everyone acknowledging that many miss their chance to be admired and respected by others because they had the misfortune of not smoothly fitting into the rules of the present game governing the ordinary world. But since friendship is concerned with the heart that remains while masks are off, it seek ways to demarcate spaces where we can all be equal contenders, equipped only with our hearts. And if a particular game is not fit for a friend, there will always be another game which might bring to light their unique affinities.
And, just as with the last player redeeming everyone in hide-and-seek, the right game might bless everyone with the chance to witness a unique beauty that the rules of the real world have proficiently hidden from us: the radiance in a friend’s proud eyes and a grin that is impossible to fake, when it’s their deserved turn to be celebrated as the hero of the moment.
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- In the original Spanish: “El último de los jugadores que permanezca escondido puede aventajar al buscador y gritar “Piedra libre para todos mis compañeros”. Cuando esto ocurre, el buscador deberá contar nuevamente. Desde luego, ya puede colegirse que el participante capaz de culminar exitosamente esta jugada recibirá la admiración y el respeto de todos”. ↩︎
- “In ancient Greek thought, the témenos is a magic circle, a sacred space delimited within which special rules apply and where extraordinary events can freely occur.” From “Free Play” by Stephen Nachmanovitch, 1990. ↩︎
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