5 Simple Games You’re Taking Too Seriously

BOSTON (MainStreet) -- For every freshman on the quad kicking a Hacky Sack and senior at a house party hitting the last cup at a beer pong table this fall, there'll be some "commissioner" out in the real world making sure they follow rules and pay dues for those games once they graduate.

Remember the person from college who always called fouls during games of Ultimate Frisbee, yelled at you for not keeping the ball up in the Hacky Sack circle or halted beer pong games to address the fact his opponent's elbow was over the table? Chances are he or she's probably now in one of the leagues organized around those games, Myachi, Cornhole, Flip Cup or any other activity people miraculously managed to enjoy in college without a governing body scrutinizing their every move.

Besides, governing bodies work out so well for sports in general, don't they? It's not as if the National Football League could get away with drawing out a labor dispute, canceling its Hall of Fame game, calling it off at the last minute, raising ticket prices and still preventing fans from seeing the game if there aren't enough butts in the seats. It's not like the National Basketball Association can send its players scattering to the ends of the globe looking for work while the league locks the doors and shuts out the lights. It's not as if Major League Baseball or the National Hockey League ever canceled seasons, called off championships and felt it was better for everyone involved that their sports not be played.

Just because a game or sport seems simple or even silly when played on campus, however, doesn't mean there won't be someone who sees it and thinks it lacks the structure that serves major league sports so well.

"Any sport or activity starts out recreationally and as a fun pastime that doesn't have a competitive slant or edge to it," says Bruce Guettich, co-founder of the World Footbag Association, which oversees the sport involving the beanbag more commonly known by its genericized trademark Hacky Sack. "Footbag does, and there's a competitive version of it that most people have never seen or even heard of that is played over a net, kind of like tennis or volleyball with your feet."

Though integrating quad and schoolyard sports such as kickball into a more "professional" setting occasionally leads to the hypercompetitive guy at work projecting all of his childhood insecurities on a bunch of people who were just in it for the beer, it does come with the benefit of standardizing rules that can vary from campus to campus (if not dorm to dorm) and halting real-world-unacceptable behavior such as namecalling and open brawling that are just fine at a house party but will get players kicked out of a bar or off a rec-league field in a hurry.

Even with that in mind, we revisited the games of long-faded youth and found five full-grown adults can take way too seriously: