Playfulness In Storytelling and Art

As God contains all good things, He must also contain a sense of playfulness — a gift he has shared with Creatures other than ourselves, as witness the tricks Crows play, and the sportiveness of Squirrels, and the frolicking of Kittens.
Margaret Atwood

PUTTING ON A SHOW

June page 2 from A Time to Keep, The Tasha Tudor Book of Holidays written and illustrated by Tasha Tudor, published by Macmillan, New York, 1977

Czech illustrator Jiri Trnka (1912-1969) illustration for Andersen’s Fairy Tales 1969

Father Tuck’s Puppet Show

Charles Hunt – Children Acting the ‘Play Scene’ from “Hamlet,” Act II, Scene ii 1863

Frederick Daniel Hardy – The Volunteers

John Burr – Little Soldier

PARTY GAMES

William Heath Robinson (English,1872-1944) – The Egg and Spoon Race

PLAYING AT THE SEASIDE

Postcard by Muriel Dawson (1897-1974)

PLAYING GROWN-UPS

Marie-Madeleine Dauphin (Franc-Brossier) 1878-1942

Eastman Johnson – The Old Stage Coach

Frederick Brown – Candidates for Girton 1884

Harry Brooker – Children at Play

DANCING AND SINGING

Nikolaos Gyzis (Greek, 1842 – 1901)

Richard Scarry’s Best Mother Goose Ever London Bridge game 1970

Marie-Madeleine Dauphin (Franc-Brossier) 1878-1942

FUN AT THE FAIR

John L. Wimbush (1854 – 1914)

TABLETOP GAMES

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHESS PLAYERS AND POKER PLAYERS

Chess players are strategic, constantly planning ahead and anticipating counter moves.

Poker players can still win with a weak hand so long as they raise the stakes.

Vladimir Putin is described as a poker player by the world’s top Russian chess player living in New York.

New Yorker magazine cover July 1973 Gerhard Richter

Sir William Orpen (Irish, 1878-1931) The Chess Players

Gustav Wintzel’s picture ‘The Chess Players,’ (1886)

Draughts illustration by Edmund Dulac

Jessie Willcox Smith (September 6, 1863 – May 3, 1935) Checkers

Alice in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass Brigitte Bryan 1969

Thomas Faed – A Game of Draughts

Types of board gamer:
– The one who can’t bear the stress
– The one who simply refuses to grasp the rules
– “Competitive Colin”
– The cheat
– Mr/Mrs Shouty
– The quiet genius
– The one who tries to keep everything jolly
– The one who can’t keep the dice on the bloody table
@SoVeryBritish

THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN CHESS AND GO

Go is a game of complex strategy that exists in a closed system, much like the game of chess. The difference is that Go has many more possible paths of play and is consequently more complex than chess. In the narrative of the film, Thrombey’s genius is the genius of a master strategist. This is how he writes his novels, with their perfect internal structure, and this is how he masters his family, and maintains careful control over their machinations, including the ones they try to keep secret from him. Nobody can best Harlan at life because nobody can best Harlan at Go. In fact, Harlan is rather convinced that nobody can best him even in death. When presented with the inevitability of his death and the potential consequences for Marta, Harlan almost instantly constructs a complex plan that will, he believes, protect his friend.
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