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Watch 900 New Yorkers gather for one epic, insane game of musical chairs

A random 50-year-old woman from Tennessee walked away as champion.

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The grown-ups are taking back one of their favorite games from childhood: Musical chairs.

If you've never played musical chairs, well, you must not have gone to Physical Education in the 90s. Along with parachute day, duck duck goose, and the now-banned-almost-everywhere dodgeball, musical chairs was a staple game for all elementary school kids.

For the uninitiated, the rules are simple: some number of participants stand around a circle of chairs. The problem is, there's one fewer chair than there is people. Music plays and the players walk, dance, or skip around the chairs in a circle. When the music stops, you've got to find a seat as fast as possible—before someone else does! If you're the odd man left standing, you're out, and the game continues with the remaining players. A new chair is removed each round until one winner remains.

The game is frantic and intense, with bouts of quiet tension in between. It's also extremely silly and sure to draw fits of laughter from everyone playing. Sounds fun, right? So why should kids be the only ones who get to enjoy it?

Bryant Park in Manhattan, New York City recently played host to, if not quite the biggest game of musical chairs in history, certainly one of them.

musical chairs, games, kids game, play, adults, adulting, play for adults, fun, joy, happiness, communityMusical chairs can get pretty ruthless.Giphy

Eat your heart out, Mr. Beast.

Nine hundred adult New Yorkers showed up one recent evening for a chance to take home a commemorative chair and a $500 gift card. But mostly, they showed up to have a good time and in that, they were all winners.

Contestants were broken into smaller groups of 30, where they competed in semi-final heats. Each group would have one winner, who would then go on to compete in the "Winner's Circle." During the contest, full-grown human beings hopped, skipped, and chicken-wing-flapped their arms as they circled the chairs, then frantically tried to find a place or face elimination.

In a recording of the event, all you can hear is laughter, gasps, and raucous giggles as these adult strangers run and topple over with glee.

According to The Times, the ultimate winner was 50-year-old Amy Beron, who had come from Tennessee to visit her daughter in New York. "[Beron] claimed the title in the absence of friends in the crowd, as camera flashes lit up her shocked face. She had seen on social media that the event was taking place, showed up alone and walked away a winner."

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Officially, the largest game of musical chairs took place in Singapore in 1989. It featured 8,238 contestants and took over three hours to crown a winner.

But that's got nothing on the world's biggest pillow fight, which took place in 2018 with nearly 8,000 participants.

Here's the thing about adults: There's a part of all of us that deeply misses being a kid. We're nostalgic for the memories and the way things used to be, yes, but we also miss when our main purpose in life was to have fun and experience joy. When we were carefree and a little reckless. Many of us are always trying to recapture just a bit of that, whether it's through art like coloring books, adult summer camp, or large-scale and completely absurd competitions like Bryant Park's musical chairs.

And though it looks like things got a little competitive in some of the musical chairs heats (in the video above, you'll see a guy get knocked over as a woman fights for his chair!), this kind of thing is generally very good for us. Playing with others helps us feel like we belong, just as it did when we were kids. It boosts our mental health and provides a much-needed escape from a world that feels like it's doing its best to beat us down.

You can watch the entire competition pretty much from beginning to end, including the dramatic moment that Amy Beron officially out-duels the last competitors, here:

- YouTubewww.youtube.com

Most large-scale community gatherings like this suffered a cruel and sudden death in 2020 during the COVID pandemic. Once the worst was over and the masks mostly came off and we were free to mingle with strangers again, it still didn't feel normal to congregate like this. It's so heartwarming to see strangers coming together again, hear them laughing again, and watch them enjoy the outdoors together—even if it is in the most ridiculous way possible.

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Celebrity

Chris Pine makes a compelling argument for kids to play Dungeons & Dragons in schools

He makes some excellent points about cooperation and imagination.

Gage Skidmore/Wikimedia Commons

Actor Chris Pine at San Diego Comic Con in 2018

Chris Pine plays the lead role in the film "Dungeons & Dragons: Honor Among Thieves," but until recently, he had never played D&D himself. Now that he's experienced the magic of the nearly 50-year-old roleplay game, he believes it should be played in schools.

Pine told Slash Film that his nephew has been playing D&D with a group of friends for six years, and he's the one who introduced the game to his famous uncle and a few other family members, including Pine's parents, who are 82 and 76.

"Within 15 minutes, we were having the time of our lives and we didn't have to know anything," he said. It was "immediately accessible," he said, especially in a family of actors, since the roleplaying game is essentially improv acting.

"It's, 'Here's what's happening. This is what you have. This is your obstacle. Now go,'" he said.

But it's the soft skills that the game encourages that left Pine feeling like the game should be played in schools.

"It immediately teaches cooperation," Pine shared with Slash. "It exercises the imagination. It's joyous, it's improvisational. And within a matter of minutes, everybody's on the same page. You're not arguing about whether or not you're cool or not. You're arguing about whether or not you should have gone over the boulder to kill the dragon."

"I think it's about the coolest thing I've encountered in a long time," he added.

Pine isn't the only one who sees a social and educational benefit to playing Dungeons & Dragons. Teacher Kade Wells, who saw the test scores of her ninth-grade Dungeons & Dragons club members rise, believes that playing D&D can make kids smarter. There is more than just anecdotal evidence to back that assertion up.

"Dungeons & Dragons, and other narrative role-playing games of its kind, provide many opportunities for learning,” David Simkins, a professor at the Rochester Institute of Technology and an expert on games and learning, told KQED. “Participation in narrative role play can open up interests in topics such as mathematics, science, history, culture, ethics, critical reading, and media production. When D&D and its cousins are played in an inviting, encouraging, compassionate, and intellectually engaged environment, play opens the door to truly amazing possibilities for learning.”

Socially, D&D has come a long way since the early 1980s, when talking about your Dungeon Master or whipping out your 12-sided die would automatically brand you a geek or a freak. (For the record, those "freaks and geeks" are likely the reason we're all here on this website on whatever device we're on—yay for creative innovators who battled imaginary dragons in their friend's basement for fun.)

The game has grown in popularity over the years and it saw a huge surge during the COVID-19 pandemic. Now here we are with a feature film starring a handsome Hollywood heartthrob who publicly sings the praises of D&D. Who would have guessed D&D would become truly, genuinely…cool?

Perhaps the group of successful, professional 40-something-year-old friends I personally know, who have played D&D every Thursday night for years and years, would have guessed it. Some of them have known each other since high school, and they never get tired of the game. The open-endedness of D&D is part of its appeal—the possibilities for how the game can go are endless and dependent almost entirely on the imaginations of the players. No wonder it has stood the test of time and finally earned the respect it always should have had from the mainstream.

Watch the trailer for the D&D-themed film starring Chris Pine:

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This parody of 'A Whole New World' hilariously summarizes the Wordle sensation

The Holderness Family/Facebook

A Wordle-themed parody of "A Whole New World" nails the word game phenomenon.

Unless you've been living blissfully off the grid the past couple of months, you've undoubtedly seen the world become enamored with Wordle.

Completing the simple word game with a delightfully wholesome origin story has become a daily routine for millions of us who appreciate the collective challenge and the limit of only playing once per day. (I don't actually have stats on how many people play it, but considering the fact that The New York Times paid the creator seven figures for it, I'm assuming it's millions.) We share and compare scores. We whine together when it's hard. We keep the answer secret as part of an entirely new social contract that the game engendered and get annoyed when people think they're sharing a clue that doesn't give it away but actually does give it away.

In an era where so many things divide and polarize us, Wordle has brought people of all walks of life together in a weird and wonderful way.

So while some may be tired of seeing people's Wordle scores on social media, the Wordle sensation is a good thing. And we need more good things.

To sum it all up, the Holderness family created a Wordle-themed parody of Aladdin's "A Whole New World" and it's hilarious. They nailed so many elements of the Wordle phenomenon, from why we play to how we try to convince our loved ones to play to everyone groaning over the word "MOIST." (I have never understood people's issue with that word. It makes me think of chocolate cake. Nothing but yumminess.)

So kick back, relax and enjoy "A Whole New Wordle."

"Let me share my Wordle score with youuuu…" So cute and clever.

To be honest, I'm feeling a bit salty today after experiencing my first Wordle loss this morning. It was bound to happen sometime, but for a person who works with words for a living, the failure hits hard. The fact that this video made me laugh out loud several times is a testament to the Holderness family's ability to entertain. It's healing my wounded Wordle heart. Well done, Penn and Kim.

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You can automatically turn Wordle results into a cool 'townscape' because humans are awesome

@DanDanikov/Twitter

Transform your Wordle results into a cute "townscape" with a simple tool.

If you haven't checked out Wordle, I'm sorry to tell you you're missing out on a delightful cultural phenomenon. You don't have to play it to appreciate it—word games aren't everyone's cup of tea—but you should at least know why you keep seeing these weird rows of gray, yellow and green boxes filling up your social media feeds.

First of all, Wordle itself is fun. The play is easy, but the puzzle can be challenging. The basic gist is you have six tries to guess the day's five-letter word. With each try, you're told which of your letters are correct and if any of those correct letters are in the correct spot. After you play, you can share your results without giving away the word at all.

But the gameplay isn't actually the most appealing thing about it.

Wordle is simple in all the best ways. There's no app. No ads. No purchases. No registrations or logins. No leveling up. You can only play once a day, and it takes just a few minutes. The game doesn't even have its own dedicated domain—it's just a page on a guy's personal website.

It was created by a software engineer named Josh Wardle for his partner who loves word games, and he decided to make it public a few months ago. He's not trying to make money off of it. He even decided not to put a link to the game in the results sharing function because it looked cluttery. The wholesome simplicity is refreshing, and the capitalismlessness of it is a big part of its appeal.

Wordle results sharing is actually one of the best things about it.

Some people have poked fun at—or expressed annoyance with—everyone sharing their Wordle results. But hear me out—we all want this. We really do.

It's exceedingly rare that we all get to enjoy something together that isn't pushed by some big corporation or doesn't have the purpose of plucking away our pennies. The organic growth of the game's popularity is simply delightful, as is the fact that there's this unspoken social contract that people don't give away the day's Wordle word.

For the most part, people are miraculously on the same page here. Don't ruin the game for anyone else by sharing the actual answer. You can share your results, but not the answer. A Wordle spoiler trollbot tried to ruin the fun, but that account was met with utter derision. In a world where everything feels increasingly complicated and chaotic, people want this nice thing.

One of the great things about humans is that, despite a handful of miserable folks who want to ruin things, there are lots of people who want to make good things just for the sake of making good things. In that vein, some people have figured out a way to make Wordle results sharing even more fun.

A couple of people started sharing their Wordle results in the form of townscapes from the Chrome browser version of Townscaper by Oskar Stalberg, which end up looking like this:

Delightful, right?

Then, someone else created a tool that automatically transforms your results into one of these townscapes, with options that allow you to create four different townscape styles.

You can create the townscape by going to this link in a Chrome browser and pasting either a tweet with Wordle results in it or pasting your actual Wordle results (which are copied to your clipboard when you click "share" from the Wordle site) directly into the box. Click "Parse," then "Generate," then see the link at the bottom to view your townscape. You can alter the results by clicking one or both of the boxes that say "Fill gaps on walls" and "Remove gaps on ground."

Fair warning: Townscaper is a time trap.

I feel the need to add a word of warning here. One of the great things about Wordle is that it doesn't suck away your time like many games do, because you can only play once a day. But if you put your results into the Townscaper tool, there's nothing to prevent you from embellishing it with some fun add-ons. It's ridiculously easy to do and it makes a satisfying plunking noise when you add things, which can get a little addicting.

Here's a screenshot of my Wordle results from this morning with a few add-ons, which only took about 30 seconds. So. Fun.

OskarStalberg/Townscaper

Well done, awesome people. Maybe if we channel this same creative energy and desire for simple, wholesome goodness into more areas of human existence, we could solve more of the problems that plague us.

In the meantime, keep Wordling and sharing, folks. Let's lean into this good thing while it lasts.

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