I encountered this in a book (author is British) and I wondered if she made it up or if it was a real thing.
One or more people in the game know the rules and demonstrate but don’t explain them, and one or more people don’t know the rules and have to figure them out. The rules dictate what you say and do when you pass a pair of scissors to the next person in the game. If you say and do the right thing, you have to be able to explain the rules, or else the game continues. The first person (among those who don’t know the rules going in) to correctly state the rules, ends the game.
There’s a whole series of these types of games called “concealed rules games.” Scissors is mentioned in that list (although it sounds slightly different than what you describe, but I’m sure it’s based on the same idea.) The card game eleusis also described there is the game I’m familiar with that has this concealed rules idea.
I’ve really never heard of games like this. The way it was described in the book, some members of this family would play the game with outsiders, who would never get it, and would use it as an excuse to laugh at their obtuseness.
I’m sure I never would have gotten it either, I’m really very bad at guessing things like that, or figuring them out from observing what other people do.
Now that I think about it, though, in boy scouts we played a couple of games like that: the new guys had to repeat “Owa Tagoo Siam” until we figured it out, and then the mock trial where the accused had to answer questions, on penalty of losing an article of clothing if the answer was not correct. Before every question the judge would say “I am an honest judge and this is an honest jury; all we want is honesty for an answer.” Of course, the answer one is supposed to give to the questions is “honesty” regardless of the content of the question. The poor guy who was the accused got down to his underwear and then quit, because he couldn’t figure it out. This was outdoors at night at a weekend camp, in front of a large campfire. A little sadistic, to my mind. The game was sanctioned by the two scoutmasters in attendance, one of whom was my father, who never tired of finding occasions for regarding other people as stupid.
The first variant of those I remember encountering was “crossed and uncrossed”. We played it at theatre group. You have a piece of paper, or a chip packet, or any flexible item, fold it and pass it to the next player saying “this is crossed”. Then later on someone unfolds it and says “this is crossed”, or keeps it folded and says “this is uncrossed”. When the noobs pass the packet, everyone in the know tells them if they’re right or wrong.
In fact, “crossed” refers to your legs. As the game progresses and more people start catching on, it can get very amusing seeing people’s broader and broader hints to the still-uninitiated. “This is …umm… yawnsbig ostentatious streeeetchlooks at legs … uncrossed!!”
The way we played it the whole point was that everyone would ‘win’ - get the idea - sooner or later. It wasn’t meant to be a vehicle for making fun of people
So Roderick, overall, did you like The Chimney-Sweeper’s Boy? Have you read other Barbara Vines/Ruth Rendells?
Well, good, because in the book RF is referencing, it definitely was. “I pass the scissors crossed.” – “No you don’t, Mummy! No you don’t!” – “She’ll never get it!” Argh.
I’ve read lots of Rendell’s books, usually the Wexford ones. But I usually like these non-series books too. This one disappointed me in the final reveal, which incidentally had been telegraphed for a while, maybe just because standards have changed so much since 1951. The experience didn’t seem that serious to me, even allowing for the different mores (I grew up in the 50s instead of the 30s). And there were several other things I didn’t find convincing about his behavior, like how he was able to have sex with a woman so many times over what must have been 3 years in order to have 2 children, when as a younger man he could barely force himself to kiss his girlfriend. I did like how the story was structured, though, and the way the facts were revealed to different characters at different times. I knew all along that the truth was going to be in that manuscript, but I didn’t suspect how the manuscript was going to be revealed. I was glad at the end that there appeared to be some hope for Sarah and Ursula, if not so much for Hope, who seemed permanently damaged.
I haven’t read any of the Barbara Vine books for quite a while, I found them generally repellent in subject matter. If she was going to write about those kinds of characters and situations, she might have taken a page from Simenon and done it in a more matter-of-fact way and with less leering delight (at least that’s how I remember them).
Aspidistra, even from your own description it sounds as if there was a certain exclusionary elitism of knowledge going on, even if it was only temporary.
I guess - but how bad of a thing you think that is depends on whether or not you’re particularly susceptible to exclusion as a thing, rather than just as another instance of doing badly at a game because you’re no good at the skill involved.
I readily admit that I enjoy guessing games more than, say, backyard footy because I’m much better at guessing games. But it seems like adding ‘you take your clothes off when you get it wrong’ does add an extra element of unpleasantness which is separate from the question of whether you’re any good at the activity.
I’d be quite willing to play backyard footy normally, although I suck at it, but definitely NOT if I had to strip off every time I missed a goal!
I remember playing a similar game with our Explorer Post kids at a camping trip to Yosemite. They were surprised I picked up on it first – being a leader and an adult I expect they thought I was dense – but the other adult leader never figured it out. He was an engineer, so I’d have thought he’d have a better than average possibility of solving it.
P.S. I usually prefer Ruth to Barbara, although I’ve liked several of the Barbara’s they often make me wish I’d never read them.
Yeah, I know. It wasn’t clear to me what or how much they actually did, or if it was just the thought that they almost did it that drove him to run away. I still can’t get that excited about it. I suppose it had more to do with his overall closeted and self-shaming attitude than that bare fact which you spoilered.
Years ago I dated a girl that tried to explain to me the scissors game so we could play it with some others at a campsite. Another game was a broom game where one player would sweep the feet of people sitting in a circle. Then another would go into a closet or another room while the player would hold the broom high or low by people and shout “the boom hangs low” or “The broom hangs high”. When the broom hung high the player in the closet would call out who it was hanging high over. It would drive folks nuts trying to figure out how he knew who the broom was hanging high over.
It was the first person to talk while the player was sweeping the circled players feet
It was another game you could only play with people once.
One such game is that the subject is brought in and everyone else is in on the game. The subject asked people in turn any question. The secret is that the person answers the question given to the previous person. The first person simply makes up an answer.
Somewhat along the same lines is the game I learned as a volunteer at a camp. It was called “snaps,” I believe. Like the above, it can almost be played out as a magic
trick.
The idea was this: you get two people who know the game. One will be the snapper and one will be the interpreter of the snaps. You come up with some sort of patter that you guys are so mentally intertwined that you can communicate with each other with just the snap of the fingers. To prove it, the snapper asks somebody in the audience to whisper or write down on a piece of paper the name of the person you want the snapper to communicate to the “guesser.” That person will be standing on the other side of the room (or some suitable distance away from the guesser.)
As an example (this is the first one I remember from when I learned it):
The snapper takes his place suitably far from the guesser. He says: “Ready?” The guesser nods. SNAP SNAP. pause. SNAP. “Got it?” At this point, the guesser may already know the answer. If not, the guesser will wave it off with either a shake of the head or a verbal “Sorry, I’m not quite getting it. Try it agin.” The guesser then pretends to concentrate harder, or otherwise hams up the effort required and snaps once and immediately and confindently states: “Now you got it!”
And the guesser might act it out a bit before replying: “Ronald Reagan.” (You can tell I learned this in the Reagan era. Well, actually Bush-the-first-era, but same difference.)
Now, typed out, it may be obvious what is happening here. Consonants are communicated verbally by the first consonant of what the snapper is saying. Vowels are just simple 1 snap = A, 2 snaps = E, 3 snaps = I, etc.
With two people who are suitably good at acting and improvising, this game can go several rounds before somebody in the audience groks what is going on. At the end of each round, you can ask the audience if anyone else shares the psychic affinity with the snapper and wants to try their hand at guessing. One of my favorite bits of improv was communicating an initial “G” to the the guesser. As we were a bunch of teenaged boys in the camp, we were quite chatty. The snapper turned angrily to us and sternly rebuked “Guys, would you settle down?!” Seamlessly incorporated into the game and, while I had been slowly figuring out the rules by that time, I completely missed that this was a “communication” to the guesser.
My friend and I would actually pull this off as a magic trick with our neighborhood friends, who never did figure out what the trick was, but we made it slightly more complicated, changing the vowel code, and playing around with how we verbally communicate the first consonant.
ETA: Oh, also, misdirection can be added my varying the timing of the snaps, so if you’re trying to communicate an “I” instead of doing three steady snaps, you can do a snap, short pause, two quick snaps, and long pauses in between rounds of snapping are the ones that indicate a new vowel. Basically, you’re giving the listeners a red herring into trying to figure out whether you’re communicating using some kind of Morse code or something and conveying all the information via snaps, rather than the verbal cues.
