The Joy of Traditional Games

(Christmas cards ... Tom Hodgkinson, his wife Victoria and their children)

By Tom Hodgkinson

Christmas is for games. This has been true ever since the festival was invented by Christian monks in the fourth century, and was also true of its pagan predecessors held around the winter solstice, such as the Scandinavian Yule and the Roman Saturnalia. Stop working, start playing. That was the idea. Winter is upon us, the snow falls outside, so it is time to suspend toil, light the fire, feast, dance, sing, give each other candles as presents and generally make merry. Christmas was particularly playful in the middle ages. "There were always many private parties at all levels of society," writes the historian Ronald Hutton, "and a great deal of card-playing and board-gaming."

And so it is today – but only sort of. As in medieval times, Christmas gives us the chance to take a break from work. We stay indoors and we give each other presents. It's a festival of domesticity. Games are still a feature of the modern Christmas but, very sadly, those excellent, cheap pastimes such as knucklebones, cards and dice have been shoved aside by expensive, profit-making, electricity-draining horrors such as the Nintendo Wii, the DS, the PS3 and the evil Xbox. Packs of playing cards just don't cut it any more. They simply do not add enough to the gross domestic product. Instead, we pay multinationals huge sums of money to provide us with games and we sit on the sofa and dumbly play them. Merriment has been delegated to Sony.

Although I played a lot of computer games in my 20s, now I have children of my own I hate them with a passion. To me there is no more depressing sight than a five-year-old staring at a screen, unsmiling, mouse in hand. Besides whatever dreadful things this prolonged exposure to screens is doing to their brains, computer games tend to be solitary affairs, and produce little laughter. Computers tend to separate us from each other – Mum's on the laptop, Dad's on the iPad, teenagers are on Facebook, toddlers are on the DS, and so on.

It is the same with singing and dancing at Christmas. We no longer sing and dance. We don't know how to. Instead, we watch other people sing and dance on the television screen. Christmas, which was once a festival of active enjoyment, has turned into a binge of purely passive pleasures. We veg out on the sofa – "chilling" is, I believe, the modern term – and enrich corporations.

But there is hope. A new book, Parlour Games for Modern Families, celebrates the old pastimes: dice, cards, pencil and paper games, as well as parlour games such as charades, which are completely free. It does a great job of reminding us of forgotten games: do you remember the Minister's Cat, where players have to find adjectives to describe the minister's cat using the same letter of the alphabet? The minister's cat is an adventurous cat, the minister's cat is an amorous cat, and so on. I note also that there are some good fighting games, suitable for the more violent members of your family. The Sock Game sounds appealing. Two players pelt each other with socks.

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I could add a few of my own invention. We like to play Bucking Daddy, where a small child sits on my back while I walk around the room on all fours and try to buck him off. Wrestling Time is a cost-free favourite. And Tickle or Trap, where a small child runs towards me and shouts whether it wants to be tickled or trapped.

I know it's a cliche to talk about the old days when we made our own fun, but it really is true. And it's also true that self-made fun is more fun than fun that you buy. The advantages of the old games over the new are many. For one thing, they need no batteries. Also, they do not crash. They are indestructible. They can be hurled against the wall with great force, and they will not break. You can slip them in a pocket and travel with them, with no need for a tangle of chargers and plugs. They offer almost infinite variety. They can be used to play 1,001 games. A pack of playing cards is also far more beautiful, charming and romantic than a Nintendo Wii, and only the most wilfully perverse relativist would disagree. And they will stand the test of time: the Nintendo Wii looks dated after a year, whereas a pack of cards will still be in use in 1,000 years.

In their familiar form, with the four suits and the court cards, playing cards date from the 14th century, and may well have been invented by the Crusaders, who were great gamblers. The medieval authorities made various attempts to suppress cards: an edict of the provost of Paris from 1397 forbids people to play at "tennis, bowls, dice, cards or nine-pins" on working days. In 17th century England, the fun-hating, Christmas-banning Puritans attributed their introduction to the devil.

Dice, which probably evolved from knucklebones, predate classical antiquity. Gambling with dice was popular with the Greek upper classes, and was an almost invariable accompaniment to the symposium or drinking banquet. In ancient Rome, dice-playing was a central feature of Saturnalia. During the middle ages, dicing was the favourite pastime of the knights, and dicing schools, scholae deciorum, were established. Dice have always been associated with a carefree attitude to life, as this Edwardian rendition of a fragment of Virgil testifies:

What ho! Bring dice and good wine!

Who cares for the morrow?

Live – so calls grinning Death –

Live, for I come to you soon!

What ho! Indeed! Live for the moment!

Children love these games. Take Picture Consequences. This is a game I used to play in my youth, but which, thanks to the advent of the computer, I had completely forgotten about. It's the one where you take turns to draw different parts of the body. The drawings are unfolded at the end, with hilarious results. I rather gingerly suggested that we all play it together one evening after supper. I was expecting to meet with a wall of resistance from our computerised children. But far from it: they all eagerly threw themselves into the game, and absolutely loved it. When it was time to wind up and go to bed, my eight-year-old daughter pleaded: "Daddy, can we play one more round, please, please, please?"

It was the same with all the games we have tried from this marvellous book. Wink murder was a great favourite and, again, the children now constantly plead with me to play it. To test the book further, I opened it at random and played the first game that I saw. It was called Mad Scientist. You blindfold the participants and feed them small items of food. They have to guess what the foods are. Again, the children found this absolutely thrilling.

When we play real games, our senses are heightened. The body and mind become alert rather than passive. And that is true even with simple games such as Beggar My Neighbour. The book's authors, Myfanwy Jones and Spiri Tsintziras, mention a lovely moment in The Pickwick Papers where Pickwick enjoys a game of whist by the fire after dinner: "Mr Pickwick thought he had never felt so happy in his life, and at no time so much disposed to enjoy, and make the most of, the passing moment." And think about the simple thrill of playing hide and seek, little hearts thumping.

For an idle parent such as myself, it is surely worth teaching the children these games in the hope that they will later play them among themselves, leaving you free to do something else. Because, let's face it, not everyone likes games. My own dear mother used to shriek "I hate games" when the idea of playing Monopoly was mooted. And my wife, Victoria, has been known to storm off to bed at adult dinners when the Perudo came out. She likes talking and finds games a waste of time. But even she has been enjoying the games in this book.

Real games are also, of course, profoundly more eco-friendly than your plastic, electricity-guzzling electronic games. They require no oil, no energy, no power. And real games will survive and thrive long after the iPad is a distant and comical memory, as relevant as the Commodore PET, ZX Spectrum or Space Invaders.

They are also infinitely more creative. With a computer game, we simply move through somebody else's creation. But with real games, we are active participants: we draw, write, think, imagine, act and use our memories. They sharpen our brains, whereas computer games and television deaden them. It is this kind of creativity that GK Chesterton, in his 1929 essay The Spirit of Christmas, applauded. He wrote: "Christmas might be creative," and he called for people to invent new games as well as play the old. He also criticised those modern types who "cannot amuse themselves; they are too used to being amused", showing that our attraction to passive forms of entertainment is nothing new.

Jones and Tsintziras offer an excellent piece of practical advice, which is to make a games box. This could be an old shoebox or similar, and should contain a pack of cards, dice and paper and pencils (note: we must remark on the supremacy of the pencil over the pen. Pencils are self-destroying: they leave no trace. The act of drawing a line with the pencil actually reduces its size. Pencils are, we might say, planet-savingly auto-destructive.)

This fully equipped games box can sit in the kitchen and will be brought out on a rainy day; it will be a boon to a family like us, who are always losing things.

The snow is falling outside my window, and the school is closed. The fires are roaring and when I have finished my work, I will call the children together and try a few more of the games in this book. There are so many more to play, and I love the names: Blind Potatoes, Hot Buttered Beans, Pass the Orange, The Matchbox Game and of course, the oldest of them all, Knucklebones. With a few of these under our belt, it should be a very merry Christmas.