Eccentric Flower:201012/Mall Exposure 50 Millirems

[N.B. I make the titles of these pieces before I type them, and it's kind of a pain to change the title afterward. This was originally going to be about malls and some trends therein, but it turned into mostly being about board and card games. I didn't think I had that many words in me about games, but apparently there's some deep well of bile there or something. Anyway, I didn't want you to have false expectations based on the title. Carry on. -c]

Once upon a time I wrote semi-regularly about advertising and consumer culture. I don't claim it was always brilliant writing, but I do think that I have often achieved a clarity of analysis there - what kind of advertising works, why it works, why advertisers try the things they do, what various types of marketing techniques (and whether they succeed) say about society at the time, and so on - that often eludes me on other topics.

Yesterday I mentioned that sometimes I take notes on my phone when I have no easier method. Usually those notes are taken in some kind of retail emporium. Y'see, I am incapable of going into a supermarket or a mall without noting a thousand little things which strike me as worth making social observations and/or snarky comments about. I think people mostly don't look at the products they buy very closely, don't stop to consider most of the little ridiculousnesses about the way things are packaged and sold in this country. For some reason I did not get this obliviousness at birth; every time I walk into a store, I tend to revert back to the personality of someone who has just arrived on this planet from Neptune and is struggling to understand the peculiar customs you folks have here.

(Could be worse. For my friend Marc, "alien from Neptune" is his natural state of mind. He walks among us, but does not understand our ways except via lessons learned at considerable personal cost.)

The problem - and one of several reasons I don't write pieces like the Stay Tuned stuff anymore, much - is that I lost my good cheer about the topic permanently along the way somewhere. Supermarkets depress me; malls depress and annoy me. So many people buying so much crap they don't need without applying any sort of analytical thought to the matter! I think I was probably about twenty years old when I first began to get the twinge of "this can't bode well for the species" when I stepped into a mall; since then it just gets worse every year. The tone of Stay Tuned took only four years to shift from "Ha, ha, aren't these bad-marketing examples hilarious!" to "Why the hell are you all still buying into this shit?" That is not a constructive tone.

So, anyway, I still take notes to myself and sometimes I even write about them, but it doesn't happen very often because I've learned that the best thing is simply to avoid exposure to shopping - especially shopping malls - whenever possible. Of course I do have to buy things, but less often than you might think. And because I also don't really do Christmas much, I generally manage to keep visits to malls around Christmas - when they are at their most toxic to the human spirit - to a number in the range 0-2.

The other day, though, I needed a USB joystick and I thought I would duck in that afternoon, leaving work a little early and taking a nice walk for part of the way, and, frankly, I simply forgot that the Christmas frenzy would be in play. Oops!

The way this ties in to the previous entry is that on the way to the dreaded Best Buy, I stopped into one of these transient stores which purported to sell non-computer games of all kinds.

(Are you familiar with these transient or temporary stores? They rent a mall slot for a couple of months at most, usually no more than a couple of weeks, selling seasonal or other short-lifespan merchandise. These are actually a very fast-growing segment of mall business. I will spare you a cynical analysis of why and merely comment that, in my observations, most of the merchandise in these stores, while a bargain, is not the kind of stuff anyone with self-respect or taste would touch with a thirty-nine-and-a-half foot pole.)

I don't play non-computer games much anymore at all, mostly because the good board and card games require other people, and I'm a hermit. Also, frankly, if I'm seeing a group of friends, they are likely people I get to see once every blue moon, if that, and I'd rather not waste time playing a game. Games are adjuncts to good conversations, but I'd rather just skip the game and have the conversation. The ideal case for games is if you have a circle of friends that you see often enough that you're past the point where just getting to see them is a novelty, where you see them often enough to have gone through most of the usual topics, but you still want to see them, so you need a fun game to grease the wheels. I don't have any friends who fit that category. There are two other couples in the area and one Neptunian I see on a regular basis, and playing games with one couple would be just about impossible because of my young niece and nephew (at least until they get old enough to play games that would be interesting to adults), and playing games with the second couple strikes me as 1) not in their temperament and 2) a recipe for disaster, as all four of us would bring competitiveness aspects to the table that would clash in horrible ways.

[I am either a very competitive or a very non-competitive game player, and that's a complication right there. When I described games above as being an adjunct to conversation, you may have felt I was giving the enjoyability of the games themselves insufficient credit, and you'd be right - but I have a reason. See, if I enjoy playing a game for its own sake, then I play very hard to win. If it's fun enough that I get invested in it, then I get invested in it all the way. This is related to the aspect of my personality that insists that if something is worth doing at all, it should be done flawlessly. Conversely, there are plenty of games which I'll play just to pass the time while a conversation is happening, but since those games don't hold my attention much, by definition, they're also not very entertaining to me.]

Anyway, back to the game store, and I apologize for the digression. The question at hand was not whether I play games and the reasons why, but whether anyone else was playing games - whether board/card games, in terms from the previous entry, are "live," "die," or "niche." (If you'd like to spare yourself a lot of words and stop reading now: I vote "niche.") Frankly, as soon as I stepped into the store I smelled the slightly dusty aroma of something well into its decline - and it wasn't just that half the space of the "game" store had been given over to selling wall and desk calendars.

When I was a kid, new games came out all the time. Especially just before Christmas. Every major game manufacturer would come out with at least three or four new games; that was just the way it was done. These days many of those game makers seem to be gone or consolidated, but most importantly, the new games are no longer in that segment. The only place you see new games being introduced regularly these days is the indie market, which by definition caters to the niche game player - the people who will still be playing board and card games after the rest of us have forgotten such things ever existed. Often the new games in this segment are translations of foreign games, particularly in German, because apparently people are still marketing new board games constantly in Germany and Austria, and presumably that means people are still playing them, because nothing gets marketed if they think no one will buy it.

This game store was not for such people. (Although I did note, in one of the few encouraging signs, that a game of definite "indie" origins, Settlers of Catan, had managed to cross into the mainstream, as was evidenced by its presence in this store.)

There were three types of board games in this store, apart from oddities like the presence of Settlers of Catan:

1) The Trivial Pursuit boxes. Not all of those boxes actually contain Trivial Pursuit. I am simply referring to the size and shape of the box: The relatively tall, square box. You know the kind I mean. These boxes contain games which are intended to amuse large groups of people and provide hilarity and ice-breaking functions. They are party games, and while there are occasionally new titles, they are often a) not very well-thought-out b) very derivative of other entries already in this category or c) both.

[One I hadn't seen before, which I suspect will serve as an example of c), was a game called Senior Moments (slogan: "You probably can't remember the last time you played a game like this!") It was a standard memory-test game, of which you could find other, better examples without the cutesy. The thing is, though, they're depending on the cutesy to sell the game. The people who buy it will buy it as gifts for their friends - probably their older friends - under the mistaken assumption this is hilarious. It is entirely possible, even probable, that once the gift is given no one will ever actually play it (or will play it once, to have done, and then consign it to the back of a closet) - but then, the manufacturer of the game doesn't care a whit whether you actually play it, and may not even have given the game any real playtesting to see how enjoyable/workable it is at all.]

Not all the new ideas in this category are bad. Another I hadn't seen before was Trivial Pursuit: Bet You Know It, which takes the standard Trivial Pursuit gameplay and adds side betting to it - i.e. bet on whether someone will get the answer right, or bet they will get it wrong. You can then use your betting winnings to buy game wedges or other advantages. This strikes me as an excellent way to improve Trivial Pursuit, a fine game which has a few big structural flaws* - but then, that's not really an example of category 1, it's more an example of ....

2) Games which are "line extensions" of existing games. This actually was the majority of games in the place! Apparently the flat-box game makers (those such as have survived) have given up on making new flat-box games (by "flat-box" I mean the games that come in boxes like Monopoly, Clue, Scrabble, Sorry!, Life - you know, the stuff you grew up with but your kids didn't) and are now just trying to find ways to hang new concepts and promotional tie-ins onto their old warhorse games.

I thought it was hilarious when I saw a Star Wars-themed version of Life some years ago, so much so that I bought it with the intention of playing it with my Star Wars-crazed brother-in-law (never did, of course; it's gathering dust somewhere in this house). What I didn't realize was that I hadn't seen anything yet. I saw "Seinfeld"-themed Clue and "The Office"-themed Clue; I saw at least two other "Seinfeld"-tied games and all kinds of "Office"-tied stuff; I saw Hello Kitty Monopoly, in addition to the usual slew of themed Monopoly-clones which have multiplied to the point of absurdity in recent years (because they make such great souvenirs you'll never actually play! I am willing to bet money that nine-tenths of all Red Sox-opoly games ever sold have never had their shrinkwrap removed).

My favorite of the seventy thousand tie-ins I saw, however, was a Super Mario Bros.-themed chess set.

Now think about this. What is the slowest-paced, most tedious of the traditional games to play, even duller than checkers or Scrabble? Chess. What is the traditional game which arguably has the biggest and most impenetrable cult around it, even more so than bridge or poker? Chess. What game's devotees are possibly most stigmatized as boring, humorless nerds of any game-players in the world? Chess.

I imagine (I have not taken detailed surveys) that chess is having real problems picking up new and young enthusiasts these days (which is fine with me). I could be wrong. Maybe there's a young person with no life right now who is contemplating professional-level, competitive chess with a gleam in his eye. But I don't think there can possibly be too many of them. It's hard to get young'uns to sit still for a game of Monopoly - hell, it's hard to get me to sit still for a game of Monopoly, it bores me - so what would it take to get them interested in chess?

Well, whatever the answer to that is, I don't think shaping the pieces like characters from the Mario universe is it.

My god, does this chess set smell of desperation. It's not for collectors; the quality of the pieces isn't good enough. It's got to be a frantic attempt to try to present chess to younger people in some sort of way that would be meaningful to them. It would be good for spirited laughter, if it wasn't so sad.

[A side observation of this chess set, which won't be very meaningful to you unless you've done time in Mario-land: Notice this picture of the "good guy" side.

It's hard to tell because you can't see an entire side of the board, but Mario is the king (naturally) and his brother Luigi is the queen. Now, make your own comments about poor Luigi if you will, but Mario has a logical "queen" and that would be Princess Peach (whom he rescues over and over and over, and who keeps "getting captured" because she is actually kinky for Bowser). Peach, if you are utterly unfamiliar with this lot, is standing on his other side, in the pink dress. But she is not the queen. She and Princess Daisy (truncated at left, in yellow) are the bishops.

Now, I recognize that at least part of the motivation behind this was to have the bishops visually match (Peach:Daisy::Betty:Veronica), but it still strikes me as kind of bizarre and leads me to constructing mental scenarios about what Mario and Luigi are getting up to, probably while Peach is off with Bowser, and yes, I am thinking about this way too much, why do you ask?]

3) Same old shit. Just because they're selling fifty thousand tie-ins doesn't mean they've stopped selling the hairy old classics. I guess these games will never die, and I guess that's good, but you know, Life is what we played as kids when we absolutely had nothing better to do and the damned spinner never worked right anyway and it was more fun to just invent scenarios for the little stick-figure people in their cars; Monopoly was boring as hell; Scrabble was boring as hell and always lopsided anyway**; Sorry! was exactly that; Clue is no fun if you can't figure out how the logic puzzle in it works, and too trivially easy to be interesting once you do - and so on and so forth. Or is this just me? Did other people really while away many happy hours playing these old chestnuts? And if so, how old were you at the time?

Do you know what's still selling? Rubik's Cubes. Hasn't everyone in America owned at least one Rubik's Cube by now? Can't we just pass them onto our offspring and young relatives instead of buying new ones? Or, in other words, why isn't this over yet? I think the bulk of the new purchases of Rubik's Cubes are given by well-meaning but misguided grandmas to their grandchildren and so forth. The kids receive them and either use them as missiles against their younger siblings, take them apart, or try half-heartedly to get some enjoyment out of it for five minutes and then put them in the closet - which, face it, is exactly what you did with yours thirty years ago.***

Everybody in my peer group knows some hopeless young nerd who got really good with Rubik's Cubes and could speed-solve them and so forth, and we all remember when that hopeless case tried to show off or establish some sort of social cred by doing so in front of an audience, and we remember how badly that backfired on him. If someone wants to show you how fast he can solve a Rubik's Cube, and you actually find this interesting, marry him immediately; you have found your soulmate. The rest of us are unimpressed.

(My spouse and I also have parity of Rubik's Cube experiences, which is to say, we both got impatient with it and went to go look up or buy or obtain the solution. Once we realized that it was a fairly-easily-solved problem if you knew the basic techniques, then we each decided there was nothing more of interest to be had there and abandoned the thing. We each did this independently, many, many years before we ever met.)

Do you know what I saw in the game store? An all-hardwood, admittedly-gorgeous, collector's Rubik's Cube. Now think about that for a moment: There may actually be a person, somewhere in the world, who buys a Rubik's Cube as a display object. If this does not make you a little nervous, you probably already had some trouble dealing with the mindset in the preceding three paragraphs.

I really am pissing in the lemonade here, aren't I? I'm sorry. I don't mean to be some huge Grinch who wants to take a dump over everything innocent and fun. As I say above, it's possible your experience of games was totally different from mine, and that's fair and valid. Just ignore me.

But from my point of view, it's yet another variant of the Richard Feynman truism about locks****: We give these games pride of place and historical/memory value, but most of them actually aren't very interesting. Why is that? Is it just me, being impatient with such things? Feel free to testify in this space how much you actually enjoy playing Scrabble or Monopoly or chess, and why.

I have had some good game-playing sessions, but mostly when I look back at those sessions I realize that it was the company and the conversation that made it good, not the game. The game was usually a disposable adjunct.

That said, here are a few counterexamples: Games I love, some old and some new, some with reservations. Just so you know I do have a heart.

• Backgammon. I am pretty much always up for a game of backgammon. However, nobody else is, because I am a nasty, mean, cut-throat backgammon player. I don't know why it is, but I am incapable of playing backgammon gently. I won't play backgammon with kids, for example, because I don't want to break their hearts and yet I am incapable of cutting them some slack. My ideal is to play for gammon every time - that is, to finish bearing off before you have begun. My favorite backgammon scenario is when you have a piece on the bar and every point in my inner table is guarded and so you can't play - ideally for many turns while I happily march all over the table and you cry. Some day I should talk to someone about this odd facet of my personality.

• Kill Doctor Lucky. The only Cheapass game I have ever been able to convince anyone else to sit down and play and it was a hoot. I'm told all their games are good; I don't know. I own one more (Captain Park's Imaginary Polar Expedition), but I've never found a set of willing victims.

• Mille Bornes. The only specialized-card game (i.e. not using regular playing cards) I have ever truly loved, with the possible exception of ....

• Uno. Best and most insane Crazy Eights variant ever, good for playing with the very young or the mentally very young. I regress to about age seven when playing Uno, especially with my sister - we will still be playing Uno and dissolving into raucous laughter when we're both in our dotage (should we live so long).

• Kensington. A game which was easy enough to teach to anyone, not so deeply strategic that you had to immerse yourself in its lore to ever play well (see: chess), no massive overhead needed, but just complex enough that you did have to use your brain. If you haven't heard of this game, it's because the two gents who invented it apparently will not allow the game to be remarketed/revived, but you could always make your own.

• Pente. A variation on go-moku which was also beautiful and tactile, with its shiny shiny transparent playing stones in various colors. (In general I like go-moku/go-bang, which to me keeps the few fun parts of Go, while trimming away all the lore/mythology/hairsplitting/nerdery associated with that latter. Go cultists are almost as bad as chess cultists, and in America even more insufferable because their game is "exotic" and they think it gives them Asia Cred.)

• Cosmic Encounter. An indescribable game which is based on one of my favorite meta-concepts for games ever: There is a set of rules, and each player is allowed to break a different one of those rules.

• Ubi. You never heard of this game; I think I am the only person in the world who loved it. I loved it so much I actually stooped to buy a set from eBay (which is what you have to do because the game was in commercial production for about fifteen minutes). I can't find anyone willing to play it with me and I will tell you why: It is about geography. Americans hate geography. (The game was also extremely quirky, which puts people off. Some questions are "red herrings" - they refer to fictitious locations etc and do not have proper answers. The game is haunted by Caesar's ghost. Santa Claus is on the map. The player whose birthday is closest to March 15 goes first. Et cetera.)

My favorite review of Ubi, from a list linked on this page:

I mention this game specifically as a necessary antidote to all the anti-game talk above. ("Of course he hates Monopoly! Look at the kind of game he does like!")

• Master Mind. But frankly, Master Mind really should be a solitaire game; its biggest flaw is that the puzzle-setting player sets the puzzle and then has very little to do. These days I still play it (or its equivalent) - but on the computer, which is where it was always supposed to be.

• Yahtzee (better yet, Triple Yahtzee, a genuine improvement on the original). It is extremely odd for me to like a game that has this much sheer chance in it. What can I say; it's fun to play. And it's one of the few games on this list that's just as fun to play drunk.

• Diplomacy. This game has three problems. First, its length. If you come to play a game of Diplomacy, that is what you do all night. Arrive early and leave late. Second, it is balanced for exactly seven people - no more, no less. Oh, sure, they say it can be played by 2-7 people, but that is a lie. You must have exactly seven people to appreciate the true diabolical brilliance of this game. You see, with seven people, no one is strong enough to make much of a dent in the game on their own, so you must form some sort of alliance to proceed. But only one person can win - so sooner or later you will have to break that alliance; and often that means a stab in the back. Which brings us to the third problem with the game: You can play it only with people whose friendships you are very secure in, people you could have a loud shouting match with and be right back on good terms the next day. This game is just as mean and nasty as real diplomacy, which may be why it was reportedly a favorite of John Kennedy, Henry Kissinger, and Walter Cronkite.

When I describe the play of Diplomacy to people they inevitably ask me what I think of Risk. I don't care for Risk. Risk has dice. Diplomacy is all human planning and no chance. Also, you can't win by "overwhelming force of offensive" the way you can in Risk. Diplomacy is mostly not about battles but about what its says on the label.

* I am banned from Trivial Pursuit forever because, let's face it, it's what I do - but I played it often enough as a kid to experience the long dead spell near the end where everyone knows who is going to win (usually me), but we all have to wait forever until the board and the gods of chance allow me to finally get the last wedge needed to finish. Actually the biggest problem with Trivial Pursuit is that, other than forcing people to answer questions outside their comfort zone, the board/wedge mechanism adds nothing good. The game would arguably be better played with just the cards and scoring on paper.

** Again this may not be everyone else's experience, but I've never in my life played a game of Scrabble where one person didn't have an absolutely clear advantage over the other. Either I was vastly better at it than the other player and this became obvious after three or four moves, or vastly worse than they were and ditto. (I have never played Scrabble with more than two players, so I don't know if that helps even things out.)

*** That's right: You are old.

**** "What is not really appreciated by most people is that they're perpetually locking themselves in with locks everywhere, and it's not very hard to pick them."