The best game I played this month¹ had zero polygons and no particle effects; it was unscripted, cost nothing, and didn’t even require any electricity.² It did have physics, though.

The game involves a tree stump, some nails, and a hammer — the type where the back end of the head is a thin blade rather than a fork. The object of the game is simple: each player takes a nail and tries to bang it into the stump using the thin end of the hammer head. You get one swing at a time, and if you miss the nail completely you have to drink some beer. There you go: the best bloody game ever made. Hammer happy.

If it were a videogame, you’d stroke your chin and say it was very, ah, haptic. (Imagine how the essence of the game would be evacuated if you were controlling an on-screen virtual hammer with a joypad.) You’d also notice how it was an ideal type of the sort of local-multiplayer or “party” game to which Nintendo and the rest have been aspiring for years. But perhaps you’d also say that the presence of alcohol in the game’s setup gives it an unfair advantage. After all, you could turn some po-faced brown-paletted FPS into a drinking game as well, and amusement would ensue.

Maybe, but not as much. The Nailing Game, as it was quickly christened by my companions, is pretty much unimprovable. Those companions were an eclectic international bunch of videogame theorists and designers. We were out on a bar crawl in Vienna (it turns out that the Nailing Game is a popular après-ski entertainment in middle Europe) after a three-day conference titled “Future and Reality of Gaming”, or FROG for short. And in its brutally funny way, the Nailing Game functioned as a kind of exclamation mark and implicit heckle for many of the themes the conference participants had been soberly addressing during the daytime. Can games be used for learning? Well, if you get really good at the Nailing Game while drunk, you will surely be a demon at DIY when sober. Can games be emotional? Nothing beats the joyous thrill of a perfect shot with your hammer. Are games social? Jesus, just shut up and nail.

The Nailing Game had an answer too to my own presentation, in which I had been expatiating on what a friend fondly calls my “Marxist bullshit” about how contemporary videogames recreate the structures of industrial labour and so lull us into rehearsing and normalizing our own slavery to capital in our “leisure time” — while also, in a diabolical twist, taking our money. Very pointedly, the Nailing Game appropriates a definite form of physical labour — banging nails into wood — and satirically reverses it: you have to use the tool in the wrong way, there is no rationale at all for getting the nails into the stump, and “failure” in this employment (missing the nail) brings delicious reward (beer).

The day before, meanwhile, game designer and international bohemian Gonzalo Frasca had given a hugely entertaining presentation on questions to which the Nailing Game also now seemed the perfect answer. Videogames to date, he said, had neglected the aspect of “performance”, owing to constrained interfaces; they had also forgotten that play is essentially social, and physical. The success of the Wii and games like Singstar meant that we were now emerging from that dark age, and that “hardcore” was dead. Well, we agreed now, what could be more physical and social than the Nailing Game?

Later that night, getting hammered (in the more traditional sense) in another, thrillingly filthy Viennese bar, we played a different game, that one of our party invented on the spot. The game is called “I refuse”. Each player takes it in turns to announce dramatically: “I refuse”, and then explain what they are refusing. In response, the other players cheer, clink bottles and drink. My memories of the individual refusals performed are terribly vague, except that they ranged from the political to the food-oriented, the sexual and the sublimely surreal. But a grand session of refusal can also be constructive. If we could agree on a grand list of things we refused about videogames, we would have a positive manifesto for the future of the art.

Back home in Paris, memories of the Nailing Game make me reluctant to huddle in front of a television and wrap my hands around a small, cold hunk of plastic in order to perform an arbitrarily choregraphed series of micromovements with my fingers. It’s so much more fun to hit something for real. Still, here’s what I refuse now: I refuse to accept that videogames can’t come nearer to the hilarious immediacy and corporeal gratification of that game. Nail that to your church door and smoke it.

1. This column was written in October 2008. ↩
2. Edge changed this to “didn’t require plugging in to the power”, which sounds like something Derek Zoolander might say. But perhaps they were making the subtle point that there is still electricity involved in the game, in the form of the electrical impulses in human bodies and brains. True! ↩