Early "video" games

Here's a neat image from the excellent Shorpy photo blog site, showing a visual display system from 1924 to show baseball games being played.  If I'm understanding it right, they'd have people sit in the theater, and then they could update the system to reflect actual gameplay, perhaps from radio broadcasts or telegraph - an early version of an abstract graphical representation of reality.

Click for the front view (shown also at left), showing how it would look to the audience.  Here's the back view, showing the strapping young men operating the machine and all the different projector bulbs that had to be coordinated and controlled somehow.  Amazing complexity.  Click on the "full size" link at Shorpy if you want to see all the details of the artwork and rigging.

Old-fashioned parlor games

I know there are some party games, like Charades and Dictionary, which have their roots in Victorian parlor games. Others are more physical, like blind man's bluff, or pin the tail on the donkey. These have mostly shifted to be kids' games.

But some were just weird. See this description of a game called "Are you there, Moriarty?" Also, this article in Tin House (via Boardgame News) is a funny look at some of the old-school games people used to play. It's hard to imagine anybody (or at least anybody not under the influence of a controlled substance) in our current cynical world agreeing to do these things, while the supposedly prudish Victorian gentlefolk were willing to flop about like a fish on the floor whacking each other with newspapers while wearing baby bonnets. Pretty amazing.

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P.S. - here's another fun article by Danielle Levanas about parlor games (I also lifted the picture above from there, although it looks like it's originally from somewhere else).