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Clear The Table

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November 01, 2009

The Internet is a fickle place. I just found out today that Yahoo have closed Geocities. That shows how little notice I've been taking as Yahoo announced the decision back on April 29th. What I do know is that some of my early work was housed on at least one GeoCities site. If I'd been paying attention I could have rescued it. I have been able to find some pages using the Internet Archive. Here's one I've found: Clear The Table

As it happens I also found a version of the original text I wrote buried in an old folder on my computer last accessed in 2001. Here's the text as I first wrote it:

This is a game for small groups. First, assign the letters of the alphabet, some to each player. One way is to give each player a master flashcard. For example, a player with 'CAT' would have the letters C, A, and T. It's not strictly necessary to assign all the letters of the alphabet. Also it doesn't matter if some players have the same letters. I have some little plastic stands so that a player's own card and the cards used in play don't get confused. Each player keeps their master card standing upright using a stand. Bulldog clips can be used for this purpose. To play the game put some flashcards on the table. The object of the game is to clear the table. One player begins by asking for a card from the table. The one who finds the card gives it to the player. Play moves clockwise around the group. The catch is that a player may only ask for a card which contains at least one of his or her letters. So the player looking after C, A, and T could ask for 'bacon' or 'tiger' or 'hamster' but not for, say, 'dog' or 'monkey'. Can the group take all the cards from the table without making any mistakes and without forcing a player to miss a turn? If the group can't clear the table - how many cards can they get? For extra pressure put a time limit on them. The less letters each player has the more difficult the game is. Obviously the kind of flashcards used will also alter the degree of challenge. The easiest kind are the ones which have the word and picture on the same side. More difficult are the cards which have pictures on one side and words on the other. With the picture card face up and the word face down the players will need to remember the spelling.

I've never played this game.

Even now, knocking-on ten years later I've hardly used this game. I'm not sure why. I know at one time I was working it into a whole theme involving stopping a monarch butterfly from eating genetically modified corn. I even went as far as creating a sound loop to use a timer. I think the idea of the game was that the butterfly moved every time one player couldn't go. Perhaps there was some mechanism for adding cards back to the table but I have no record. Not only is the internet fickle but so is the digital world in general. I don't know how much data I've lost to hard drive failures over the years. If you can't hold a copy in your hand is your data really real? What was it that Shelley wrote? Arh, yes:

I met a traveller from an antique land
Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone
Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,
Half sunk, a shatter'd visage lies, whose frown
And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command
Tell that its sculptor well those passions read
Which yet survive, stamp'd on these lifeless things,
The hand that mocked them and the heart that fed.
And on the pedestal these words appear:
"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:
Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"
Nothing beside remains. Round the decay
Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare,
The lone and level sands stretch far away.

Or as Kurt Vonnegut put it, "So it goes"

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