What is "fun"?

Note: A dreidel is the Yiddish name for a four-sided top, with each side traditionally having a Hebrew letter - Nūn, Gimmel, Hey, and Shin. (Or Pey instead of Shin in Israel.) It is said to represent the phrase "A Great Miracle Happened There." It is traditionally played on Hanukkah.

Suffice it to say that the dreidel is now a ubiquitous symbol of the holiday, and that is good enough for me. I'm not going to get into the history of dreidel, ascertain why it is played, or even when it began.

Last Hanukkah, I invented and ran a game of Dreidel Bingo for a group of more than 150 participants of all ages at a synagogue in Chicago. This year, I've created both a home version and a version that other synagogues / Jewish centers/organizations can easily use to entertain their guests for around an hour.

I posted a little video for Instagram this morning admitting my opinion that while spinning a dreidel may be fun, the game of dreidel is not. (I may have called it "boring".) I concluded the video with the phrase "twice the amount of spinning, more than twice the amount of fun." As I believe in ethical advertising, I didn't want to lie and state a precise increase in fun that one would garner from playing Dreidel Bingo as opposed to the standard traditional game of dreidel. 

Have set the bar sufficiently low enough, I would like to prove my statement.

The Serious Study of Fun and Games 

Academics have researched games from numerous angles - whether in mathematics for probability, economics for rationality, in anthropology and sociology for ritual and community, and in history for fun.

In 1938, Johan Huizinga wrote a book titled Homo Ludens (Man the Player), as opposed to 18th century Homo Sapiens (Man the Thinker), or the 19th and early 20th century Homo Faber (Man the Maker). According to Jacques Erhmann, his work largely focused on the competitive nature of play. Huizinga was subsequently critiqued by Roger Caillois, who described four categories of play: agôn: competition; alea: chance; mimicry: simulation, ilinx: vertigo.

"Traditional" Dreidel

The traditional game of Dreidel is very simple:
Each player begins by putting a coin in the pot.  On each turn, a different play spins the dreidel, and depending on the letter it falls on take a different action.

• Nūn - nothing happens
• Gimmel - player takes the entire pot
• Hey - player takes half the pot
• Shin - player puts a coin into the pot

For the player, during their spin, at first glance, there is a 50% chance they will win some money, a 25% chance they will lose money, and a 25% that nothing will happen. 

Colorful Tops

In Iona and Peter Opie's Children's Games with Things, they write about why children enjoy playing with tops, and proffer a gendered distinction. 

For boys, it was about mastery of the spin, and they would develop competitive games in which they would attempt to have their top knock down another's top. For girls, it was the "custom of colouring patterns on the top, in concentric circles, or in sections."

They even cite a 1780 verse about a "Peg-Top" which includes "And on its smooth and well turned head, Are painted yellow, blue and red." 

They continue by quoting a letter from Italy in 1786 by a Mrs Piozzi:

The more one sees of different Places & People, the less Effect has that diversity upon one's Mind–If you take a Boy's Top, and paint it in stripes of red, Blue, Green, & Yellow only; whip it merrily–& the general Appearance will be white.

Staying on the topic of color, they quote the 1877 publication of Science in Sport in which a father explains the refraction of light and how white is comprised of the entire spectrum by spinning a top.

Fun of the Spin

In my opinion, the fun of the game cannot simply be reduced to relating fun to winning, and relatedly, lack of fun to losing.

The actual spinning of the dreidel, which might be best described by Caillois' ilinx (vertigo) highlighting mastery and ability, which again, is part of the fun of playing with any top, regardless of outcome. So, doubling the amount of spins by every player would double their amount of enjoyment.

It is the duration of the spin, the time of the unknown, which can best be associated with the alea (chance) of Caillois, and that is the time that can be best described as "fun". Obviously the more skilled one is at spinning, the longer that time lasts, but due to the laws of physics, it is a very finite amount of time.

Fun for the Spinner

The problem is, it is only fun for the spinner, and each player only spins 25% of the time. Moreover, while someone's else spin has a 25% chance of potentially helping you (if they need to increase the pot), there is a 50% chance that someone else's spin will affect you negatively. And that doesn't seem to be much fun. 

Simply put: The traditional dreidel is a non-cooperative zero-sum game. And to quote another chapter of the Opies' book, "'This is a very good game if you win,' remarked one informant." As the game of dreidel lasts as long as there is money to put in the pot, there are going to be at least several people who do not have fun during the game.

Four Colored Dreidel Bingo

In the home version of the Dreidel Bingo game I created, there are four colors represented on both the dreidels and the bingo cards.

• Each turn, the active player spins the dreidel twice: once to ascertain the color, and the second time - the letter. (Red Shin, Blue Hey, etc)
• And then all the players find the location of that dot on their unique and random Dreidel Bingo Card, and mark it down.

This means that every single spin represents possible chance for all players, and every player will find the correct colored circle on their bingo card. This is also unlike regular bingo, where the possibility exists that a number called may not be printed anywhere on your bingo card.

While the physical fun of the spin exists only for the active spinner, the fun associated with chance is experienced by all players during every turn. What is more is that there are three chances every round for someone to win something:

• the first to get one row of four in a row,
• the first to get two rows of four in a row,
• and the first to get three rows of four in row.

It is probabilistic that the same person will not win all three. The element of excitement or thrill does not subside simply because someone else wins, and every round represents a new start, unconnected with the round before.

And repeated over eight rounds, it is likely that all four players will win something. If you won in the previous round, you can't lose that win. It's like in a fair ground or a Skee-ball machine, where one player may win 10 tickets, and another may win 20 tickets, but they both still experience the thrill of winning.

Inventing Tradition

I've written many times about the idea of finding meaning in a new item. Whatever the reason, the dreidel became part of the tradition, and it has been linked to the concept of celebrating miracles. 

Randomness and Miracle

It is not lost on me that I first used algorithmic randomness and color while working on my Atomic Einstein Project in 2020.

“In other words, God tirelessly plays dice under laws which he has himself prescribed.”

Nothing is random, mathematically speaking. There are laws of nature, and we are able to observe patterns in nature. As [Einstein] said, “Look deep into nature, and then you will understand everything better.” 
From my "Einstein: Randomness in Nature", 2020

According to many rabbis and scholars, the idea of a miracle is not something happening from outside the laws of nature. It is that the laws of nature operated in a particular way at a specific time, resulting in a fortuitous event to occur.

This understanding can be illustrated by the home version of Dreidel Bingo. 

For any given player, the confluence of events which results in them winning a round can be described as "luck" (or even a "miracle"), but it's really just physics working in a way that seems to favor them in this scenario.

Nerdy Fun

As I noted above, the spin of the dreidel can be described as fun for several reasons. 

On a basic level, it is fun for the same reason why the spinning of any top is fun, and that is a type of fun which is correlated with skill and ability. On the other hand, it is fun for the same reason that roulette wheel is fun, and that is not because it requires any skill or ability, but rather it represents the unknown.

It is for this reason why research is fun, at least for me. I never have any idea what I will find, like the historical and scientific focus on the color of tops in a random volume on Children's Games.

Ritual Fun

I also randomly came across an early version of Clifford Geertz's essay titled "Deep Play: Notes on the Balinese Cockfight" which I first read while in graduate school on the same shelf in the Warburg Library. 

There are two aspects which seemed relevant to the topic at hand.

The Balinese never do anything in a simple way that they can contrive to do in a complicated one, and to this generalization cockfight wagering is no exception.

Geertz describes several systems of betting, which occur concurrently, including a very long footnote about the relevance of using the color names of the cocks for the purposes of quick identification. I only mention this this week to remind the reader the turkey is not named after the country, it is named because of its similarity in color to the turquoise stone.
 
I would contend that these several layers of bets and prop bets create situation in which the event is not all down to a single winner or loser, but many people are able to win in difference ways, allowing them to better enjoy the entire match, even if they lose overall.

But the other relevant aspect of the essay is the description of when the police came to break up the cockfight, and Geertz and his wife fled (just like everyone else) and ended up having tea with a random Balinese gentleman in his garden, who then lied to the police and provided them with an alibi. He continues that they became accepted by the larger community following that, including the Brahmana priest who would have nothing to do with cockfighting.

The fight is more than a game or gambling event, it's a communal ritual which brings everyone together. And that is what Geertz, the anthropologist, understood.

Playing the Game

And if it is a ritual, it's not about winning and losing, it literally is about playing the game.

I saw a translated quote by Claude Lévi-Strauss's La pensée sauvage (The Savage Mind) in an article titled "Can There Be Play in Ritual?" by Johannes Bronkhorst. It described a tribe in New Guinea called the Gahuku-Gama 

who have learnt football, but who will play, several days running, as many matches as are necessary for both sides to reach the same score [...] This is treating a game as a ritual.
...
Games thus appear to have a disjunctive effect: they end in the establishment of a difference between individual plays or teams where originally there was no indication of inequality. And at the end of the game they are distinguished into winners and losers. Ritual, on the other hand, is the exact inverse; it conjoins, for it brings about a union (one might even say communion in this context)...

In light of this, I'm not sure if Lévi-Strauss would call Dreidel Bingo a game or a ritual, but I'd hope he would have described it as "more than twice the amount of fun" of the traditional game of Dreidel.

Four-color home packs of Dreidel Bingo are available for purchase for $18 / £18 / €18, with free shipping before the first night of Hanukkah, at DreidelBingo.com. Additionally, on the website, there are six-color packs designed for organizational events starting at $1.80 / £1.80 / €1.80 a participant, providing an hour of ritual, communal fun. In fundraising, they more than pay for themselves.

If you have a list of people you want to purchase Dreidel Bingo for, please order the number of packs on the website, and email me the list and what you want the cards to say.

It goes without saying that Dreidel Bingo is a project to help support the Colorphilia's research.