Until recently, my wife and I used to fear three words coming out of our daughter’s mouth: “Let’s play Life!”
Life, in case you don’t know, was a popular Milton Bradley board game in the 1960s, now transformed into a card game called Life Adventures.
In it, players take turns choosing cards that offer “plot points” in career, family, adventure or wealth, such as “You have just gone scuba diving in a volcano. Earn 20 points.” You acquire points and lay down your cards in a row, creating your “life” story.
But that’s not the hard part. The hard part is that you have to tell your unfolding story on every turn. Your narration doesn’t have to be any particular length, though you can’t just simply say, “I went scuba diving in a volcano” and be done with it. You have to spiel out some details, such as “After I earned five million bucks from my previous job as an architect building eco-friendly treehouses, I took the money and brought my wife to Taal to scuba dive in the volcano crater; we found a bunch of diamonds down there.”
This may sound like a lot of fun for a couple of writers, and it definitely is for our daughter, who can invent endless storylines and subplots and magically tie them together with previous storylines and subplots for 15-minute stretches. But I have to say, it’s a game that wears out its welcome pretty quickly. Most adults find it hard to dwell in the world of imagination for extended periods; they’ve been taught to deal with a world of realities and facts. “Playing” for them means slicing virtual fruit on a gadget screen or collecting a bunch of virtual candy. Something completely brain-dead, but strangely satisfying. It doesn’t involve inventing a character who represents them, and then trying to live out that character’s life in a plausible storyline. I think that’s pretty much the domain of novelists.
So playing Life Adventures is like writing a novel, except it’s a very bad novel that no one would ever want to read or think about ever again. You have to pretend you got married and had seven kids, and adopted a dolphin, and made a ton of money as a pop star, but then decided to drop it all and study iguanas in South America instead. It’s mentally tiring, much like life itself.
And it’s endless. There are a number of “time” cards in the deck, and when enough of these turn up and are played, the game ends. But not soon enough for me. And so — and here I reveal a secret I hope my daughter never finds out — when she’s not looking, I go through the deck and shove the “time” cards closer to the top, to speed up the game. That’s right: I cheat at Life with my 10-year-old daughter.
But our daughter adores the game. She can’t understand why we hide the thing under a bunch of towels in the linen closet whenever it’s game time. We offer her Monopoly Deal instead, which at least has a possibility of people getting wiped out quickly and someone making their three Monopoly sets and winning (whereas real Monopoly can go on for days). Life Adventures doesn’t seem to have a point, other than to sharpen kids’ storytelling skills (a typical online reviewer describes it as “A very vague game” and gives it two stars. True on many levels).
You could say it’s a very imaginative game, something like Dungeons and Dragons, where people take on roles and develop epic stories for themselves. Yet the cards get predictable after a few times playing it: you just know you’re going to have a mess of kids, buy an exotic house somewhere that you would never purchase in real life, and engage in a series of meaningless career choices as you edge toward The End. Nobody ever dies in Life, but you may find yourself wishing Milton Bradley had included a Death card.
So, that’s Life. I’ve tried in vain to find some metaphorical meaning in my reluctance to play the game, but I think the truth is that I’m just not a fan of tedium. I did enjoy inventing characters the first few times I played it with my wife and daughter; but after that, if I was in a grouchy mood, I would find myself inventing very dark storylines indeed, involving embezzling and crime families and the IRS. You have to do something to keep it lively.
Lately, though, our daughter has shied away from board games altogether. She’s discovered gadgets and apps, you see. And I don’t know how I feel about this: I don’t miss playing Life Adventures much, but I do think she’s missing out on the interactive nature of board games.
Yet I can’t honestly say that playing Life is necessarily more instructive than, say, playing Minecraft. Both at least require imagination. I’ve tried to find some deeper meaning in Life for my daughter, who will probably face all the real-life choices that the game proposes: “adventures” in education, wealth, career, marriage and family. Maybe she could learn some valuable lessons about using education wisely, or marrying well, or helping the environment. But all those choices are strictly random in Life Adventures: they’re not “choices” at all; you just play the cards that are dealt to you. And that seems rather bleak and fatalistic. So, if I’m being honest, I would have to tell her the truth: that Life is pointless and meaningless. And it’s just a game.
source: philstar.com
