Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article? Or are you expected to have to google it?
Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.
It's much more likely to have died out because of smartphones. The boredom of the pre-smartphone era led to all kinds of ingenuity. Kids were bored so they found ways to not be bored. Nowadays everybody is addicted their phone, simple pleasures such as violently smashing two nuts together no longer have the same pull.
They are where I live, both elementary and secondary schools. The first results are promising; kids have more concentration, interact socially with each other more, etc.
I mean if it's a school where they also have to carry laptops and use digital schedules I don't think it makes a difference, but it's a good first step.
One issue was that each phone also has a camera, so people would seek out / make trouble on purpose, spy on people and post it online, etc.
I saw on the wikipedia page the following totally stupid reason for the ban in some schools:
In 2004, several schools banned conkers due to fear of causing anaphylactic shock in pupils with nut allergies. Health advisers said that there were no known dangers from conkers for nut-allergy sufferers, although some may experience a mild rash through handling them.[20]
Interesting, as conkers are seeds (not a nut) - so shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy - though no doubt some people are allergic to them.
It's not quite that simple. The line isn't quite as hard between seed and 'nut'. Namely people may commonly refer to things as a nut when it is a seed.
e.g. a Peanut is a seed, as are almonds, cashews, walnuts.
This rabbit hole goes deep. Berries are particularly poorly named - stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries but tomatoes and bananas are.
This is only a problem if you mistake words for scientific classifications, instead of ways to convey meaning between communicating humans.
Very few people using the word "berry" are discussing scientific classifications. It would be worse, not better, to make terms more scientifically precise. Berry refers to small juicy fruits, often in bright colors.
I was sticking with the context of the GP though. Maybe its pedantic to point out that many berries aren't technically berries, but that's much the same as the point that many nuts are actually seeds.
> stawberries, blackberries, and blueberries aren't actually berries
Yes they are
> tomatoes and bananas are
No they’re not.
The word “berry” is much older and more fundamental to language than the technical botanical definition that a tiny minority of people know or care about.
You clearly understand that there's a difference between the colloquial name and the scientific definition. In the context of the GP comment, the discussion was related to nuts that are poorly named (like peanuts and tree nuts that are actually seeds).
Strawberries aren't berries and tomatoes are. You can say that's wrong all you like, but in the context of how they are botanically classified rather than what we named them you're incorrect.
Imagine if someone said "this chair is an object", and you told them they were wrong, because in Object-Oriented Programming, an "object" is an abstract entity in a computer program, not a thing in the physical world.
They have never heard of object-oriented programming and yet, they're not wrong. You're the one who is wrong by assuming the terms made up by a niche field override common language used by everyone.
> I get the point that we call them berries even if they aren't
That wasn’t the point. The point is that they are berries, by the real definition of berries, which is not the different definition used by a tiny minority of mostly irrelevant people in a specific context.
What reason is there to prefer the botanical definition to the common one (that says a berry is a small colorful fruit)? I can see none. On the other hand, I can see many reasons to prefer the common definition: it is older, it is used by far more people, and it more closely corresponds to what we care about in real life (because almost everyone spends more time preparing and eating meals than they do classifying plant parts, so the culinary meaning is more important).
Scientists are not in charge of the whole human experience. They do not get to decide on behalf of everyone else that the salient defining characteristic of berries is not how they taste or what dishes you would use them to prepare, but rather what part of the plant they come from.
> as conkers are seeds (not a nut) - so shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy
I take issue with this, and in fact we can see how the pedantic scientific meaning caused confusion about the actual underlying facts: people with allergies to what are commonly called "nuts" can in fact be allergic to things that according to the pedantic scientific definition are "seeds". So the OP is actually wrong to say it shouldn't be an issue for someone with a nut allergy!
I disagree with this on multiple levels. For one, the word "berry" has multiple definitions, and I don't see why the botanical definition should be the only one that counts. If anything, the culinary one should have primacy, as that is the one that is far more relevant to far more people. Botanical jargon is useful to botanists but not very useful in general. And to descend to pedantry, blueberries should not have been on your list of examples. They are berries in both the culinary and the botanical senses of the word.
Very true - I'll admit that while I knew that peanuts are legumes not nuts, I didn't know that the others you mentioned were not nuts. I learn something new every day (and my son has a severe allergy to many of them - though not all - so I should know these things!).
And while I know my son can safely play with conkers, we most certainly have not tried to eat one!
Ultimately it depends on the semantic meaning when you say 'nut'. They are not 'nuts' in terms of the technical definition, but they are in terms of 'what most people think of when you say nut'.
There's also some things with nut in their name. c.f. Nutmeg, coconut.
As others have mentioned, same kind of deal with 'berry'.
And to follow up, if you're travelling abroad it's worth noting that some countries have different naming structures/separate out the families of 'nuts'. So be careful if you're asking if something has 'nuts' in, there can be a language barrier. e.g. tree nuts vs. Lupins (peanut family).
I'm one of that 'too young to be a millennial, too old to be a zoomer' cohort and we definitely played it in the '00s, I vaguely remember the rumours of it being banned encouraged its popularity quite a bit. They also banned British bulldog around that time so we renamed it 'hot dog' and carried on!
<The reason? Schools have banned the game of conkers due to health and safety reasons.>
I understood that was a myth created from a few isolated instances and the medias general desire to wind people up. I don't know why it has died out mind.
It is a myth that it was banned nationally for health & safety (“nanny state”) reasons, as was incorrectly reported in the press (mostly in the red-top papers), but some schools certainly did ban the game.
This was usually because it became a tool for bullying: deliberate hand hits in games, deliberate hand hits in other contexts with complaints of an attack fobbed off as “we were playing conckers and there was an accident”, and so on.
Also like any playground sport there were gambling issues (I'm not sure if they were serious issues, or just if some schools took them too seriously, but I remember there being a glut of warnings about it when I was in secondary level education, around the same time as some bullying concern related bans).
The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.
Kids will be kids and bullies will always find an excuse to pick on someone if they want to. Just deal with it one-off when a game gets out of hand and let kids play games and learn social skills along the way.
> The idea of banning a game because it can lead to bullying is ridiculous in my opinion.
It was more banning the tool without which the game can not be played, but yes as someone who was subjected to bullies at various times in my education history I can say you are right about them just finding something else.
I didn't say it was right, just that it happened.
The problem that causes these ineffectual bans is simply that the school's head (and other authorities) feel the need to be seen to be proactively doing something, anything, about the bullying problem they otherwise officially deny having¹, especially when local press have got onto the issue and are stirring up angst amongst the parents, and when they can't think of anything better a target is picked and a simple ban gets announced.
----
[1] It always amazed me how soon after a claim that we don't have a bullying problem in the school, there would be a call to celebrate an action that was supposed to reduce the bullying problem we didn't have…
Quote: "Realistically the risk from playing conkers is incredibly low and just not worth bothering about. If kids deliberately hit each other over the head with conkers, that's a discipline issue, not health and safety."
Not a myth. I went to school during the twilight of the conker. It absolutely died because risk-averse teachers banned it, to howls of protest from us kids.
Drilling/punching the hole in a conker might be vaguely dangerous, and you're not supposed to carry a stabby tool at school anymore. But the game itself is not that dangerous, though that won't have stopped some schools from banning it.
I'm between your ages and we played it. Not a lot, it definitely occupies a larger area of national psyche than it's played I think, but we did. Yes school banned it, but when did that ever stop us?
Imagine swinging two stones (many techniques to harden conkers including the game itself evolving the brutes by elimination) together at high speed with fingers and faces in very near proximity.
I can't really visualize the amount of momentum involved, or how sharp the chestnut is. Is that specifically about eye injuries, or could it hurt someone some other way?
After writing the above comment, I watched videos of people playing conkers and now I understand how it could, in theory, cause an eye injury. It was hard for me to visualize how close the defender's conker is to the defender's body before seeing the video. I was somehow wrongly imagining that it was being supported on a much longer string or with the help of other objects somehow.
Yes. Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school. My dad seemed to find the concept of fake conkers amusing enough to take it upon himself to craft me a resin filled one, although it didn't fool any kids.
In more recent years a bus driver complained to me conkers are not legal tender as I placed some down while in search of change. Around this time of year you will find most people have their pockets filled with conkers. </dev/random>
> Although the last time I played or heard anyone discuss conkers as a game was in the 1990s at school.
Same, but with peonzas/trompos[0]. It's interesting since it's also about breaking the other player's item thanks to the inertia provided by a string.
In short, they're hardcore spinning tops: large, generally with a metal tip, spun much faster due to the string winding, and as mentioned, the objective is to crack the other player's.
I did not know it was possible to break those things to be honest. We made a circle with a string or something, and then let the two spinning tops (as we called them) duke it out, and the loser is the one knocked out of the ring.
Ours were made from a very tough plastic, either nylon or HDPE.
As well as the old myth that putting a conker in the corner of a room will ward off spiders building a web there. The veracity of which, attest to I cannot.
It is a very, very British thing. A generation or two ago, almost everyone played it at school and it was Very Serious Business. I guess you needed something to occupy yourself before Pokemon Go was invented.
I have fond memories of playing conkers in primary school. Sometimes you got a rapped knuckle but children's sports is full of cuts and grazes, and it didn't hurt as much as slaps anyway. The main issue was that some kids would inevitably harden their conkers by putting them in the oven or lacquering them, and so on. But spotting that was part of the charm.
Being of a geeky bent, I tried them all. It never worked. They go brittle and shatter, or they go soft and fall apart.
(When I was a kid, conkers were so prized we chucked sticks at them to try to get them to drop. So it was a bit of a shock to me when they started just being left where they fell. Kids today, off my lawn, uphill both ways, etc etc).
It’s not even true, no one had Tamagotchis two generations ago unless your generations are 15 years or so… Or am I counting generations completely wrong? Are kids these days two generations removed from millennials?
Well, sorry to be a bummer again, but indeed kids these days are from the Alpha generation, which is two generations from Millenials (GenZ being in-between) :
I feel there is enough in the article to build an image of the game in your head: I'm imagining a game game where two people trying to destroy the other person's chestnut by whirring and hitting the chestnuts on the end of strings. Now I'm going to go check my mental image against wikipedia.
You make a hole through your 'conker' (horse chestnut, not the edible type) and thread a string or a bootlace through it.
Then you take turns.
One holds their string still and lets the conker hang down, the other gets a swing at it with their conker. Whoever's conker lasts the longest is the winner.
There were all sorts of rumours about baking them, or soaking in vinegar or what have you to harden them up, but effectively it's the sort of game that a bunch of kids can play under a horse chestnut tree with relatively few props.
Using a steel 'ringer' in that circumstance would be the worst sort of unsportsmanlike behaviour.
If my memory serves me: you used to announce your conker as a “two-er”, or “three-er”, for example, to inform your opponent how many conkers your particular conker had previously claimed. If your opponent decided to challenge you and won then they would claim your “three-er” and add its win total to their own. So a “two-er” would become a “five-er”.
A gimlet? Hammer and a thick-ish nail? Honestly I can't remember how we used to do it. Might even have used a hand drill at some point. They're fairly soft when you've made a hole in the shell, so you might get away with a screwdriver?
When at school we probably made do with a compass (the drawing kind), as we all had them. I'm sure that resulted in a pretty high rate of conkers being destroyed before they could be strung, and a lot of ruined compasses.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Generally not, though the game isn't without its minor hazards :)
We used to have a BBQ skewer that we used for various purposes, including adding holes to belts. We'd heat it up on the gas hob and then burn a hole through the conker. I actually still have the same one I've inherited in my kitchen drawer. If you have an awl, you could use that instead, but I'd recommend heating it to get a cleaner hole.
You need to use a long enough string. Old cotton shoe laces are actually perfect as the aglets make threading that much easier.
The force of one conker against another is enough to sometimes make it spin round, but not enough to do any real damage. You just need a long enough string that your fingers are not in the firing range. Obviously there is a vanishingly small risk of a piece of conker ending up in the eye but I never witnessed that or any other injury happening. The biggest problem was usually upset kids when their prized conker got destroyed.
I'm not from Britain, but we used to craft with chestnuts. We always used a small hand drill (Wikipedia tells me it's called a gimlet). I assume it's the same in Britain
The memoir Where Did You Go? Out. What Did You Do? Nothing describes using a heated icepick.
You take a chestnut, and you hook the ice pick. You wait until nobody is in the kitchen, and then one kid presses down on the pilot-light button so that a long delicate blue finger of flame comes out, and the other kid puts the ice pick in the flame until it is red-hot. When it is, he bores a hole in the chestnut. You do as many as you can until somebody comes and asks you what you are doing, and then, according to your standing in the family, that day, you either plead, argue, or say, “Oh, jeez,” and slink away.
> Also, doesn't the conker spiral around your hand hitting it and hurting you?
Not usually in my experience, the string isn't that short and you're holding it at one end. Injury is still possible though, but that's part of the fun!
It's not a sport, it's something that kids used to do pre 1950s. People were poor, didn't have manufactured "stuff", so they made their own toys out of simple things like stones, sticks, old wheels etc Football was likely popular because a single ball could keep a while bunch of kids happy for an afternoon (if someone could actually afford a ball).
I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
> And nowadays people don't really grow up at all. They continue playing right into adulthood and old age, with luxury toys.
It would be nice if we stopped stigmatising play. Growing up doesn't mean we stop playing. Acting grown-up might mean stop playing, but it's just that — an act, and a likely childish one. Real adults don't give up on what brings them joy.
Back when I was a teenager, I used to also have similar thoughts as the person you replied to about not playing with toys because it was childish behavior.
Luckily, I grew out of that and I do not feel self conscious when playing as an adult or being goofy.
>To carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
> I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Did you grow up in a city? I'm mid 30s and we used to regularly play conkers in the village where I grew up.
I don’t mind the nit on word choice but in my mind a game becomes a sport by the existence of a Championship match and title.
Also, I think this follows how most sports come to be. They are started as child play, when we have the time/leisure/energy, then they eventually become something some of us want to continue with as adults and the rest of us will pay to watch because we enjoy the sport so much (often fostered during youth play).
There are dozens of sports that I have no interest in simply because I wasn’t exposed to them as a kid. As an older American, we did not play Soccer(football) when I was a kid. It’s pretty popular now and my kid has had me go to professional games and such but I still just don’t really understand the game/rules/strategy or fully appreciate the difficulty of things that occur. I could learn I suppose but I still just have little effort in doing so as a middle aged person. I could say the same about Cricket and a handful of other sports that I never played as a kid but know are popular elsewhere. Likewise, when people move to the US, it usually takes them a while and likely never fully get into American Football and Baseball. Basketball has become more global and so I do expats that follow that sport. More likely than not, they follow the sports that interested them as a kid and just live with the time zone issue.
A minor correction (though I agree with all the rest of your comment): baseball is also popular in several countries, just a different set of countries than basketball (most of them are in Latin America or East Asia).
Round here, in the olden days the kids would fashion a crude type of ball called "basse" by cutting up a broken bicycle inner tube into a bunch of small rings, threading all the rings on a piece of string and tying this mess up in a particular way to form a roughly spherical object.
It does not roll well at all, but the kids stand around in a circle and kick the basse around to each other, trying to keep it in the air. If you cause it to fall to the ground, you lose.
I'm an 80s kid and we passionately played conkers at my primary school. We used to hang them on shoe laces or string, by burning a hole through the middle with a heated awl or kebab rod.
Cheating was always rife with people using all manner of techniques to try to preserve and strengthen their conkers: soaking in vinegar, baking them, coating in nail varnish, &c.
Pretty sad to hear it's fallen out of fashion, as it was good, cheap fun and, with long enough string, not very dangerous.
I played conkers in the 90's, my kids (7 and 10) play conkers now. We even have debates on whether applying nail polish is considered cheating - it is, it totally is! What's more, I was brought up in a poor area of Manchester, they've been brought up in quite an affluent area of Oxfordshire - so couldn't be any different!
I went to first school (3 tier system, first, middle, high) in the 1970s and we played conkers in the school yard in the 1970s, and into the mid 80s in middle school too. By the time I reached high school they'd been banned.
I see parents and children collecting horse chestnuts in the local market square and arboretum still today though, and it brings back fond memories of rapped knuckles and entanglement "clingy-niner's" or "clinchies" in some games, depending who you were playing with.
I think whether or not you grew up with a significant local population of 'conker trees' probably had a lot more to do with it than age. I'm younger than you (and didn't grow up 'poor') and we played too, 'pre-50s' is ridiculous.
> I'm almost 50, and to me the image of boys playing conkers only comes from books or TV based in early 1900s UK. I've never actually seen anyone play it.
Extremely common for kids to play this at least into the mid 2000s where i'm from, i moved away so i don't know if they still do
I played conkers in the 80s, everybody in the school did. People had tricks like coating their conkers in gloss etc. but it was still a widespread game.
Played football and British bulldog type stuff too but conkers came in season for a bit every year.
Yeah, very much fron the 1950's 'Beano' era, but it did still go on in the mid 90s, at least in a wild throwing them about the place as entertainment. It was indeed a simpler time.
A lot more kids in the background smoking cigarettes around the bike sheds as well, but that's another story :)
I emigrated to Britain. These sorts of things mystified me for the longest time.
Yes. Picture some British parents and their child on a walk near a pond, river, canal or whatever. The child sees a swan. The parents will say something like "don't get too close dear, it could break your arm".
Swans are aggressive so it's probably not terrible advice, but not because they go around breaking people's arms specifically.
The idea that a swan can "break a man's arm with a blow of its wing" is (or was) ingrained enough into the British psyche that Peter Cook's comic creation, Arthur Streeb-Greebling, once said of his mother that she could "break a swan's wing with a blow of her nose."
In the Netherlands we are also taught a swan could break your arm if you get too close. I don't know if it's true or not because I've been too scared to find out.
They're not going to hold you down and break it with a tire iron .. but I'll bet for certain that Swans are responsible for arms being broken.
They've got a pretty savage and scary charge to them, it's highly likely they've startled more than one person in a park who've turned to run, tripped and fallen across steps or rockery edges and come out badly injured.
They are also able to swing their wings quite rapidly while charging you. In this way they can throw a surprisingly hard punch. But not break bones in healthy humans - kids included.
Black Swans in Perth, herdsman Lake and elsewhere, in the 1980s during breeding season (and likely still today) fully charged people and had the mass to knock over more than one kid or small teenager .. and scare the bejeebus out of many adults.
As I said, and supported by your link, I can't see a swan directly breaking a human bone - but they sure as hell can knock one arse over by charging and causing a step back fall over. That'll do some damge in some cases, easy.
I've never been charged by a swan, but I have been knocked into a ditch by the slightly smaller but no less aggressive Canada Goose while biking. No broken bones, but I did have to straighten the alignment of the wheels on my bike.
The smell test here is that swans are flying birds and a human is large(-ish) land mammal. Nature just cannot make a flying bird's bones strong enough because they have to be much lighter.
If we play conkers with each other's bones the swan will lose.
Was bitten by a swan as a child. Painful by all accounts, but not enough for me to remember the pain, though I recall being more careful around swans afterward Probably more scary for my parents.
All swans are owned by the crown and the monarch has the exclusive right to kill and eat them.
Or at least that's the way I heard it, come to think of it I have no idea at all if that's true. Stops people killing and eating swans though. Not that many would anyway these days.
St John's College serves swan on formal occasions sometimes, because they have some connection to the royal family that means they have special permission. (Or used to in the Queen Elizabeth days, I don't know if they still do under Charles)
Not all, just mute swans; so not Bewick’s or whoopers (if I remember correctly)
Edit:
“His Majesty specifically owns any unclaimed mute swan in open water in both England and Wales in a ceremonial fashion. This has been a law since medieval times. His ownership is shared with the Worshipful Company of Dyers, granted to them by the Crown in the 1400s.”
Yes, it was a big deal when I was in school in the 70s. Everyone played. There were never any conkers left unclaimed under any Horse Chestnut within a mile of the school. We all tried lots of tricks - soaking in vinegar, baking in the oven - practically anything was allowed, but I'm not sure any of it made a difference. It could be pretty painful as getting your hand hit by a high speed conker was common occurrence, but I don't recall anyone getting any lasting injuries.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland that readers will know what on earth is being alleged just from reading this article?
Absolutely. Very well known.
My Youtube-fu is not with me, so I can't seem to locate this video on Youtube, but see this BBC Archive footage from 1971 that was posted on Instagram[1] from a BBC News Report entitled "Conkers is no longer a kids' game."
It's a game you play as a kid. This is the first I've heard of there being a professional league.
On the other hand, we also have competitions such as cheese rolling (trying not to get killed by a giant cheese wheel rolling down a hill), so I'm not that surprised.
I did that race twice, dislocated my left shoulder each time. Scariest thing i've ever done.
People have the misapprehension that you're supposed to catch the cheese. No idea why you'd think it's a good idea to catch a rock hard lump whilst running down a hill so fast that if you tense your legs once to slow down you do 3 cartwheels.
Also just remembered - they have local rugby players to catch those who can't stop running from hitting the fence of the house at the bottom. Saw at least one person they missed who smacked into the fence and got carted off by St John's Ambulance.
Yes, it's a quintessential childhood game here. You take turns to have a single swing at the opponent's conker, until one of the conkers is smashed off its string.
Cheating is a bit of an art. Baking the chestnuts at the right temperature was one method; a friend of mine filled his conker with glue.
In Britain, it's very well known by those of us who are 40+, and I think even younger people will at least have heard of it, even if they haven't played it themselves. It was an absolute staple of playgrounds in the 1980s. There's a rich history of supposed 'cheats' — boiling the conker in vinegar was a classic. And, note, conker, not chestnut (two different things).
Yes, conkers is sufficiently well-known enough as a children's schoolyard game that I would expect pretty much every newspaper-reading adult to have heard of it. The fact that there is supposedly an "adult" championship event would be a surprise to most. If you're looking for the "story behind the story", other than the fact that it's a seasonally-specific, light human-interest story: there is probably a slight cultural bias amongst those who most fondly remember the game towards the private-school-educated, upper-class types who combine nostalgia for imagined "glory days" with political conservatism, so this is a good opportunity for the left-leaning Guardian to hand-pick someone who appears to belong to that class and expose them as a ridiculously-dressed scoundrel with childish interests and suspect morals. The subtext is: these are the sort of idiots we want you to associate with Nigel Farage, Boris Johnson and co, and thus the Overton Window gets a tiny nudge in the opposite direction.
I think you’re reading way, way too much into this. Read the piece and it seems like just a goofy little oddball story, makes for a light and enjoyable read, I’m really not picking up any political angle in this piece.
The Guardian are certainly a left-leaning, frequently political paper, but that doesn’t mean every story is political, and IMO this one isn’t.
I heard the conkers cheater was an illegal immigrant, the establishment covered it up and now they wont even report on conkers anywhere in the main stream media (/s?)
Contrast the BBC's take: First American wins World Conker Championships[0], which focuses on the winner's family's pride, the "lovely little village" where the tournament was held, the American visitor triumphing over churlish natives heckling her, and concludes with a cozy panegyric embracing both tradition and the New World Order (of conkers):
> "Our overall champion, Kelci Banschbach, is our first American Queen Conker and David Jakins, previous finalist and long-standing committee member, very much deserves his King Conker title."
In typical fashion, the Establishment's champion declines to even hint at the underlying corruption.
It never occurred to me that conkers could be a class thing and you could be right. But let it be known that conkers was extremely popular at my state school; me and all of my friends grew up to be pretty left wing too by the way. Also they banned it at my school, along with pogs, yoyos, etc.
Which of those are you imagining doesn't have horse chestnut trees? (Conkers come from those, not plain chestnut trees)
I'm sure there are parts of the country where they're less common, but there's huge numbers of conkers falling off trees in big British cities (even if the majority will be in parks) as well as in the countryside. We played with them at my pre-teen city centre school for sure, and the trees are a common sight on roads and in gardens as well as public parks.
edit: the Woodland trust actually says "Though rarely found in woodland, it is a common sight in parks, gardens, streets and on village greens."
Live in London in Zone 2 and there are absolutely tons of conker trees around me including in areas which are not posh. They are very common in an urban setting.[1]
[1] Which kind of sucks for me personally because they cause me really terrible hayfever. I think I'm specifically alergic to their pollen maybe.
Skiing is a much more expensive activity in most of Britain, mainly since it requires taking a week off work, international flights and hotels to be able to participate. And to become good at skiing you'll have to do that once or twice a year for many years. In places where the local ski slope is a bus ride away it is much less of a class/wealth thing.
The height of ski chic in Scotland used to, at least when I skied regularly, consist of offshore foul weather gear emblazoned with the name of the oil company (or oil service company) the wearer had borrowed it from.
> Is this game well-known enough in Britain and Ireland
I’m from elsewhere in Europe and I know about it from high school and it’s also something that pops up in the world sports section on news websites every now and then.
I find it highly suspicious that the reigning champion gets to drill the holes in the conkers. You can intentionally make some of them weaker by drilling closer to the edge or something.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers, and the participants must select their conker from the collection or given one at random. Prevents tampering I guess.
I assume the conkers are provided by the organizers
Going around the conker trees in your area and finding the perfect conker is a huge part of the game. There is also a certain amount of pre-game 'modification' that are generally allowed, like soaking them in various solutions, or baking them in an oven.
Having to use a provided conker would be like showing up to the Tour de France and being assigned a bike by the organisers.
I'm Norwegian, but have lived in the UK half my life, since I was 25, and I'm aware of it, though have never seen it played. I think most people who have lived her for a while will at least have heard references to it.
in my schools, the closest analog was probably using the school-supplied sporks to engage in "Spork Wars" (not the best example but it will do https://youtu.be/vO7SclBfpZ8?t=145 )
though through the "draft" nature of which spork you would receive, we never had a controversy on the level of the article's:
> "There are also suggestions that King Conker had marked the strings of harder nuts"
I'm British. I only have a very vague memory of the game from my childhood. I didn't remember what the goal was, but I remembered you have to hit the opponent's one. I don't remember if I ever played it or not.
You hold the conker in one hand and the string in the other with some tension and then release so it pings and bashes the other players conker, hoping to smash it off the string.
Repeat until one conker is smashed into oblivion.
If your conker wins against multiples it becomes named mythically: a twoer, a threer, and so on.
> The 23-year-old said: “My conker disintegrated in one hit, and that just doesn’t happen … I’m suspicious of foul play and have expressed my surprise to organisers.”
It’s just crazy that someone would cheat at something so low-stakes with such a high probability of being caught, but I suppose I shouldn’t be surprised.
People cheat on online cooperative computer games like Helldivers with almost no rewards for being performatively better other than a few imaginary in-game points. People can be weird about the smallest things
You shouldn’t state it so confidently as fact — nobody has ever produced any evidence that Hans Niemann cheated over the board (let alone with a Bluetooth butt plug, despite all the memes to that effect).
I generally don’t like Hans and think given how many times he is confirmed to have cheated online he doesn’t deserve the benefit of the doubt. But still, claiming the butt plug meme as fact is going a bit too far.
Thank you. This is the kind of speed-of-correction (~20 min or less) that is needed for social media discourse to work effectively. Indeed, no evidence has been found, this was just a silly meme from Reddit which predated the Hans drama by several years. When the Hans drama happened, of course Redditors started making silly flippant references to this joke. But some people didn’t understand that those were references, instead mistook them for actual “accusations”, bought into it, and started actually seriously perpetuating the accusation/rumor. It was repeated often enough in juuust serious enough tone that tabloid journalism eventually picked it up and ran stories with it.
But overall perhaps the false rumors might have been a good thing? Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players. The rumor/tabloids in combination with Magnus Carlsen’s very loud whining(?) got FIDE to greatly upgrade their security posture and now they walk through metal detectors and their shoes are put through metal detector/scanned manually.
So it’s very hard to hide controls for something like this at the moment. Worth noting that radio-controlled / WiFi buttplugs actually made for sex often fail to pick up their command signals because the flesh attenuates the signal too much. The most reliable ones have an antenna exiting the body (kind of like the Lovense Lush or Vulse series). I don't know if metal detectors will pick up an ESP32 and an antenna and a lithium battery large enough to power that for up to 6 hours or so…but I think they might?
Normally I’d expect the butt part to just be the RX, with TX done with the toes or something rather than by butt clenching some kind of morse code, which would require some moderately impressive signal processing and a lot of player-practice. Any non-butt-clench TX would be very very to get past the current FIDE anti-cheating-device screening.
But maybe someone could get away with something built on the same platform as the O.M.G. cable - but I still expect the power demands of WiFi to require a battery big enough to be detected. Or maybe someone could get away with a tiny-enough battery by dropping power-hungry wifi in exchange for LoRA (1x) / long range BLE (10-20x) / SigFox (1-2x) / IEEE 802.15.4 (Zigbee & Thread) (5x-10x) / NB-IoT (50x-100x)? Multipliers are for rough energy-per bit estimate. Anything else would have too short of a range; would need to be at least reliable at 50 feet. So probably LoRA because it has both lowest energy-per-bit as well as excellent long range.
With an optimized microcontroller strategy and wireless strategy, most of the battery energy would be used for the motor. A small cell phone vibration motor (weakest you could get away with and still reliably feel) uses 60mA at 3V. A lithium coin cell battery can only provide around 1% of that current, so you’d need a bigger battery - at least 100mAh lithium weighing approximately 3g (75% of this is metal). A cell phone vibration motor weighs about 1g (all metal). The world’s smallest Lora module with included microcontroller (FMLR-6x-x-MA62x) weighs about 16g (not sure what % of that would be metallic, lets say 10% as a low-boundary worst case).
So at minimum you’d be looking at 5-6 grams of metal for this cheating device (which has no input device at all!!). This is approximately the weight of one US quarter. It is right at the limit of what walk-through metal detectors are rated to detect on their highest sensitivity. NIJ level 3-certified metal detectors like the Garrett PD 6500i are designed to be able to detect a steel handcuff key which weighs about 4 grams. The manual for this scanner includes a technical drawing for a reference design of a test “handcuff key” so that customers can validate this performance themselves.
Is FIDE using an NIJ level 3 metal detector? I don’t know. But if they are, it would be impossible to get a radio-controlled buttplug through without detection.
> Depending on how you balance/weigh personal harm to Hans Niemann vs. How FIDE’s response benefited championship-level players.
It’s certainly a good thing that security is being taken more seriously now. And I have zero sympathy for Hans. He chose to destroy his credibility by cheating online and, regardless of whether he also cheated over the board or not, has only himself to blame for the fact that people don’t trust him now.
Given how easy it is to cheat in chess, reputation and trust are really all you have, and if you decide to squander them, well, that’s on you.
To be fair, Chess.com said that they had identified 24 other GMs who they believed had cheated (who they declined to name). His cheating may have been more normal than is comfortable. It's entirely possible Carlsen was on that list; we just don't know.
Niemann seems like a jerk, but he's also just a kid. He was 19 at the time of the controversy. I've sure grown a lot since I was 19.
It is a pretty straightforward wave shooter game. I had fun with it, but it isn’t high art or anything. I enjoy games like Hades or Dark Souls where the fact that you keep losing is an interesting part of the narrative and builds the overall ambiance. Helldivers (2, at least) is not really that sort of game, the plot is more like fun, even sillier Starship Troopers.
I played it properly, but I think is somebody decided to fast-forward through some bits they wouldn’t be denying themselves too much.
I think it's a special kind of person that gets a kick from "winning" at something that's not a challenge. You might as well write "winner" on a t-shirt in marker and wear it.
Solitaire is a game, and many people see games in terms of gaining or losing either social status or self-image. But for single-player games:
- maybe "winning" is a special case of "completing"
- "playing a game" in a competitive sense is totally different than "playing" in an undirected sense; e.g. playing with Legos or playing with a cat. Or playing with matches for that matter.
- for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."
We were talking about people cheating at multiplayer co-op in this thread. I don't think people use rule-breaking cheats in multiplayer games (competitive or otherwise) purely for the story in the game, or they could go watch a TV show/movie or read a book instead and get a better story. (Or watch someone else play it!)
> for me, i'd much rather write "winner" on a t-shirt and wear it than prance around in a t-shirt that I legit competed for and won, and I need the world to know that about me. What kind of fragile ego does that? I'm more likely to see that as a "special kind of person."
These aren't the only two options. You can also just challenge yourself for the satisfaction of overcoming challenges and not wear a t-shirt. I think when people cheat at something where the outcome is broadcast there is almost always an element of status seeking.
I don’t really know that it is cheating to get a “win” label. Maybe it is just a distraction or fun flashing lights.
Do you remember being a child and just playing with action figures? It was harmless and fun. I wonder where we lose that ability to just chill and have fun without a challenge.
Actually, a lot of people seem to just spend a lot of time watching TV, which is also fun without challenge.
The comparison to TV watching or playing pretend is apt, though I don't see how cheating at multiplayer games is an improvement over those. If you cheat in something like helldivers 2 (what my comment is meant to address) that can also spoil other peoples' experience who actually want a challenge. Besides, nowadays you have the option of just watching someone else play a game to completion on twitch or youtube, which is quite popular.
The games cheat industry was huge[1] back before the internet was a major thing. Entire books about cheat codes, walkthrough to get the best gear and to beat the game in the easiest way possible, then websites full of cheats, etc.
People, on average, like to do the easiest thing possible and on top of that, they frequently like to brag about what they've achieved and how good they are. Social animals and all that.
I dunno. The article states that David Jakins has been competing since 1977 and has never won. He was also a Judge, so this game seems to be extremely important to him for some reason. I guess he wanted to win by any means necessary before he has to retire from the sport permanently due to age or physical limitation
Veblen called sports Conspicuous Leisure. The goal is not fun but that everyone sees you win. So Stakes are Status. And Status gets people things in the same way Cash does.
Playing conkers at 23 years of age is a bit wrong. It is a bit like building LEGO kits as an adult, particularly wrong if the goal is to just build the design on the box and put the completed model on a shelf, rather than build your own creative masterpiece.
Please resist the urge to mod me down in flames for the above, but, in former times, buying LEGO at the ripe old age of fourteen would be a bit shameful in the school playground. Adults did not play LEGO then, it was the role of the father to read the newspaper and the role of the mother to be 'chained to the sink' in those days, with LEGO just for small children.
Conkers was very much for younger children, once an interest in the opposite sex, playing cards for match sticks or general juvenile delinquency was established, conkers was 'grown out of'.
Much like how fathers could teach their sons to beat up bullies, so it was that fathers could help with the technical aspects of conkers, such as getting the hand drill out (remember those contraptions, before battery power tools).
Conkers was a rite of passage, something that you would be expected to grow out of. It also came with a season, i.e. autumn, and the etiquette was to pick on someone of your own size. Hence, someone playing conkers at the age of 23 has not really got it right.
As for the guy with the steel conker, again we have a problem of age.
Now, as for playing with LEGO as an adult, or playing conkers as an adult, or, for that matter, the retro 8-bit computer scene, this is about regressing from the adult world of today, with all of its problems, and hiding in a recreated childhood. This is sort of understandable for people that were sent off to war, to see things they did not need to see. Those people kind of need the therapy that a return to the child world provides.
But nowadays, I see it as a response to the atomisation of community. If you are not spending your weekends with friends at pubs or at dinner parties, if you don't have an adult hobby such as with a lathe in a shed, if you can't afford big toys such as a boat, then childhood hobbies are a safe space to return to. Apart from anything else, you can buy all the LEGO that you could not buy then. Or, with conkers, you can find a social scene of like minded individuals and get a bit more scientific about winning.
For the record, I read your entire post before downvoting it, which I did because I disagree both with your diagnosis and its prescription (or perhaps I should say proscription).
While there is somewhat of a crisis of adulthood, I find it feasible to salvage the concept without carrying forward the sort of smothering social conformity you seem to advocate as a necessary condition.
Was confused too. My first thought was about conker crafting [1] and I was puzzled that there was a world championship for it and people were serious enough about it to cheat - but then again, weirder things exist...
I only know about conkers due to photonicinduction's youtube video where they play conkers with two CRT televisions attached with ropes to the ceiling
However even without knowing that I think reading the article makes it clear enough what it's about and that a steel chestnut shattering the other one seems like an unfair advantage :)
Can you cheat by purposefully missing the opponent’s conker? Thus reducing the total impact on conkers in this match vs conkers in other matches and getting an advantage?
You take it in turns to hit, moving yours on their turn is cheating. Given that you have a lot more control over what kind of hit happens on your turn than on theirs, skipping your turn is never going to give you an advantage (unless your opponent is somehow anti-competent).
I can't imagine so. A match is over when one persons conker is destroyed. If you were purposefully missing, you'd be throwing the game. Theirs would still take a battering from hitting yours as well.
Missed the edit, but just to add 'keep-away' is 'piggy-in-the-middle' in the UK, and I don't know if perhaps you have it too but 'swingball' is a similar game to 'tetherball' but played with a tennis ball & (typically not tennis, but just cheap plastic thing for the purpose) racket.
Apparently it’s a game where you take turns swinging a chestnut on a string and trying to hit the opponent’s chestnut and break it. Yes, I can see how a steel fake chestnut would be an advantage here, though I’m amazed it wouldn’t be instantly obvious to even a casual observer that the look and sound were wrong. So maybe I’m still missing something.