making it up as you go

The speaker we had who talked about different languages in which people speak such as cockney rhyming or polari reminded me of something my friends and I did when we were little.  We used to not make up our own language but make up our own games.  The games weren't drastically different from other games just like how the language games the speaker talked about weren't entirely random made up words - they had a logical origin.  One of my favorite games was tennis baseball.  I'm sure you can imagine what this would look like.  The main differences between baseball and tennis baseball were: no gloves, a wiffle ball, a tennis racquet instead of a bat, and the ever changing boundaries which depended on whose yard we were playing in.  Not that complex but yet it was our own and we made it up as we went.  Speaking of making things up as you go reminded me of another type of game: freestyle rapping.  The speaker mentioned this and even showed a clip of Eminem from "8 Mile" competing in freestyle rapping.

This is the only picture I could find but you get the idea

Comparing tennis baseball and freestyle rapping, I can easily see how games evolve.  Rules as made up on the go and then are built upon each other until you have a rule for every situation.  The difference between tennis baseball and freestyle rapping is that rapping rules and play are made so much faster.  A person has to think of what they are going to say seconds before they say it and at the same time that they are speaking another set of lines that follow the same pattern.  Tennis baseball can have a stoppage of play to determine what the rule is.  Both still accomplish the same thing through a similar fashion, even though one rule can be determined in a matter of seconds and the other through a matter of minutes.

If this doesn't exactly make sense it's probably because I've rambled on too long but I hope you just come away with the notion that the rules of games and how they work can be made up as they happen and aren't always set in stone from the beginning.

Here's some rap freestyle

Just like tennis baseball, these freestyles aren't entirely made up, they use the same background music for another song but change the lyrics just like tennis baseball still uses basic baseball rules but change parts of the game.