Out in the Field beyond Right & Wrong
A Post-Election, Pre-Holiday Love Note
From time to time I encourage respectful, curiosity-filled conversation with your political mortal enemy. I’m not doing that today, miei car’amici1. I have something totally different in mind for you— especially since, for those who lost the US election, talking across difference may feel unimaginable right now.
Some Americans are celebrating; others are devastated. A few think everyone is making too much of a fuss. The emotions are real and raw as we move into the holiday season. Most of us are about to spend even more time than usual with people we deeply disagree with— our families, friends, neighbors, fellow church-goers, co-workers…
For a moment, let’s leave things to cool before diving headlong into intense convos. (Something I learned the hard way.)
How about we play a game instead? Pick one. Any one. Exploding Kittens, basketball, Monopoly, Super Mario Kart, charades, Dungeons & Dragons….
Wherever you live, wherever you call home, wherever your ancestors—known or unknown—hail from, you come from people who played games.
And they played them in the best of times and the worst of times.
Rumi, the medieval Persian poet, whose beautiful quotes we Americans often see in memes and on coffee mugs, once said:
Out beyond ideas of wrongdoing and rightdoing, there is a field. I’ll meet you there. When the soul lies down in that grass, the world is too full to talk about. Ideas, language, even the phrase “each other” doesn’t make any sense.
Rumi is speaking about a realm beyond division. One where differences dissolve and understanding— like a warm, gentle wave— washes over us all.
Now is a good time to visit such a field. And games are an easy way to get there.
Games take us out beyond it all.
God, Nature, or Both built play— and the games that naturally follow— into our species for a million pragmatic survive-and-thrive reasons.
To practice, when we are kids, the adult skills we’ll need. To blow off steam and inspire creativity. To sharpen our cunning side. To build teamwork. To give us room to be rowdy and ridiculous. To have a healthy way to shit-talk and challenge one another… and then to practice being good winners and losers.
More importantly than all the pragmatic stuff, games are fun!
On my short list to learn is a deliciously macho game called morra— a loud, lightning-fast, rock-paper-scissors game from the Mediterranean.
In the most common version, each player throws out one hand, showing between one and five fingers, and calls out their guess for the total number of fingers shown. If a player guesses the total correctly, they score a point. The first to three points wins the game.
Like many simple games, morra is easy to learn but tough to master. It may look pure luck, but there’s skill and strategy—enough that, with practice, a good player can turn chance into advantage. Just watch this maestro2 at work.
Morra’s oldest known roots trace to ancient Egypt, then Greece and Phoenicia.3 But it was in ancient Rome that the game’s popularity exploded. People played it all over the city—sometimes just for fun or showing off, but also to settle disputes or gamble.4
The game’s loudness serves a purpose beyond Mediterranean liveliness— it lets the crowd hear the calls and act as witness, confirming each player’s guess to prevent cheating5.
Even with this community honesty check in place, morra often enough ended in fights, leading to public play bans in Italy from ancient Rome to today6.
The tension in morra is likely why fights pop up. If you watch the master player in the video closely, you’ll notice he taunts and provokes his competitor… but then he dials it back, cracks a joke, and shows goodwill—for the sake of friendship and respect. He’s not just winning, he’s setting the tone, and the tone is togetherness.
Despite its sometimes rough reputation, morra spread across the Mediterranean with Roman soldiers then settlers who followed. Centuries later, it traveled east along the Silk Road with traders. Learning the numbers 2 to 10 in another language is easy, so people with different languages, religions, and even rival governments taught each other the game and played together7.
Today, through different names and variations, morra is still played across the Mediterranean, in parts of the Middle East, and even in Mongolia and China8. In recent years, it’s also been getting revived through a World Tournament9.
I can’t take credit for the wisdom of playing games— that’s something I learned from Floridians. Twice.
Twenty years ago, Cuban-Floridians taught me how games could bond families. In large, complex extended families— dominos created a space where tensions could be set aside. Even amid fresh feuds, decades-old issues, and intergenerational trauma tracing back to the island, the game could prevent spoken or unspoken conflict from taking over and consuming family dynamics.
Today, a mix of Midwestern snowbirds and Southern-rooted native Floridians have shown me how games build community. Several years ago, one neighbor turned a strip of grass into a game space with enough room for folding chairs and wound up turning strangers into a community.
That humble spot dedicated to Cornhole became a local gathering place. (Yes, my international friends, we Americans have a popular game with the ridiculous name “Cornhole”. And yes, it refers to a certain humorous body part, though many don’t mention it out loud.)
Over time, more and more neighbors have connected by waving one another over for a game.
Out of this space has come friendships, potlucks, and fundraisers for veterans and hungry families. Greater neighborhood safety, local news, and hot political conversations that bend but don’t break the bond. Neighborhood holiday parades, borrowed tools, helping hands, and lifelines when Trouble— in whatever form it takes— comes knocking.
And Trouble, as you know, has certainly been knocking.
The moral of this Floridian story is: The ease of a game came first. Then, out in this Field beyond Right and Wrong, understanding and togetherness naturally flowed.
Never underestimate the slightly magical power of a good game. Especially one that becomes Tradition. Ritual. Routine. Habit. Culture.
A game can build a neighborhood, bond a family, restore trust, and increase community stability. It softens disagreement with a kind of empathy that doesn’t feel like such damn, hard work all the time.
Games help us love each other, even across bone-deep differences that, rightly or wrongly, we see as threats to our survival. They give us the shock absorption we need for the hard stuff—for the passionate disagreements and the issues we think we’ll never move on from10.
Vi prego, miei car’amici— please, I beg of you, my dear friends— through this season and into the coming year, pick a game and play it with others.
Learn one that’s an old family tradition. Try something that’s just silly fun or that you know will easily rope others in. Play with those you love. Wave over a neighbor or co-worker you don’t know all that well.
Start a game with the person you disagree with on absolutely everything- how to fix the economy, the Middle East conflict, immigration, the meaning of sex and gender, free speech…
For a short while, play with them out there in the Field beyond Right and Wrong.
Keep an eye out for the shy folks who feel intimidated or unequipped to play. Find something that’s easy and inviting. Make being a spectator a fun part of gametime, or find a option that’s cooperative instead of competitive.
And like morra teaches us, get a little bit rowdy. Blow off steam. Have some fun. Just keep an eye out for the gambling and fights.
Now, miei car’amici,
go play.
Miei car’amici is Italian for “my dear friends”
Maestro is Italian master (as in master player, master craftsman….)
Source: Rong, T., Chen, H., & Chen, Y. (2020). *The Morra Game as a Naturalistic Test Bed for Investigating Automatic and Voluntary Processes in Random Sequence Generation*. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 588584. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.588584
Source: Wikipedia contributors. (2023, November 9). *Morra (game)*. In *Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia*. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morra_(game)
Source: I learned this through Italian-American community convos. I fact-checked it using ChatGPT: OpenAI ChatGPT. (2024). The role of vocalization in the game of morra: Community witnessing and fair play.
Source: Associazione Giochi Antichi. (n.d.). *The Morra family of games*. Associazione Giochi Antichi. Retrieved November 9, 2023, from https://www.associazionegiochiantichi.it/giochi-tradizionali/famiglia-della-morra?lang=en-US
Source: Wikipedia contributors. (2023, November 9). *Morra (game)*. In *Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia*. Retrieved from https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Morra_(game)
Sources: (1) OpenAI ChatGPT. (2024). Cultural exchange and spread of the game of morra to East Asia. (2) ChatGPT. (2023). Explanation of the spread of morra to Arab cultures and its historical bans in Italy. OpenAI
Cronin, R. (2019, November 5). *How to play Morra, Italy's ancient hand game* [Video]. YouTube. www. youtube. com/watch?v=nEvJIG42D14
Source: Segal, J. (2008). Playfulness and humor. In “The language of emotional intelligence: The five essential tools for building powerful and effective relationships.” McGraw-Hill.