Nagging Questions for...
Jim Gladstone
by Jeff Lyons

PROFESSION: Writer

WHERE YOU'VE READ HIM:
His latest book is Gladstone's Games to Go. His debut novel was the award-winning The Big Book of Misunderstanding. His writing has appeared in The New York Times Book Review and other newspapers including The Philadelphia Inquirer, The Chicago Tribune, The San Francisco Chronicle, and The Atlanta Constitution.

FIND OUT MORE:
www.gogladstone.com



Being a game geek, I was excited to see a new book on the market explaining in fine detail various clever games people can play with little to no equipment. That's right kids, no energy-draining electronic devices, boxes of dog-eared trivia cards or old-fashioned game boards needed — just a decent reserve of brain power and minimal instructional reading, and you're ready to spring into action with your new knowledge and liven up any long road trip or lifeless get-together. Bonus, the handsome little book is cheap ($10) and (in my best Ron Popeil voice), "It makes a great gift!"

I caught up with the author Jim Gladstone recently to discuss his new book and play some "Games to Go" with the master over a few beers. To get in the right gaming mood, we met at Fergie's Pub, the celebrated home of Quizo, Philadelphia's best bar trivia. I was out of my league with the challenging rhyming exercise "Hinky Pinky," but fared a little better with the easy-to-play and highly-addictive "Initialist." Jim, an extremely witty and good-natured chap, stressed the social aspect of playing games — having fun, learning about others — over being competitive and keeping score. I must agree, especially when I'm losing. In a weak attempt to distract Jim from the games at hand, I peppered him with questions.

At first glance Gladstone's Games to Go seems to be a simple book of games, but is it not a bold, overt statement about people needing to pry themselves away from their computers and X-boxes and get back to a simpler, more fulfilling way of entertaining themselves?

Yeah, there's more than a little low-tech joy in this project for me. The first title I came up with for the book was The Caveman's Gameboy—I thought we could design the cover to look like a little slab of rock.

I know I've become a little overwired to the Internet in the past few years, and I think that playing cool, socially engaging analog games helps serve as an antidote. Getting together with friends and playing pen-and-paper games makes my brain less speedy and more happy. It's a great conduit for banter and conversation and just hanging out, which I think is really necessary for recharging my mind and loosening up my creative muscles. And there's also something that feels great about being able to play without any special equipment, not even boards, cards, or dice. It reminds you what a nifty toy your own brain is.

Are any of these games full-contact?

Well, there's this people-watching game called Star Qualities that could definitely get you into a brawl if you're caught playing it too obviously. It requires making clever observations about strangers. The strangers won't necessarily think your observations are clever, though, so you'd be well-advised to keep your voice down playing that one. In terms of the other end of the full-contact spectrum, I think finding a really clever, good-looking word-game player who enjoys the process of the game even more than the competition is just about the biggest turn-on in the world. I love the intimacy of a good collaborative mind-meld. The game I invented called Saint Marks is a great one for that, because at the end of a round, the players usually end up collaborating rather than competing; it sort of transforms from a game into a puzzle.

Describe yourself using "Star Qualities" rules.

Back in the '80s, when the first two movies in the recent Batman series came out, there were some photos that would have allowed me to fairly peg myself as "85% Michael Keaton." Which is odd, because I also resemble my mom, who went through years where she was definitely "90% Valerie Harper." But Michael Keaton and Valerie Harper don't look at all similar. It's weird. This is almost a new game evolving right here… "Six Degrees of Facial Bacon" or something. In any case, my changing hair and waistlines have made me less Keatonesque over time. I've still got it going on in the codpiece department, though.

You've written a successful novel, The Big Book of Misunderstanding, so why follow it up with a book of games?

Egad! He's strayed from the Official Master Plan! Whose plan was that, again? I like the master plan that the French writer Georges Perec had: He said he wanted to write one of everything. I want to make a lot of different stuff out of words. I've written speeches, and instructions on how to insert tampons, and websites for poultry products, and short stories, and travel journalism, and I got to hang out with Stevie Wonder to do an interview once. And I love games. Playing and making new games up is a great escape from the gnarled ambiguity of fiction-writing. There are way more rules and tidy endings in games than in fiction, so it gives me a really nice break and balance.

I've also committed to letting myself take my time in my novel-writing. I've been grappling with another novel, ever-so-slowly, for almost three years now, and I actually wrote the games book and edited a short-fiction anthology in the midst of it. The inside of my head is a pretty bouncy environment. I'm curious about so much in the world, and I tend to have multiple projects on my plate at all times (not to mention a demanding full-time job). I have lots of eggs in lots of baskets and I'm not always sure which ones are closest to hatching. Sometimes I feel like I'm losing my mind with all the different ideas tangling around in there, but I'm never bored.

Did this take a lot of research, or were most of these diversions living in your head already?

Even the games I invented needed to be researched in terms of play-testing, but one of the most interesting things about the more traditional games is how they're like folk songs: they've passed through the culture in many slightly different versions without any "official" written record. So there was lots of research into origins and rules. I often found several people who grew up playing very similar games, but with different names, or variations in the rules that make game-play considerably more or less challenging. There are alternate versions of lots of the games in the book, in order to catch a bit of this folk-song spirit, and I put my e-mail address in the book, hoping that people will make up their rule-tweak ideas and send them in to share on my website. It was cool to learn where games like Battleship, Mastermind, and Connect Four came from.

There are two burning questions that I was never able to come up with the answer to. Maybe a Wigs reader will know: 1) How did the "Hangman" game concept become associated with gallows and nooses? It's a harmless word game—where did the morbity get involved? 2) What's the James Thurber essay where he talks about playing the game GHOST in the car with his family? I'm convinced that I read such a thing years ago, but even aided by both the Net and some excellent public-librarian friends, I couldn't track it down.

You offer "Gladstone's Game Night" House Parties where you teach guests how to play games. Which game-show host do you model yourself after?

I like the hosts who seem to have some smarts and character themselves. I dug Win Ben Stein's Money because he actually played the game with the contestants. As a kid, I loved the shows where the hosts and panelists felt like a great dinner-party group—the What's My Line and To Tell the Truth gangs. Alex Trebek is kind of a sham, though, isn't he? Somehow people just assume he's smart because he's associated with Jeopardy!, but he's never actually played a round as far as I know. I actually like Regis Philbin, too—he strikes me as an intelligent guy who's very self-aware and understands how happily ridiculous his career is. I once spent a morning interviewing Bob Eubanks at a casino in Atlantic City; he seemed like a cheesy Wal-Mart markdown of Clint Eastwood. And then of course I'm a sucker for Chuck Barris of The Gong Show, who is an alumnus of the same junior high as me. For a couple years when I was a kid, my family would get up from the dinner table early every Thursday night to watch The Gong Show followed by Mork & Mindy. Trivia for you: Chuck Barris's sister is married to a boar-bristle magnate. Honest.

I would never doubt you about such things, other favorite game shows?

I'd like to give a retro shout-out to The New Treasure Hunt with Geoff Edwards. It was a silly show, but you've got to admire a guy who has the balls to spell Jeff like that. I actually wrote about that show—and about Scrabble, come to think of it—in my novel. Weird. It all comes together somehow. Next thing you know I'll be buying Turtle Wax and shopping the Spiegel catalog. One more show that I was crazy about in elementary school was Masquerade Party; it came on just after Lawrence Welk and before prime time on Saturday nights. It was very high concept. Celebrities were disguised in elaborate costumes and placed on sets that provided clues to who the celebrity actually was. At the end, they'd pull off their latex fake faces like on Scooby Doo. The most bizarre moment ever was when a guy in a Colonel Sanders costume revealed himself to be... the real Colonel Sanders. That moment was meta before meta was in style! I think that's when my mind started warping.

How do you deal with overly aggressive and competitive game players?

I actually don't like to play games with people who are so concentrated on winning that they can't have fun. It's called PLAYING games, not WORKING games. That's the spirit of my book and that's really how I play games myself. Even when I used to play a fair amount of Scrabble, I was more into making oddball words than playing defensively to protect the triple-word squares and stuff. I like to play several different short games in an evening, so people with different strengths all have a chance to shine a bit, and everyone can learn a game or two they've never tried before.

When you're at a party, are you always expected to be the "fun party-game guy"? Is it a burden to always have to be "on"?

Honestly, I find playing games to be pretty calming and relaxing. You can be clever, but can't really be "on" because you've got to follow rules and work within a framework to a certain extent. It's nice to have the parameters set. Some of my games involve creativity, but it's structured creativity. And you've got to be focused when you're teaching people something, too.

Give me a great, little-known board game that will make our lives that much more fun.

How about a card game? I love this word game on cards called Quiddler. In July 2001 I played it every day in cafes in Prague. My set is lovingly beaten up, and I still take it on trips with me sometimes. I've made quite a few friends as a result of having a good game handy while travelling. Its one of the things that inspired me to write the book.

What's the best game to play by yourself in public?

Other than pocket pool? There's a game in the book called Initialist that works really nicely for solitaire, and another game called Doublet Racing that's based on a kind of puzzle that was originally popularized by Lewis Carroll in the 1890s—the solo version is really absorbing if you're the sort who likes to do crossword puzzles..

All-time best game for a group of people?

I'll confess to being a huge fan of charades. But a lot of people get inhibited with that, which is a shame. As far as the games in the book go, I've been playing a lot of one of the new games, Chain Reaction, which is very sociable and often ends up loaded with goofy wordplay and double entendres if you've got a good group.

What do your listen to when you write?

I'm so into words that when I'm writing, I can't really concentrate if I'm playing music with lyrics. No matter how many times I've heard a song, the words always hook into a part of my brain. Kind of like when I'm in a restaurant I tend to pick up an amazing amount of what gets said at nearby tables. So I tend to listen to instrumental stuff while I'm writing. I like Underworld, Air, this great German group called Pole, Matmos. And there are a few classical discs that I'm totally reliant on: Yo Yo Ma's Cello Suites (inspired by Bach) is a staple when I'm doing my fiction writing, and I love Erik Satie's piano compositions. And I can listen to music with words as long as I don't understand the words, so lately I've been really into Brazilian tropicalia and Portugese fado stuff.

One other thing to mention here. In my head, I actually have a theme song for this book. It's called "Century Plant," and it was written and first recorded by Victoria Williams, but there's a totally moving version of it on the soundtrack to the movie Camp (which is a decent movie but a terrific CD). Anyway, in the midst of working on Games to Go, I ended a long relationship and this song seemed to address these two big topics simultaneously. The refrain is, "Hey, do you want to come out and play the game/It's never too late."

Which writers would you like to go head-to-head with in a drunken night of word games?

I think it'd be most fun to play with writers who are exuberant and playful in their own work, so I'd definitely pick Jonathan Carroll, the incredibly imaginative American ex-pat novelist who lives in Vienna (and who I'd love to meet in any case, just because his work simultaneously fascinates me, irks me, and is completely compelling even when it's irksome). Augusten Burroughs and James Patterson would probably be great because they've worked in advertising which, like word games, demands creativity within tough constraints. Chuck Palahniuk and Jeffrey Eugenides are such nimble idea-spinners that I think they'd be a blast. And A.M. Homes, because she comes at things from quirky unexpected angles and has a seductively tricky intellect.

What are your three most favorite words?

Today? Let's say UVULAPALATOPLASTY, which is a surgical procedure I had (If you ever have the opportunity to stare into my open mouth, you'll note the absence of a uvula), BESMIRCH, and of course CALLIPYGEAN which means "having beautiful buttocks."

Get more Gladstone's Games to Go!