My Favorite Made Up Game

If you are reading this sometime between March and May, know that somewhere in New England skinny prep school children aged 13-19 are running over concrete, risking their fleshy knees and ripping through sneakers, to bounce stolen volley balls over a wooden plank in pursuit of glory. I have been that child—freshly seventeen, face just starting to grow stubble, my body covered in glossy sweat—staring with quiet intensity at the asymmetric grid in front of me as I pull the scuffed ball from the crook of my arm, bounce it solemnly, and then swing my arm in a thundering rotation that would make the dervishes weep.

As you can probably tell, I was—and still am— maniacal about Quadball, the traditional game of my high school dorm. It’s a weird cross between doubles tennis and volleyball dreamed up by some malcontent WASPs 60 years ago or so, so goes the mythology. I don’t know if you’ve ever tried to make up a game before, but if you have, you know it’s not easy. You have to reason out incentives, create a expansive yet simple rule structure, and then a critical mass of people have to actually enjoy it. In light of all those constraints, it’s amazing how consistently generations of Mainstreamers have picked up a shared mania for this game. It was not at all strange to to skip a class (or two) on a spring afternoon and play Quadball until it was physically too dark to play, and maybe a bit longer. Nor was it strange for alumni to drop by for the sole purpose of playing a few matches. I’m not a stranger to games. I’ve played soccer, football, baseball. I’ve done jiu jitsu and wrestling. I’ve run a marathon. I’ve gone surfing and skiing. Still, in my time on this earth, I have not found any game more engaging and thrilling to my personal temperament than this niche little mutation, which happens to only be played at MainStreet Dorm at Phillips Exeter Academy in the spring time. What if I never went to Exeter? What if I had been deprived of the experience of being so engrossed in something I simply cannot get tired of it. What if the perfect game for you is in some unexplored corner of the world, or in the back corner of someone’s mind, just waiting to be invented?

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