Well, yesterday was quite the roller-coaster: up, up, up, and then a serious plunge down. I was invited to come play the Know-Your-Haiku card game with a meditation group this week, and then a friend told me she wants to play the game (hopefully her husband will join in too!), and then another friend is going to play the game with me tomorrow AND we're going out to eat: so it will be yummy food and a fun game.  That was all the "up" part of the day.

Then... the downer. I had been eagerly awaiting news about the Haiku Society of America conference because they had said we would hear on September 15, and indeed around midnight last night I got an email, only to find out my proposal was rejected.

Yep, rejected.

I won't lie: I am so disappointed. I have really poured myself into these games for several months now, and I figured that an online conference (it's the HSA online conference in November) would have plenty of room for all kinds of presentations. But apparently they don't have room, and I didn't make the cut.

Meanwhile, I'm not giving up! This has actually been the story of my academic life: rejection just makes me work harder until I can convince people that my eccentric work really does have value. And, usually, I succeed... eventually. Every time I've played these haiku games with people, both in person and online, the response has been really positive, so I definitely want to keep playing and to keep improving the games with the feedback I get every time we play.

Plus now that I have discovered how to use full-sheet labels to print my card decks, I have much bigger ambitions for what I can do with in-person card games in addition to the Zoom games online. Here's the best thing: by printing the card contents instead of writing by hand, I can start doing card games with haiku in Japanese! But I'll save that new project for another post. 

Anyway, I will definitely submit a games-based proposal to HSA next year too... with more and better games even than I have now!

Below is a screenshot of the materials for the current iteration of Know-Your-Haiku played in person with a deck of cards:

The colored cards have haiku features on them, and the white cards have haiku poems; these texts are printed on labels and stuck to the cards, while sources for the poems are handwritten on the backs of the cards. (The game can be played online too, with each player supplying their own deck of haiku poems; only one player needs to also have a features deck.)

Here's how the game is played:

1. Learn. Together we quickly go over the main features of haiku using a 1-page handout, which briefly discusses both haiku style and haiku content (similar to the features slideshow I use in the Zoom games).
2. Draw haiku cards. Each player then draws 4 haiku cards. We take a couple minutes so each person can read their poems and think about them. If they don't understand or don't really like any of their poems, they can return those to the stack and draw new poems. Once everybody has 4 poems they like, the play can begin.
3. First player. The dealer turns up a feature card. The first player (on dealer's left) looks to see if they have a card which exhibits that feature. If so, they read the poem out loud, slowly, for the other players to hear, and then they put it next to the feature card; this is the "pot" for that turn.
   Commenting about each haiku poem during the course of play is highly encouraged!
   When a player plays a card, they then draw a new card so that they now have four cards again; every player should always have four haiku to work with.
   But if the first player doesn't have a haiku with that feature, they pass.
4. Next player. The next player (play moves left) then adds a card if they have a haiku with that feature, reading out loud. If they don't have a matching card, they pass. 
5. Play continues. Play continues until all players have had a chance to play a card. 
6. Back to first player. The player who went first then gets another chance: if they have another card with that feature, they can add it to the pot.
7. Pot winner. The player who LAST put a card in the pot wins the whole pot for that hand. (By getting to go last, the first player has a big advantage each time.)
8. Play advances. After a pot has been won, the player to the left of the first player is now first player.
   If all players pass and the pot is empty, the dealer turns up another feature card and the first player gets another chance to be first player.
9. Game over. The game is over after a fixed amount of time or after a fixed number of rounds (after the dealer is first player, that is the end of a complete round). The player who has taken the most cards in the pots is the winner of the game.

In my experience playing the game, however, most people don't even think about counting the cards at the end of the game. The point of the game is not really to win; the point of the game is to find haiku poetry that you like, to share haiku poetry with other people, and to discuss the poetry in detail. Some of the features are simple objective features, like the number of syllables or the punctuation style, but other features are more subjective and can prompt some good discussions, like what does it mean for a haiku poem to show "compassion" as a feature, for example.

I have a more advanced version of the game where instead of feature cards, there are quotation cards with insightful observations about haiku, and that version of the game leads to even more discussion. The "quotations" version is for people who are already familiar with the basic features of haiku, and I am hoping that the meditation group will want to play that version of the game after they learn about the basic features this week!

For me, preparing the quotations deck has been very educational, since it motivates me to find the best quotations in the haiku books that I am reading, writing them down so I can use them in the game; I play a solitaire version of that game on my own. So, no matter what the HSA decided about the games (sigh........), I've still got lots to do and lots to learn, and games are definitely how I like to do that learning. So, let the games go on!