In February my friend Emily Koonce and I hosted the Folk Game Game Jam, and for a few hours we ran around our university as if it were our childhood neighborhood. We hid in a conference room playing sardines as dozens of others searched the floor for us. We appropriated the Very Expensive chairs in the brand new building to wheel across the floor as an amoeba of giggles, pushing and pulling each other without letting our feet touch the ground. Then we started playing tag and the It started counting down aloud and we were frozen until we all jumped on “one!” We played enough games to forget some. Changed enough rules that when anyone new joined we had to explain by committee. It was a summer evening in a cold New York February and we played until we had to go back inside. And, well, we’ve been inside since.
Before the pandemic, each game night I organised or took part in was some different permutation of my friends and their friends, each person with their own games and their own character. On the last day at my university before classes went online indefinitely, I was playing Jenga with some friends when another friend passed by and suggested adding a chess timer. Chess-timer Jenga is now one of my favorite games of all time.
Self isolation took away this spontaneity. I spent months translating my friend and family relationships online, setting up discords and standing zoom calls, making lists of multiplayer games and scheduling zoom happy hours with different group chats. But the permutations don’t translate. The spontaneity doesn’t translate. A group chat or a discord server has specified members, and zoom calls require invites. There’s no one to walk by and suggest a chess timer, and if we want to play tag we must first all agree to buy and download Tag Simulator first, assuming we even have a computer good enough to run Tag Simulator.
But it turns out that there’s a secret place online to go for the spontaneous and the playful, full of strangers trying out games and making up games and remixing games. The secret place? Well, it’s on TikTok.
TikTok has a popular reputation as the haven of the zoomers, impenetrably self-referential, and impossible to understand for anyone that didn’t grow up after the death of AIM. Depending on which researcher you ask I’m either a millennial or a zoomer, but since the first iPhone released when I was 11 I feel a lot more aligned with the generation that grew up in an online world.
No matter your generation, when you open a freshly downloaded TikTok it will show teens dancing and teens doing challenges and teens dating each other and teens commiserating about high school in a pandemic and teens playing minecraft or roblox and they’re texting each other and they’re recording videos with each other and they’re showing off outfits and doing crafts and posting videos of their parents that they’re living with even though they’re technically in college right now and they’re just everywhere so many teens how can the world have so many teens? The most popular account is Charli D’Amelio and she just turned 16! The UN says there are 1.2 billion adolescents (aged 10-19) in the world, which is a fun number to compare against the 2 billion total downloads that TikTok reported in April of this year.1 This number is far larger than the total number of teens in the world, and far far larger than the number of teens on TikTok posting videos, indicative of a much richer tapestry of users and creators than its reputation. Just ask the TikTok creator Chunja46, an elderly Korean woman who built a following of 2.2 million by recording herself doing all the latest dances and trends. There’s a lot more happening on TikTok than you’re first greeted with.
This first opening of TikTok lands you on the “For You Page,” a personalized feed showing the selection of videos that TikTok has guessed you will enjoy. The cool kids call the For You Page the “fyp,” and we’re all cool here, so I’ll do the same. At first your fyp is highly impersonal, and feels very foreign, but a properly honed fyp is how we get to our playful online communities, where we’ll learn our games.
The algorithm that TikTok has created for this feed is powerful. It quickly picks up on what you like (even faster if you tell it what you don’t like), and very soon your feed starts surfacing videos that are so far up your alley it feels uncanny. The app does this through a few straightforward ways—TikTok thinks you like a video if you engage with it or watch it all the way through, and dislike it if you quickly scroll paste it or hold down on the video and select “not interested.” Videos are determined to be similar if they are liked by similar users but also if they have the same audio, language, or hashtags, along with other minor factors like if they were recorded with the same brand of device as yours.2 When a video is posted it is first tested to a small number of users that TikTok thinks may like it, and from there it is sent to larger and larger groups of users, creating fyp’s that oscillate between very popular videos and videos with far fewer views, all chosen for you by TikTok. But even before the company shared this information publicly, users were interfacing with and gaming the features of this algorithm.
For the generation raised in an online world, they’re hyper aware of the ubiquitous algorithms built into the digital platforms they use. On TikTok the fyp algorithm is understood, gamed, subverted, and referenced with the highly attuned online literacy that comes with being a teen in 2020. Users liberally apply the hashtags of advertising campaigns to their videos in an attempt to game the algorithm and reach the fyp of more people. Simultaneously, they are immediately subverted with hashtag-less videos uploaded with captions like “no hashtags, if you see this it was meant for you.” Some people will also post two separate videos with almost identical content as a pseudo poll, where each video’s success within the algorithm is proof of its public support. Having an understanding of the algorithm and digital landscape you’re creating in prompts playing with those rules and guidelines, pushing and pulling at the boundaries. Playing with the boundaries of the system you’re working within is a surefire process for creating challenges, playful trends, and folk games. Merely operating within the bounds of the algorithm and the platform has created a user base already set to engage playfully with the medium, the space, and each other.
As you use TikTok more, your fyp becomes more and more unique to yourself. Users post videos of themselves in disbelief at the fyp of their sibling, unrecognizable compared to their own. Quickly these started being referred to simply as different TikToks, with some videos theorizing on how you get to Frog TikTok (going through Cottagecore TikTok or Alt TikTok should do the trick). People will leave comments on videos from outside the usual genre of video they are shown, writing comments like “commenting just to stay on farming tiktok” because they know that engaging with a video as much as possible helps to train their personal algorithm.3 These different TikToks are symptomatic of the unique nature of a digital platform with a purely algorithmic foundation. The communities of TikTok are algorithmically created and ephemeral, each video with an audience uniquely assembled for just this once, evaporating after each individual scrolls onto the next video in their endless queue. I call these communities “Flash Communities,” and they’re the secret to the playful nature of TikTok.
Flash communities are the unique communities created for each video on TikTok. They exist only for a single video, but for that brief moment they communicate and operate with the identity of a community. Sometimes these flash communities are fabricated by a video prompting to “make the comment section like a socratic seminar you didn’t study for but try to talk bc u need the points” or “make the comments like a passive aggressive group message after the jv/varsity cheerleading teams were announced.”
Most of the time though these flash communities are created as a recognition of the algorithmically diagnosed interest that you all share. It could be something as wildly popular as cute dogs, or it could be someone participating in any of the current popular trends or challenges that ripple through TikTok every few weeks. But sometimes it’s something even more specific, like being the kind of person who has organized drawers, or still remembering that one move in the bridge of Black Eyed Peas’ “Pump It Harder” on Just Dance 3. These flash communities are built on shared experience and interest which fundamentally fosters an environment of understanding and empathy. You identify with the video, with the creator, or with specific comments in the comment section. But that specific community doesn’t have a name, and won’t exist for longer than this video’s comment section. You cannot identify as a member of that flash community. There are identifications that are sourced from outside of TikTok, like your politics or where you are from, but the format of TikTok itself does not give an opportunity to create in-groups and out-groups formed of these communities. Instead, everyone watching the video of someone trying to bounce a plunger off of a trampoline and onto a stool is there to watch just that. And then some of those viewers may try it themselves, and perhaps some of them may record it and post it. Then that video may be surfaced to the same viewers who watched the video that inspired it, but it will also be surfaced to new users and this will be their entry point into the trampoline plunger game.
Games, challenges, memes, dances, jokes, pranks, crafts, life hacks, songs, instagram filter settings, movie pirating websites, playlists—they’re all shared and spread this way. It’s the same feeling as playing a game with a new group of friends. The same feeling as when a passer-by suggests adding a chess timer to our Jenga match. The same feeling as learning a new game on the playground and later teaching it on a different playground. It’s play. It’s spontaneous play and it found a way back into my life during self isolation.
Folk games have always had a home on TikTok, but as Covid-19 spread across the globe, and workplaces and schools moved online in order to begin social distancing, TikTok became a bridge for folk games to travel between our homes. And those folk games became fundamental to finding new happiness and experiences in spite of being in the same room for months and months on end. @tuwanrovio posted a video of “Don’t Let the Balloon Touch the Ground” in April, quickly kickstarting the “Keep-Up Balloon League” in their house, pitting different family members against each other, all documented on their TikTok account. @davishastiktok posted a video of them muted on a Zoom call, yelling as loud as they could without looking different to their webcam video. Even further playing around with our new medium of Zoom, user @notcoywhite hung a pair of pants and started lowering them into the background of their roommate’s laptop webcam shot. When anyone else in the zoom meeting mentioned the pants, they would be hoisted out of frame as fast as possible, only to return a few moments laters. In lieu of human opponents for beer pong, @runintoflowers created a version of the game that can be played with their cat Ishty. Set up are one rack of standard red plastic cups along with a rack of small cat sized cups filled with milk. Ishty the cat lies on top of the kitchen cupboards, and to take their turn they are pitched a ping pong ball that they then swat with their paw toward the cups placed below them on the countertop. User @peterkervin created a “new sport” by taping table tennis paddles to the front and back of his waist and one to his forehead, using the trio of paddles to rally a ping pong ball off of a table tennis backboard. @georgialynnrose created the “Red Wine Golden Retriever Challenge” which tasks the player with drinking a glass of red wine while a golden retriever tugs at a rope they are holding in their other hand.
Each of these videos prompted others to try it for themselves, often recording their attempts and posting them to TikTok. Each of these videos tells the story of playing the game, and then each video response tells their own story playing that game, and so on and so on until there are so many stories that people start changing the game a bit to make new stories. And then they change the game again, and have a new story.
It often feels like self isolation throughout this pandemic is a desert for the new, that every day is exactly the same and there is no change coming, no new experience or spontaneity to lift you out of the rut. And I think there is truth to that, but also there are these games on TikTok, and at least for me, they lift me just a little bit out of that rut.
In the beginning of October I tweeted a thread of folk game TikToks, and it started to go moderately viral. I braced myself for the vitriol that I was warned comes with viral tweets. To my astonishment, the exact opposite happened. I received tweet after tweet and message after message expressing pure joy and gratitude for seeing so many videos of people having fun goofing around with each other. People greeted these videos like lost friends, remembering what the spontaneous and playful felt like to take part in, or even just to watch. It seems that so many people had forgotten what it felt like to play. I had forgotten what it felt like to play. The response to a thread of people playing games was an overwhelming affection for people, for friends, for games, and for play. During the pandemic sometimes it feels like we’ve forgotten to play, but we haven’t: we just need to make our spontaneity digital.
How do we do that? Well, I recommend this cool new app called TikTok. All the kids are using it.
Danny Hawk (website, twitter) is a game designer, developer, and adjunct professor based in Brooklyn NY. He is a co-founder of Folk Game Game Jam, and is currently working on Bird Town, a comedy adventure video game about a town of birds.
Image based on Jenga by Jose Hernandez under a CC BY-NC-SA license, and released under the same license.
- Carman, Ashley. “TikTok reaches 2 billion downloads”. The Verge, 29 April 2020. https://www.theverge.com/2020/4/29/21241788/tiktok-app-download-numbers-update-2-billion-users
- Matsakis, Louise. “TikTok Finally Explains How the ‘For You’ Algorithm Works”. Wired, 18 June 2020. https://www.wired.com/story/tiktok-finally-explains-for-you-algorithm-works/
- Merrilees, Kristen. “The Comments Are Now The Best Part of TikTok”. Medium, 18 May 2020. https://medium.com/swlh/the-comments-are-now-the-best-part-of-tiktok-78c624d51141