History Main / Calvinball

!!Examples:

* ''Comicbook/TheSandman''[='s=] ''A Game of You'' -- and, perhaps, this trope in general -- may be summarized by the quotation prefacing the book:

* ''Anime/BludgeoningAngelDokuroChan'': Dokuro's various board games appear to be parodies of other board games. For instance, the first episode shows a game called Gothello, which appears to be a version of Othello that's played with five colors instead of two. Dokuro being Dokuro, she picks more than one color instead of a single one.

* Would you believe that one of these could be an ''Wiki/SCPFoundation'' entry? Behold [[http://scp-wiki.wikidot.com/scp-2206 SCP-2206]], "Maximum League Baseball," a phenomenally bizarre series of radio broadcasts that are apparently the results of baseballs games in an alternate universe. The rules have little to no bearing on baseball rules from our reality, and permitted participants include a team of Aztec warriors who perform blood sacrifices before every game, ''actual'' ghosts, a collection of autonomous vehicles, clones, and a bunch of literal RedShirts who die in droves every game. The rules include mentions of invocation of weather gods, assassination attempts, Catholic clergy used as mascots, and Atlantis.

* Grifball from ''Machinima/RedVsBlue'' started out this way; it was basically an excuse to whale on [[ButtMonkey Grif]]. Then it became an actual game type, developed a concrete ruleset, and even has a series of special maps within ''VideoGame/Halo3'' for you to play it on yourself, but the goal is still to torture Grif.

If the basic rules are described ''to the audience'' in any way (or if the game already exists in RealLife) then it's not Calvinball. You may instead be dealing with ThePointsMeanNothing (where the game is explained but the scoring is arbitrary); MovingTheGoalposts (where the game is explained but characters try to change the rules to their own advantage); GretzkyHasTheBall (where the sport is real but the characters play it like Calvinball); ArtisticLicenseSports (where the sport is real but just inaccurately portrayed); ScrewTheRulesIHavePlot (where the fictional game is ''technically'' defined but inconsistently portrayed); or GameplayRoulette (where the rules are defined, but the game itself unpredictably changes them on the players).

* ''Literature/{{Rihannsu}}: The Empty Chair'' takes fizzbin from ''Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries'' and runs with it to create "Tournament Fizzbin", a game where you make up the rules as you go along. The ''Enterprise'' crew creates it after their Romulan friends Ael t'Rllaillieu has trouble grasping poker. The goal seems not to win so much as to [[IntoxicationEnsues get drunk and have fun.]]

* The 1943 Creator/HermanHesse novel ''Literature/TheGlassBeadGame'' (''Magister Ludi'' in early translations, ''Das Glasperlenspiel'' in its original German) revolves around an extraordinarily complex game whose rules are never explained. It's implied, however, to be a kind of Liebnizian symbolic model of philosophy.

* ''Series/ThatMitchellAndWebbLook'' (and its radio predecessor) has the game show ''Numberwang'', "the maths quiz that simply everyone is talking about!" It's portrayed as being so ubiquitous that its rules no longer need explaining, and seems to involve the players just calling out random numbers until the host declares "That's Numberwang!", and the player scores ... somehow. The only discernible patterns are that Julie (played by Olivia Colman) nearly always loses and suffers some sort of humiliation, and rounds involving [[EleventyZillion imaginary or non-numbers]] have rejected "Shinty-Six" and "Brazil" because they are supposedly numbers. In addition, the SuddenDeath round is [[ExactWords literal]]. What constitutes a "Numberwang" is never fully elaborated: the official HomeGame includes 200-sided dice and a 37-volume rulebook (each about the size of a dictionary), and a documentary about the history of ''Numberwang'' suggests that even the hosts cannot determine Numberwang without the help of Colosson, a supercomputer which has extreme views as to what should be done to things that aren't Numberwang.

* [[http://www.thedailymash.co.uk/sport/sport-headlines/skrnsson-takes-gold-in-uphill-nordic-skjord-2-20180210144051 This]] article from ''WebOriginal/TheDailyMash''. All of it.

* ''{{Magazine/MAD}}'' introduced Three-Cornered Pitney, the full rules of which can be read [[https://imgur.com/a/QX8Ko here.]] The success of Three-Cornered Pitney spawned a field variant known as [[https://external-preview.redd.it/AR6pgjZSUJtuzZ9Knuxv08Gk_JWClsy_WEGvHvg_Uf8.jpg?auto=webp&s=d3ecc0a8472df3a4b8acd4d4dac6f11151efd65b 43-man Squamish]]

* The British show ''Series/GreenWing'' gives us Guyball, which features all the quirks of jai alai, basketball, and Eton College's Wall Game, plus a [[NiceHat really funny hat.]]. The only rule actually explained was "curbing the Matterhorn", which entails insulting your opponent as much as possible.

[[folder:Real Life]]
* Many games and sports can seem like this to the newcomer. If you aren't introduced to the rules first, you'll see a bunch of people doing things in a ridiculous specific fashion and avoiding things that appear to be logical, like taking the ball with your hands in basketball, or using hands in soccer. It's even true if you're familiar with one sport and see another that's kind of similar but not the same (like UsefulNotes/{{baseball}} and UsefulNotes/{{cricket}}).
** One particularly egregious example of this is modern olympic fencing. There are three styles (Foil, Sabre, Epee), and each has their own ruleset. Epee is the most logical to onlookers; touch your opponent to score a point, stay within the allotted space, etc. Foil adds onto this a narrower target area and the idea of "priority", where a fencer's attack can have the right of way over their opponent's simultaneous attack. With Sabre, priority is so important and it has so many more rules that it becomes a wild mess of twitching, stepping, and stabbing to the uninitiated.
* In UsefulNotes/{{North Korea}}, basketball is played under [[https://thisisbasketball.world/north-koreas-totally-insane-basketball-rules/?v=7516fd43adaa a set of rules]] that creates a wildly different scoring system from what you'd see anywhere else in the world. Dunks are worth 3 points and traditional 3-point shots are worth 4 if they're "nothing but net"; shots made in the final three seconds of a game [[DownToTheLastPlay are worth 8]]; and while free throws are still only worth 1 point, missing one is a 1-point ''deduction''.
* Many children newly introduced to trading card games don't always have the full starter set or have access to the rulebook (or the inclination to read it). So they tended to try and make sense of the game themselves with what the terms and numbers mean, resulting in many variations and HouseRules.
* RockPaperScissors is a simple game, so naturally people who think it's kind of boring have tried to spice it up. It typically starts with just two extra symbols (often called "Lizard" and "[[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries Spock]]") Then a game was codified with [[http://www.umop.com/rps101.htm 101 gestures]], and by then, it's a total Calvinball because nobody can keep track of anything. More fun? Perhaps. Useful in dispute resolution? Not so much.
* In the philosophical treatise ''Finite and Infinite Games'', Professor James Carse divides games into two kinds: finite games, where the rules are fixed and the object is to win; and infinite games, where the object is to continue play and the rules change in order to prevent the game's end. It's deep philosophy, but it fits the trope, since infinite games just wind up sounding like more fun.
* "Bar Chess" is an exercise in tricking other bar patrons into thinking you're playing a game. You sit in a bar, move things around (like ashtrays or beer mats), and occasionally say things like "Check" or "no, that's against the rules". You can play it outside a bar (college dining halls are great venues). The best players can get others to offer tactical advice.
* Financial markets are often described as a form of Calvinball. The only problem with this analysis is that if the participants actually realize that it's Calvinball, the game (and thus the market) collapses.
* Many fans of the UsefulNotes/IndyCar Series feel Brian Barnhart's liberal and inconsistent application of an admittedly ill-defined rulebook have essentially reduced the series to an automotive form of Calvinball.
* UsefulNotes/{{NASCAR}}'s Rookie of the Year rules are sometimes accused of this, as they're obtuse and poorly explained. (although a few websites have sorted them out well enough to produce unofficial reports that match the official ones coughed up by the sport's website) As of 2015, restarts have also descended into this due to poor enforcement of the rules, and possible confusion over exactly what constitutes a "jumped" restart. Gamesmanship inside the restart zone (and, by extension, the fact that it's a "zone", not a "line") isn't helping.
* Schoolyard tag can result in some hilarious rules. The most basic rule apart from "touch someone else" is "[[ObviousRulePatch no touch backs]]". It can go up in complexity [[NoodleImplements to include (but not limited to) certain items of clothing, two pounds of spaghetti and]] [[BreadEggsMilkSquick a random car accident]].
* [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chapayev_(game) Chapayev]], a popular ex-USSR board game based on checkers, which can have dozens of spoken/unspoken rulesets and houserules... yet basically goes down to "flick your pieces everywhere until you win somehow". One of the common things among casual Russian players is to turn a round of checkers into chapayev mid-game whenever they get too bored to finish the game the right way.
* Ezra Klein of ''The Washington Post'' gave the game a namecheck when discussing the 2013 US government shutdown:
-->"As the White House sees it, Speaker John Boehner has begun playing politics as game of Calvinball, in which Republicans invent new rules on the fly and then demand the media and the Democrats accept them as reality and find a way to work around them."
* Every single game with a codified set of rules once started as Calvinball. Their creators made up the rulings as they went along, sometimes beforehand, sometimes in the middle of a game, adding and removing stuff, sometimes for logical reasons, sometimes not.
[[/folder]]

* In ''ComicBook/{{Lumberjanes}}'' #49, Molly, Barney, Hes, Diane and Jo are invited to play a game of Emily's making called Panterra, a "multi-tiered, world-building and conquest strategy game". It's ''definitely'' the complicated rules variation (it took twenty five minutes to explain), and it can only be described as Settlers Of Catan taken UpToEleven....thousand, out of a possible three. And it is '''awesome'''.

** Chandler and Joey play a number of dangerously stupid games of their own invention. One is "Hammer Darts"; beyond [[ExactlyWhatItSaysOnTheTin what can be intuited from the name]], all we know about it is that it cost them their insurance and part of the wall. Another is "Fireball", which involves [[NoodleImplements oven gloves, lighter fluid, and a tennis ball]], and its variant "Ultimate Fireball", with [[UpToEleven a bowling ball and acetylene torch.]]

* ''Webcomic/SluggyFreelance'' has [[http://www.sluggy.com/comics/archives/daily/20020915 "Quisatz Haderach"]], an exaggerated parody of ''Franchise/HarryPotter'''s Quidditch with random ''Franchise/{{Dune}}'' references that turns the nonsensical rules UpToEleven. And in the end, it's all a moot point because nothing but the GoldenSnitch matters anyway.

** One particularly egregious example of this is modern olympic fencing. There are three styles (Foil, Sabre, Epee), and each has their own ruleset. Epee is the most logical to onlookers; touch your opponent to score a point, stay within the allotted space, etc. Foil adds onto this a narrower target area and the idea of "priority", where a fencer's attack can have the right of way over their opponent's simultaneous attack. This gets taken Main/UpToEleven by Sabre, where priority is so important and has so many more rules that it becomes a wild mess of twitching, stepping, and stabbing to the uninitiated.

* RockPaperScissors is a simple game, so naturally people who think it's kind of boring have tried to spice it up. It typically starts with just two extra symbols (often called "Lizard" and "[[Series/StarTrekTheOriginalSeries Spock]]") This went UpToEleven until a game was codified with [[http://www.umop.com/rps101.htm 101 gestures]], and by then, it's a total Calvinball because nobody can keep track of anything. More fun? Perhaps. Useful in dispute resolution? Not so much.

* The sport shown in the music video for "New Lands" by Music/{{Justice}} starts off as a baseball game, then adds lacrosse, football, and roller derby. By the end, it's utterly incomprehensible.

* ''Webcomic/NewSchoolKids'' has Trevopoly, which appears to be a mixture of ''Battleship'' and ''Sorry'', played on a ''Monopoly'' board, with made-up rules.

* UsefulNotes/{{North Korea}}n dictator Kim Jong-Un is well known to be a fan of basketball, but in his home country, the game is played under [[https://thisisbasketball.world/north-koreas-totally-insane-basketball-rules/?v=7516fd43adaa a set of rules]] that creates a wildly different scoring system. Dunks are worth 3 points and traditional 3-point shots are worth 4 if they're "nothing but net"; shots made in the final three seconds of a game [[DownToTheLastPlay are worth 8]]; and while free throws are still only worth 1 point,missing one is a 1-point ''deduction''.

* Orbot and Cubot in ''WesternAnimation/SonicBoom'' have their own version of "Rock, Paper, Scissors" called "Rock, Donut, Thursday". Not even they can agree what beats what, and the rules are so much of a LogicBomb that they defeat [[VillainOfTheWeek Nominatus]].

* ''WesternAnimation/FetchWithRuffRuffman'': In the fourth season episode "Blossom Bawls While Ruff Has a Ball of Balls", Ruff is trying to market "Ruffball," a brand new game that's supposed to sweep the nation! Unfortunately, Ruffball is interest for only about six seconds. Sterling went to stadium to [[BaseballEpisode learn how to broadcast a baseball game on the radio]] while Talia and Liza went to meet with a physics teacher to learn how to make Ruffball a little more excited. To make it even more fun, Ruff sends Brian, Bethany, and Isaac after a "Half-Time Quiz Show" to join the others into playing a great game!

* ''WesternAnimation/{{Centaurworld}}'': The [[Recap/CentaurworldS2E5BunchOScrunch Bunch O' Scrunch]] game follows a complicated set of rules that seemingly requires every player do a completely unrelated task, resulting in a gameplay that’s incomprehensible for the audience. At one point, Ched is wearing a peacock headdress and Glendale is skating with clothespins pinched to her arms, all while Gebbrey is holding a glass container filled with mulch.[[note]] To be fair, [[WordOfGod Meghan McCarthy]] posted [[https://twitter.com/MMeghanMcCarthy/status/1470186594363609088 the rules for this game on Twitter]]. They don't explain how to Splurf-Dorrff the Sflü, though.[[/note]]

* The ''Literature/{{Goosebumps}}'' book ''The Beast from the East'' is described [[http://www.bloggerbeware.com/2006/02/43-beast-from-east.html here]] as a book-long description of a game of Calvinball.