Game Plan - Symmetry Magazine

With the onset of hi-tech gadgets aimed at keeping young family members amused on road trips, Adam McCulloch wonders if the traditional games of yesteryear are dead.

Are traditional road trip games dead? Even the bleating cry of “When are we going to be there?” is fast being drowned out by the “oohs” and “aahs” of back seat moviegoers, transfixed by mobile plasma screens. How are future generations going to benefit from the lessons of Car-Cricket or Punch-Buggy?

I recall the wonderful moment on a long drive when the last country radio station had been reduced to a whispered hiss. The car was quiet: the silence long. Eventually another car would pass and someone would pipe up, “Two runs” to signify that the game had started.

Eye spy was the easiest (but least satisfying). My brothers and I knew every object inside the car including all the possible insults — “I spy an idiot, Idiot”. Choosing objects outside the car only increased the risk of receiving a Chineese burn, especially if, by the time your sibling gave up, the object was two hundred kilometers behind at the Big Koala.

Number-plates offered many distractions, from collecting the letters A-Z in order to constructing sentences from the plate’s three letters. The number-plate JLB became Jared Loves Boogers. (With a brother named Jared, Victoria’s “J” series plates gave me a wealth of material, and well-deserved Chinese burns.) Another favourite was Car-Cricket. White cars were worth one run, red cars two, blue cars three, yellow cars four and black cars six. Spy an emergency vehicle and you’re out. The problem, if I recall correctly, was the density of traffic never quite matched the delicate pacing on which cricket relies. Our in-car World Series either resembled a five day test on Rohypnol or an un-scorably fast Twenty 20 match. Appealing for morbid young minds, the more gruesome Road-kill Cricket caused more controversy than Trevor Chappel bowling underarm. (Who’s to say the bloody smudge on the tarmac was a wallaby scoring two points or a dog causing a very rare runout?)

I’m very thankful that our family remained unaware of the delights of Punch-Buggy, one of the few full-contact road trip games. The rules were simple: if you saw a Volkswagen Beetle you got to punch your opponent. In spite of our vigor, our games were genteel compared to that of older kids. During the long hot summers young P-platers hooned around in crap-wagons playing Sauna. In this test of endurance, the driver cranked the heater up to roast and closed all the windows. The loser was the person forced to open their window first.

Even our parents enjoyed the odd game. Their favourite, I suspect, was tunnels whereby the entire squabbling back seat would hold their breath for the duration of the tunnel — they quickly changed the rules to include holding our breath between capital cities. It was in this way that our family hurled through the wheat fields of South Australia. I maintain that these road trip games made me a better person. To this day, when I see a dead snake on the road I think “four runs” and, by God, I can certainly hold my breath.

Words by Adam McCulloch. Originally published in Symmetry Magazine. The format has been altered to suit Tumblr.