Others said they could move where they liked, but they could only be caught by the chaser when they were on the ground (a few people called this “off-ground tig”, and a few “lava monster”). Some players said they played a normal chase game, except they had to stay off the floor completely. But even within this 10% there were dozens of variations. One of the things we usually mention when we describe a game, especially a physical game like this one, is the aim-what are you trying to achieve? But I asked that question in the survey, and 55.3% of respondents said the game as they played it had no aim at all.ġ4.7% said the aim was to be the last person off the ground 10.0% that it was to chase and catch each other. It’s a collection of behaviours, a set of changing rules, a bundle of connected ways that you can be weird about touching the floor. “The Floor is Lava” is complicated to talk about because it’s not a single game. This essay is a collection of some of the things I found out when I went through their answers.įirst things first: what do you actually do when you play “The Floor Is Lava”? So I ran a survey to find out what else the world’s imaginary dangerous floors are made of. Surely, I thought, people who have lava floors are in the minority-or at least, surely they would be if the phrase “the floor is lava” wasn’t spreading so widely, flowing over other dangerous floorspaces, hissing over quicksand and piranhas and mysterious voids and rustling snakes. Which is frustrating to me, the way that this name-and it’s a good name, evocative, clear-has started to overwrite all the other things that the floor could be. Now, in 2020, the go-to term for games about avoiding the ground is one big phrase: “The Floor is Lava”. When I got a bit older, the ground stopped being made of anything in particular. Or it was gaps between delicate starry pathways like in Skymaze. Or it was insta-death sand like the deadly desert from Ozma of Oz. Occasionally my floor was matted with tree roots like the ones the girl falls through in Labyrinth. (Though my floor was never spiders, which were too immediate a fear to have fun with.) When my floor wasn’t quicksand, it was often water filled with sharks-it may not be a surprise at this point to learn that I grew up in Australia. This time I might finally get to use all of my eagerly-acquired expertise in how to escape (throw away anything you’re carrying sit or lie down to increase your surface area free your trapped limbs slo-o-o-o-wly and clamber towards safety). This was partly because of that one scene in The Princess Bride, but mostly because of going to the beach and feeling the wet grainy sand shift under my bare feet, wiggling my toes into it, imagining that this time-this time-it might suddenly give way.
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