One of my grandsons will be 11 next week and I’m designing a birthday card for him. He’s definitely arrived at the age where it's difficult to find suitable birthday cards and my heart sank when my daughter replied to my enquiry about his current interests with, ‘X-box Live’!
For a start, X-box isn’t within my realm of experience any more than Playstation or Nintendo Wii are. All I know is that a lot of children and young people crave them!
Secondly, my most successful pen and wash greeting card designs seem to be ones where there’s a bit of action, or at least, movement. And from the little I have observed about these things, in television soap operas mainly, with video games, there’s very little movement going on, in fact the opposite, as the players sit crouched in one position for hours on end!
Which brings me to my third difficulty. A short time ago, I watched a television documentary about addiction to gaming. So all the time I was wondering about the design of a birthday card for my grandson, this rather worrying thought was at the back of my mind. However, the programme I saw seemed to suggest that people who get addicted to video games mostly have some underlying problem that predisposes them to addiction and that there are some real benefits to be gained from playing video games – in moderation!
So this is what I came up:
My query relates to the caption. In the UK, ‘pass the parcel’ is probably one of the most common traditional party games. But if I want to post this design for sale online - ie globally! – I need to know whether that text will be understood worldwide. Is, for instance, ‘pass the parcel’ as popular in the US as it has been in the UK? If not, what would be the US equivalent? (And if there is anyone reading this who could translate my text into another language completely, with appropriate party game inserted, I’d be very, very grateful!)
Humour doesn’t always translate easily into other languages because of cultural differences. For instance, a range of my lighthearted Christmas cards that haven’t sold at all through Greeting Card Universe, sold very well through the UK website, yoodoo.com.
So maybe a bit of ‘international cooperation’ is called for and would be very much appreciated!
PS I must just add that Daniel, my grandson does do a lot of more active things – tennis, golf, skiing for instance – but not just at the moment! And his brother will be turning 14 in early February, so that will probably present another challenge for me!
6 comments:
Judy, Love you and hope your family is well....also.
Hi Jean - thank you very much for stopping by; lovely to hear from you! And yes, thank you, my family are all more or less well, with just a touch of the seasonal coughs and colds!
my son and I looked up pass the parcel and i wished I'd heard of it when the grandchildren were smaller as it sounds like fun. I can't speak for those in the US but in
Canada the only thing similar is musical chairs where the kids walk around a chair until the music stops but there's no parcel which would make it so much more fun.
Yes, Pass the Parcel is a very simple idea, but it always goes down well with children. It is very much like musical chairs but I think it's easier for small children to grasp - and nobody gets eliminated as they do in musical chairs. Usually the person in charge of the music will time the breaks so that everyone gets a turn and sometimes so that the 'birthday child'is the one to get the prize at the end.
I discovered through the GCU forum that this game is known in Australia but not in the US - and now we can add Canada to the list. Maybe it's something the UK can 'export'to the US for once!
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