David Parlett. Photo: Dan Glimne.
Interview: David Parlett
Games inventor David Parlett talks to Ian Kirk-Smith about Quakerism and his career
Three subjects dominate the hundreds of books that line the shelves of David Parlett’s study in his South London house: games, language and theology. They reflect the concerns and interests that have dominated the life of a genial, courteous and kindly Friend, who is known and respected across the globe as one of the leading figures in the specialist field of board and card games.
A games scholar, historian and translator, he has published many books, including The Oxford History of Board Games and The Oxford Guide to Card Games. He is also a restless inventor of board and card games. His Hare and Tortoise game remains a bestseller throughout the world. He is blessed with a dry sense of humour and says he has a ‘compartmentalised classificatory brain’ – more attuned to Robert Barclay’s Apology than George Fox’s Journal.
David Parlett is, and has been for many decades, an active Friend at Croydon Meeting. He has been fortunate in making his recreation a lifetime’s enterprise and recently talked to the Friend about his life and work.
What is your memory of the first games you played?
Like everybody I played childhood games: Ludo, Snakes and Ladders, and so on. The key moment was when I went to visit a cousin. He’d been given a compendium of games, which included dominoes with coloured spots – a complete novelty to him!
During my teens, as soon as I got a new game, I started creating variations of it. I think all good games inventors do this. A friend and I made a version of Monopoly based on our locality – Tooting. I was inventing and modifying games right through my teens and into my twenties.
By chance or providence, I happened in 1972 to see in a bookshop the first issue of a magazine called Games and Puzzles. It advertised for people who were interested in games and who liked writing. They had a voluntary games testing panel and I joined it. I wrote articles and several series and for a brief period was the editor. I demonstrated my prototype of Hare and Tortoise to the games testing panel and it went down well. The founder was also a games agent. He placed it with an excellent company. They wanted something new. The original 1974 version is beautiful.
What attracts you to games?
My father was a motor mechanic. What fascinates me is the mechanics. What you have beneath the surface. It is the underlying mechanism of games that really interests me and has always interested me. A good game should work beautifully, like a machine. It’s that combination of mechanism and rules. I think it is also the reason I have a fascination with language and why I did a degree in Modern Languages.
What is the background behind Hare and Tortoise? It has now sold two millions copies and been translated into ten languages.
I invented Hare and Tortoise first as an abstract game. I wasn’t thinking about animals. I had an idea for a ‘race’ game with a ‘first home’. My idea was that you start with units of energy. You can spend them slowly or you could spend them quickly, and initially make a lot of progress. If you do not spend your energy units quickly, you lag behind at the start, but you are conserving energy. This immediately brought Aesop’s fable to mind and units of energy naturally became carrots! The theme grew out of the mechanism. Initially, all my inventions for games begin as just symbols on a page. I think a good game has got to have a good underlying mechanism.
What about chance?
Well, there are different kinds of chance. You cannot get away from chance but a better word, I feel, for chance in games is unpredictability. All my games are games of skill. I think skill includes the use of imagination – but this has to be managed.
And gambling?
I hate gambling. They use the words in promoting the National Lottery ‘Play here’ and it annoys me. It is not play. Play is a much more dignified and noble thing. So many people associate games with gambling. I think this is one of the reasons that games are not taken as seriously in Britain as they should be. They are associated, in the mind of many people, with gambling and with children. This is a pity. I do not invent games for children, though many enjoy them. I invent games for my friends and myself.
What is your religious background?
I went to a Church of England primary school. It was only when I took confirmation, though, that I discovered I had problems with mainstream Christian doctrine. Two of the most influential books in my childhood were the Bible and The Children’s Encyclopaedia. One questioned, in many ways, the other. I remember once I heard a talk at a church youth club by an anti-evolutionist and I asked if I might give a talk offering an opposite viewpoint. I was refused and that was a turning point for me. When I was at university in Aberystwyth I had two Friends who had been to Quaker schools and they always had the most sensible arguments. I was about twenty. So, I became interested in Quakers. Then, later in my life, I read Quaker by Convincement by Geoffrey Hubbard, and I realised that I had been a Quaker all my life. I went to my Local Meeting in Croydon, in 1980, and have been there ever since.
You are an active Quaker. You’ve served on committees, been a clerk and helped out on Talking Friends. What was it about Quakerism that attracted you?
I felt I was among people who were more interested in who you were than in what you believed. I also like our diversity of opinions. I am not happy with the word ‘belief’. I prefer ‘interpretations of experience’. I was amongst people who were prepared to share their experiences of the spiritual. I am in the Nontheist Friends Network, though I do not like the title that much, and my wife, Barbara is from a Methodist background. She is now a Baptist and she keeps me on my toes. Both our children went to a Quaker school – Saffron Walden.
What are your thoughts on Meeting for Worship?
I must admit I allow my mind to wander, initially, in Meeting. I often use a mantra to help me. I use, on the in breath, the words ‘…in the beginning’ and on the outbreath ‘was the word’. I find it helpful. ‘The word’ is a metaphor for language, which is so important for me. Humanity, I believe, began when people acquired language and so enabled an apprehension of God to emerge. I believe God is a universal potential waiting to be realised. I also believe that ministry can be spoken or silent. You can have a Meeting with no words but it has a meaning and you, somehow, have to apprehend that meaning. I need to be part of a worshipping group. You know whether or not a Meeting has been ‘gathered’ and you’ll find Friends saying, after the Meeting, whether it was. I like a Meeting when ministry connects on a theme. I strongly believe that a Meeting for Worship, though, is not a ‘Meeting for Silence’. Silence is the medium in which the worship takes place and it can involve silence or spoken ministry.
And God?
God is a very much-misused word. When I came to Quakerism I became reconciled to the sort of language I had been disillusioned with before – because I realised the same words were being used, in Quakerism, in a very different way.
You are world famous as an inventor of games and author. You are a visiting professor of Game Design at the University of Suffolk. You have won international acclaim and awards. You are an inventor. What do you feel about being an inventor of games?
An inventor of games is like a poet or a composer. I regard a game as a work of art. It can be appreciated in the same terms. It will contain some germ of an idea that can be expanded and lead on to something else. Edward Elgar, the composer, was once asked where his ideas came from. He said: ‘From the air’! I feel like that.
You seem to have been born with an insatiable curiosity.
I guess I have. I have always wanted to find out about things. We should open our minds and our brain and explore this wonderful world. That is why I like Quakerism. I once learnt a poem when I was very young and I still remember the words very fondly:
‘The world is so full of such wonderful things
that I’m sure we should all be happy as kings.’
Katarenga, invented by David Parlett and published in October by the German company Huch Spiele, was launched at the Spiel Essen in the autumn. It is available in England. His card game Chicken Out!, published by Gibson, won a Toy World Creative Play award for eight- to eleven-year-olds this year. Further information: www.parlettgames.uk, www.davpar.eu
