Talk:Mornington Crescent (game)

1,2,3 O'Leary

I've heard of a game similar to this called 1,2,3 O'Leary in which the first person to say "1,2,3 O'Leary" is the winner. Utterly pointless and not very funny though. Anyone else heard of this??

Why it's Mornington Crescent

Is it worth explaining that the reason the game centres on Mornington Crescent (and not, say, Finchley Central) is that, for the uninitiated, Mornington Crescent can be a slightly tricky station to reach? Although all Northern Line trains pass through Camden Town and Euston, only those on the Charing Cross branch stop at Mornington Crescent in between, as those on the Bank branch bypass it. I don't, of course, have a source for this; but as a Londoner I've always thought that was pretty obviously part of the joke. GrindtXX (talk) 12:33, 26 October 2017 (UTC)

It's probably because, up to 1966, Edgware trains passed through Mornington Crescent without stopping. You could only get there on a High Barnet train. If you did not know this, or forgot it, you were in for a difficult time. Even after 1966, the station was closed from 9pm and at weekends, so all trains were non-stopping at those times. Again this could easily catch you out, and it continued until the 1990s rebuild. So Mornington Crescent had folkloric status as this place you couldn't get to. Khamba Tendal (talk) 14:19, 20 June 2018 (UTC)

Yes, it was marked with a dagger on the underground map, the only station so labelled. This was to warn people about the odd times, but a generation grew up wondering why this one station was so special.

213.205.241.17 (talk) 14:32, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

Factually Incorrect to Claim There Are No Rules

There are many rules to Mornington Crescent. I can provide links to them, in print and online. But that's been done several times already. Must I do it again? It is factually incorrect to claim the game has no rules. It is true that the rules have next to no bearing on who wins, but claiming the game has no rules is just as incorrect as claiming Calvinball has no rules. Calvinball has no fixed rules, save that you can never play it the same way twice. That doesn't mean it has no rules. Mornington Crescent is similar. Mornington Crescent is a social game, like punning with friends. Consequently the main rules that govern proper play are social rules, not arbitrary game constraints such as having to roll a six before you start. Two other examples of games 'without rules' that do in fact have rules: playing tug-of-war with a dog or playing peek-a-boo with a baby. No-one has written down the rules to either of those games, and yet all normal people know how to play them. A po-faced insistence that Mornington Crescent doesn't have rules when in fact it does, they're not just the ones the game promulgates, is a significant misrepresentation, but I'm not going to try to correct it unless I can be reasonably sure the change isn't going to be promptly reverted by someone insisting that Mornington Crescent's rules somehow don't qualify as 'proper' rules, without ever properly explaining why not. I can fulfil the letter of the requirement that MC has rules and provide copious examples of such, and I can demonstrate the spirit of the requirement. What more is necessary? And why are the opinions of people who think they understand the game being given greater weight than those who actually do? 82.69.54.207 (talk) 21:17, 26 June 2018 (UTC)

Bang on Badgerchap (talk) 23:11, 7 July 2018 (UTC)

It shouldn't get reverted if you can cite a reliable source. Wikiepdia is about venerability not truth. Totteridge and Whetstone - your move. Cnbrb (talk) 14:51, 4 October 2018 (UTC)

Broadly speaking, there are no rules because the game the players purport to be playing does not exist. A.N. Wilson, in his memoir Iris Murdoch As I Knew Her (Hutchinson, London, 2003, ISBN 978-0099723103, p.244), recalls that, when he was lunching with the novelist and academic philosopher Dame Iris Murdoch at her favourite restaurant, Dino's on Gloucester Road, London in 1989, she asked him, 'Andrew, you're a clever chap, so tell me: what *are* the rules of Mornington Crescent?' According to Wilson, he replied:- '“But Iris, the point of the game is that there isn’t a point.” She shook her head and laughed. “No, no. They quite often stop the game and discuss the rules.” “But that’s the joke.” “But they never explain what the rules ARE.”' (See also V. Purton, An Iris Murdoch Chronology, Palgrave Macmillan, London, 2007, ISBN 978-1-349-52308-5, p.190.) Reviews of Wilson's book often picked up on that particular conversation, and on Murdoch's comical failure to get the point. See, for instance:- https://www.theguardian.com/books/2003/sep/03/biography.features11 This means, of course, that not only had Dame Iris not got the joke, but her husband John Bayley (writer), Warton Professor of English at Oxford, can't have got it either. I'm not sure what that tells you about Murdoch, or Bayley, or Oxford academics in general (I am sure, actually), but it certainly tells you what a good joke Mornington Crescent is. There aren't any rules except that the players take turns to announce the names of London streets, districts or Tube stations, and the winner is the first one to name Mornington Crescent, and the winning move may not be made until the players have taken a certain number of turns, sometimes wittering about non-existent rules such as whether 'diagonals are wild' as they go along. Barry once said 'Fairlop', which is on that weird loop of the Central Line, and the game ended because no one could think of a way out of it, in fact Humph invited listeners to write in with possible solutions, but in recent shows Fairlop has been cited as a move without any problems at all, because basically there aren't any rules. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:09, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

In addition, have a look at this short paper by two mathematicians, a professor and his student son. https://plus.maths.org/content/how-win-mornington-crescent They try to impose game theory and Bayesian probability on to Mornington Crescent, but they know nothing about it and they fall into a variant of the Murdoch-Bayley Canard, ascribing rules to the game which it clearly does not possess. They think that players can only name Tube stations -- current, active ones -- and that repeats are not allowed, and therefore they suggest that no game can ever exceed 270 turns, that being the number of current active stations on the Underground. (Except that two of those stations, completely unconnected, with no interchange, share the same name -- Edgware Road -- a factor not taken into account. It is noteworthy that, in actual play, when a player names Edgware Road, he -- it's usually 'he', I'm afraid -- is never asked whether he means the road itself, the Bakerloo station or the District, Circle and Hammersmith & City station, because it doesn't make any difference. Which it would if the 'rules' imagined by idiots applied.) In fact repeats are allowed. And players are not restricted to Tube stations and can name any London street, square or district. 'Crouch End' is a valid move, but it's not a Tube station -- the area is served by Highgate Tube -- and it's not even a street name; there's a Crouch End Hill and of course Crouch End Broadway, but there's no actual street called Crouch End, just the district, and yet Crouch End is a valid move. The whole game-theory approach based on a theoretical maximum 270 moves is false, as would be obvious to anyone who has the slightest familiarity with the game as it is actually played, but intellectuals gonna intellectual, I guess. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:18, 13 November 2019 (UTC)

The West Ham Shunt rule states that if you find a long, pointless discussion of 150 lines or more on any media, you are instantly qualified to call ‘Mornington Crescent’.

Mornington Crescent! I win! 213.205.241.17 (talk) 14:35, 23 September 2020 (UTC)

intro

To be encyclopedic, the article must say early on that MC is a spoof.

It does. Khamba Tendal (talk) 19:50, 12 November 2019 (UTC)

Origins

I have a memory that an episode of the Goodies had a prototype of Mornington Crescent - two of the Goodies (Graham & Bill, I vaguely remember) were playing a meaningless game and Tim wanted to join in. Apepper (talk) 08:08, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

What relevance does this have to the article? You would need a reliable source that makes the link between the two games otherwise it is irrelevant. Robynthehode (talk) 12:27, 11 October 2020 (UTC)

Tube Map Picture?

Why is that picture of the tube map used? Isn't the modern diagram Harry Beck thing better because it is universally known as the tube map of london, rather that is a bit less well known. JacobTheRox (talk) 07:55, 23 August 2022 (UTC)