Tombstone hold'em: The poker game that’s played in a graveyard

Key topics:

• Tombstone Hold’em is a poker variant played in cemeteries

• The game encourages reflection on mortality through play

• Cemeteries can be reimagined as vibrant community spaces

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By Debby Edelstein

There are some combinations that go together easily. Like bread and butter, Anthony and Cleopatra, tea and cake. But when it comes to poker and graveyards, the fit is less obvious.

The game Tombstone Hold’em is the creation of the American game designer, author and gaming advocate Jane McGonigal. It’s designed as a variation of Texas Hold’em which is one of the most popular variants of the card game of poker. However, rather than using cards, Tombstone Hold’em can be played in any cemetery that has clearly marked gravestones.

The game is played by identifying the four shapes you find on a tombstone. Pointy is for spades, a statue on top is clubs, rounded is hearts and flat is diamonds. It also involves a lot of running around and creating the kind of commotion that could not be described as dignified.

McGonigal describes it as the most controversial game she’s designed. And in a world where we prefer to focus on the here and now, rather than confront our mortality, it’s hardly surprising.

Even though a graveyard is the kind of environment guaranteed to attract attention, she chose the backdrop for reasons that go beyond the sensational.

How games can make people happier became the focus of her research after she had to overcome a personal health challenge.

Halfway through writing her book, McGonigal suffered a concussion that left her depressed and unable to write. When a doctor told her that lifting her mood was essential for her brain to heal, she created a game to help her cope with the depression.

The game, called SuperBetter involves creating a secret identity as a superhero (hers was “Jane the Concussion Slayer”) and then recruiting friends and family to play support roles in her healing.

It’s been developed into an app which is now being tested in a clinical trial at Ohio State University to support patients who are suffering concussions and transitioning from hospital care to home care.

As part of her research, McGonigal discovered that thinking about death is one of the most highly recommended “happiness hacks” and that a cemetery is the most logical place to do this.

Tal Ben-Shahar, a positive psychology lecturer at Harvard, who wrote Happier reinforces this and recommends activities such as imagining ourselves on our deathbeds as a way to access positive clarity and thereby boost happiness.

Unsurprisingly, this is not the kind of happiness activity that most of us are particularly keen to undertake, but it turns out that the kind of reflection about mortality that takes place in a graveyard makes it therapeutic without making it too personal.

“I deliberately bought a house next to a cemetery so that I’d wake up to birds trilling on old tombstones and be happily reminded that life is short, spurring me along to get up and do something productive,” writes Professor of Science Communication Jesse Bering in Scientific American.

Reflecting on our mortality and visiting graveyards might not be where we choose to spend our leisure time, but this hasn’t always been the case.

Plato advised students to “practice regular meditation upon death”. Budha said that “Of all mindfulness meditations, that on death is supreme.” Even Greek philosopher Epicurus who was best known for pursuing pleasure, put death at the centre of his vision of happiness.

In the early to mid-eighteenth century, a group of British poets known as the Graveyard School, focused their writing on death and the afterlife. Thomas Gray’s Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard is famously representative of this kind of poetry, which was set in the countryside to reflect the simple, rural lives of those who lie buried there.

There was also a time when cemeteries were a place where families met after church on Sundays for picnics and baseball games. But near the turn of the twentieth century when parks became more popular, the practice of regularly visiting cemeteries began to dwindle.

“As a society, they [cemeteries] are a necessity, but then we forget about them,” says Barb Headle, a senior history instructor at the University of Colorado at Colorado Springs.

She’s taught the class “Cemeteries and Memory in American History” since 2012 and believes that we judge how civilised a society is based on how well it takes care of its children, its elderly, its poor and its dead.

Even though in some parts of the world grieving is a private, solitary affair, there are also places where cemeteries can be integrated into daily life.

Assistens Cemetery in Copenhagen is a popular place for residents to congregate and relax. Cemeteries play a central role in Día de los Muertos celebrations in Mexico. In central Berlin, a kindergarten playground is built on an old graveyard belonging to the Sophien Church. Here, children chase each other on bikes, run around with balloons, and climb on top of tombstones.

Even though her happiness hacks were top of mind in the design of Tombstone Hold’em, what surprised McGonigal most was the discovery that cities desperately want graveyards to be more populated spaces. All over the world graveyards are struggling with getting the funding for their upkeep. After all the fewer visitors they attract, the less anyone notices the state of disrepair they are in.

She was also surprised by how people responded to hearing about the game. Of course there is censure and disapproval, but for many, rather than thinking that it’s inappropriate that young people are using the graveyards as a playground, many older people talk about a sense of comfort that graveyards are no longer deserted ghost towns. It makes it more meaningful for them to remember their loved ones in a space where there is an energy and a sense of vitality and community.

It’s highly unlikely that a game like Tombstone Hold’em will ever become mainstream, and without the necessary context to understand the intention behind its design, it will remain controversial. But just like the role of art in society, McGonigal believes that one of the most vital powers of gameplay is that it gives the players permission to do things differently. Gamers are used to being asked to think unconventionally within the game context. And as McGonigal explains, “A crowd carries the social authority to redefine norms.”

So Tombstone Hold’em could very well be a way to rethink how we maintain one of society’s most important public spaces while honouring the memories of previous generations. It’s a way to think differently about graveyards as places where we congregate rather than as places we avoid. It might even end up making us all a little happier. (As long as you aren’t scared of ghosts.)