X-treme Forum

I've been playing games most of my life. From my childhood, my father and mother often would sit my brother and I down at the table in our family room or in our kitchen and break out the family board games and, somehow, it taught us about life. Of course, in once case it LITERALLY taught us about life because that was the game in 1966 that we got for Christmas. It taught us that we could be anything we wanted to be in LIFE — as long as we realized that our basic choice was between college and obscurity, that we were required to stop and get married (collect presents) and that whether we were a winner or not depended entirely on the size of our bank account.

This view, of course, was reinforced by that other family classic, Monopoly. There I learned not only that winning meant having the biggest pile of cash but that I had to crush everyone else into bankruptcy in order to achieve my win. This, in part, may explain the bizarre and repressive economic situation in which so much of the industrialized world finds itself today: too much believe that the Monopoly game was a model for success in life.

Nevertheless, that was how I was raised … which led me eventually to play, as so many of us did, the game called 'Risk.' This game taught me such basic principles as (1) you need to secure your boarders and (2) never start a land war in Asia (thank you  Vizzini) and (3) trying to maintain armies scattered all over the world was a sure way of losing them. I also learned that if you wanted to pretend you were the United States in the game you had better take over ALL of North America — including Greenland and especially Mexico/Central America. It is a bit unsettling to me as a game-player that the leaders of the United States have failed in every one of these lessons although I suspect we could take Greenland in a pinch.

It was recently announced by President Obama while in Australia (easily defensible on a Risk board, I would point out) that the United States was going to station a force in Australia to counter the threat of China. China? And, yes, my first thought was 'Hasn't he ever played a game of Risk? … or at least seen 'The Princess Bride?'

In the mid-1980's we played a 'Risk-with-nukes' game called 'Supremacy' by Robert J. Simpson and his group. This had a wonderful economic/market component for purchasing resources and, yes, little black plastic mushroom clouds in case things got out of hand. It was of particular interest to me that whenever anyone in that game developed 'L-stars' (the game equivalent of Starwars anti-ICBM systems) in the game, the likelihood of someone starting to lob nukes at the other guy actually INCREASED … and things quickly got out of hand.

All the games I played in my youth were highly competitive and reflected competitive ideals in the world of the United States in the last century. Laura and I both loved games and raised our own children playing them. However, we also recognized as we played them that the games were, indeed, teaching our children as they had taught us. This engendered a number of 'house rules' regarding all games in our Hickman House which we pass on to you now:

1. How many players will lose the game? We always asked this question at the beginning of the game. Everyone thinks about winning but no one thinks about the fact that for every winner at Monopoly there are going to be an equal to or, more likely, larger number of losers in the game. We like to remind everyone right up front that there can ONLY be ONE winner in Monopoly, Risk, and Milton-Bradley's version of 'Life.'
2. The Winner of the Game Cleans it up and puts it away: This proved to be the single most important rule we established in our household. The winner has the satisfaction of having been victorious — but then they have to deal with the mess created in their victory. The 'losers' of the game — the rest of us — may not have won the day BUT we are then all allowed to get up from the table and walk away from the mess saying, 'Hey, at least we didn't have to put that game away!' And, in my household at least, you had better put the game away in good order! My children were raised on epic, hours long games of Talisman and when you were finished all those pieces had better be put away properly.

The games we play shape our lives. For both Laura and I, they are some of the clearest memories we have of being with family around a board game on holidays. We even designed our own holiday board game called 'Santa's Sleigh Ride' just so we could recapture those memories we carry from our childhood and pass on new memories to our children and grandchildren. Visit our little website there and download the demo game for free so you can make a few memories of your own.

I have often thought that it might be a good idea to require people who are nominated for public office to play a competitive game of 'SimCity' or 'Civilization IV' just so we could see how they would do under test conditions so that we could properly evaluate their performance BEFORE entrusting them with real armies, navies and economies. In more recent years, games have gotten much better at dealing with cooperation rather than competition. One of our favorite games in our household today is 'Forbidden Island' which is the best designed cooperative game I've ever played.

Maybe our politicians should play that one, too. There's nothing like having an island sinking out from under you to motivate a little political accord.

Read original blog post