What Was My First Video Game? A Game With No Screen and No Referee

What was your first ever videogame?

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My First Video Game Had No Screen and No Referee

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 26 October 2026

Today’s prompt asks about my first-ever video game. The honest answer is that I never had one. My childhood games were Goli, played with glass marbles, and Gilli-danda, played with two pieces of wood.

It would be easy to stop there and write a fond lament for simpler times. I want to make a different claim. The real difference between the games of my childhood and the games children play today is not the screen. It is the rulebook. Most video games arrive with their rules already written into the code. Our games arrived with only a loose tradition, and every afternoon we had to settle the details ourselves.

1. The game came without a rulebook

Goli needed a circle scratched in the dust and a few marbles. Gilli-danda needed a small tapered stick, a longer one to strike it with, and a shallow groove in the ground. Everything else was open to dispute. Where did the boundary run? Was a marble resting on the line in or out? If your hand crept past the mark as you shot, did the shot stand? Did a catch count if the gilli had bounced off a wall? No manual answered these questions. We did.

2. The arguments were half the game

Some afternoons we spent nearly as long disputing a shot as playing it. That was not wasted time. We were learning to propose a rule, defend it, hear the other side, and accept a decision we did not like. Nobody called an umpire, because there was none to call. In many video games, the code settles disputes instantly. That is efficient, but it can remove opportunities for children to negotiate the rules themselves.

3. Older traditions saw the same thing

In his Laws [1], Plato has his Athenian speaker warn that children’s games decide whether a state’s laws will last. Children who keep changing the rules of their play, he feared, grow into adults who want to change the laws. So he wanted children’s games kept fixed. I read his observation the other way round: children who argue out their own rules learn why rules are worth keeping.

The Romans also linked games to growing up. Their children played with walnuts much as we played with marbles, and “to leave the nuts behind” (nuces relinquere) [2] was a Latin way of saying someone had become an adult.

Tamil poetry adds a gentler note. In the Pillaitamil tradition [3], poets imagine a god as a small child. In the poems addressed to boy-gods, there is a section in which little girls beg the divine child not to destroy the sand houses they have built. Even a god at play, the poets suggest, must learn to respect what others have made.

4. The street was not always fair

Here I must concede something. Rules made by children are often rules made by the biggest child. In Premchand’s Hindi short story “Gulli-Danda” [4], a man returns to his village as an engineer and plays the old game with Gaya, his childhood rival and once the best player around. Gaya plays poorly and lets the engineer’s doubtful strokes pass. Only later, watching Gaya play in earnest, does the engineer realise that he had not won at all. He had been humoured because of his rank. A game that teaches fairness can also teach deference. On this point, the video game has the stronger claim: within the rules of the game, a player’s social rank cannot simply make a doubtful shot count.

5. Video games deserve their due

Modern games teach strategy, persistence through long challenges, and cooperation with players across the world. Multiplayer games bring their own disputes, negotiations and community rules. The best of them now let players build their own worlds and agree on their own rules for playing in them. In those games, the old argument has simply moved indoors.

6. What I would keep

So I would not ask children to choose between the screen and the street. I would ask only that every child have at least one game whose rules they must write, defend and keep for themselves. A child understands a rule he has argued for in the dust. A rule written by a programmer is more often one he simply obeys.

So, what was my first video game? I never had one. What I had instead was my first parliament: a circle in the dust, a handful of marbles, and a few friends arguing over whether a shot was in or out.

Which childhood game taught you to argue over the rules? Share it in the comments.

Notes and references

[1] Plato, Laws, Book VII, 797a–d; the argument continues to 798d. English translation by R. G. Bury in Plato in Twelve Volumes, vols. 10–11, Loeb Classical Library (Harvard University Press). Online text: cts.perseids.org

[2] The proverb nuces relinquere is traced to Persius, Satires 1.10. See Charlton T. Lewis and Charles Short, A Latin Dictionary, s.v. “nux”.

[3] Pillaitamil, roughly “poems of the child”, is a genre of Tamil devotional poetry that praises a deity or hero as an infant, traditionally across ten stages of ten verses each. In the stage called sitril (“little house”), girls plead with the boy-god not to destroy their sand houses; the Tiruchendur Pillaitamil is one example. Kumaraguruparar’s seventeenth-century Meenakshi Ammai Pillaitamil is among the best-known works of the genre. For a scholarly study with translations, see Paula Richman, Extraordinary Child: Poems from a South Indian Devotional Genre (Honolulu: University of Hawaiʻi Press, 1997).

[4] Premchand (1880–1936), born Dhanpat Rai, is one of the most celebrated writers of modern Hindi and Urdu fiction. “Gulli-Danda” first appeared in the Hindi magazine Sarasvati in May 1925. English translation in Premchand, The Complete Short Stories, ed. M. Asaduddin, 4 vols. (Penguin Random House India, 2017).

John Britto Kurusumuthu

Rise & Inspire   riseandinspire.co.in

In response to the WordPress Daily Writing Prompt, 26 October 2026: What was your first ever video game?

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Internal links used

Four links, each opened and confirmed as a live, published Rise & Inspire post. No published posts were found on Plato, Premchand, Pillaitamil or the Roman sources, so those passages stay unlinked.

Anchor text	Destination article	Why it fits
childhood games	The Beauty of Being a Kid at Heart	Treats play as the language of childhood
fond lament for simpler times	Do You Spend More Time Reflecting on the Past or Dreaming About the Future?	Warns against nostalgia that keeps us stuck
the screen and the street	Reading vs. Online Reading	Argues for balance between traditional and digital formats
Written by a programmer	Is Learning to Code Still Relevant in the Age of AI?	Argues that human judgment still matters behind the code

The first line of the post is the older SEO title. The tightened version agreed earlier is “What Was My First Video Game? No Screen, No Referee”.