Labminton, the greatest of all games

Labminton is the greatest game ever imagined. It takes everything good about badminton and adds to it all of the good parts of squash. It's a game that was invented in the postgrad computer science lab of Swansea University, in Wales, sometime between 2004 and 2005. It has not, to my knowledge, been played since 2007, when the cohort of graduate students who made it their lives (myself included) completed their studies and left Swansea for lives elsewhere.

The setup is simple. Two players, each with badminton rackets. One shuttlecock. And a cubicle divider, one of the proper old-school types, a metre-and-a-half tall, solid, with fabric sides. There is no strictly defined court size; it should be agreed on before play begins. The cubicle divider is used as a net, and play itself follows badminton rules, with the crucial differences that a) a single rebound off the body is permitted, and b) unlimited rebounds off the divider are allowed. A player can repeatedly bounce the shuttlecock back at themselves off the divider until they find the perfect angle to hit it over to the other player. And of course, the divider itself is opaque, so exactly where the shuttlecock will spring from is not easy for the other player to work out. First to five points wins. The games have a fantastic mixture of speed and stealth.

We played at evenings and weekends whenever we weren't playing Frets on Fire (an open-source version of Guitar Hero). We played at exactly those times at which any normal PhD student should have been working on their PhD. Remarkably, I don't think any of the Labminton players dropped out.

We were, unfortunately, disruptive to everyone else. Labminton was invented and played in the Faraday Tower, and it turns out that even in so solidly-constructed a building as that, if two people are jumping up and down on the fifth floor, everyone on the fourth floor will know about it. I must apologise! I don't think we were ever sanctioned, though there were grumbles.

Once we left the game left too; the next generation of PhD students didn't keep up the tradition. Perhaps the sense of relief at having a quiet lab was too great. That's why I'm writing this now, so the idea itself doesn't die. It really is a marvellous game. Indeed, with companies ditching cubicles for fully open-plan offices (which only look good in photographs and are otherwise a pox on work), there might be good opportunities to find your own labminton equipment for cheap. It needn't only be played in a lab. But it must be played!

Contact: labminton@gmail.com