On a van routinely parked along one of the rat trails I take through the place I grew up, there’s a bumpersticker that reads “Catan: The Game of Our Generation.” I feel like I’ve met this person at a game night. He was drinking an IPA. Have you ever played the game of our generation? Do you remember playing Monopoly? I remember going to my uncle’s house to watch the game, which was as impossible as taking your eyes off of a screen on the back of the next row of seats on an airplane. The game was on, somewhere in the room, emitting the noises of whistles, the crowd, and the hypnotic or hypnotized voices of the commentators. The noises became one noise, and gave me the feeling that nothing was happening anywhere. If anyone is bored, it means their family is doing well. It means they’re doing well.
A game is an activity that a millennial can’t get enough of. In the sense that “millennial,” rather than indicating a generation, means “product of the American middle class,” or “product of the desire for the American middle class,” playing board games, the kind their parents’ played and had brought from their parents’ homes, evokes and is a scene of good times with family. Nobody has played them, in the sense that memories of Trivial Pursuit and Monopoly are memories of other memories of people on television playing those games. In the grip of nostalgia, millennials have dropped the boring games of their parents and sustain an expanding market of meticulously designed board games. “Interesting” is a term of praise for these games. The boredom of playing games that are so well-known it’s assumed everyone knows how to play has been exchanged for the boredom of reading the rules of novel games.
A game is a way of sustaining an investment in an activity. When millennials get together to play games, as they so often do, it’s to play a variety of games of playing a variety of games. Some pay little attention to the game, or seem not to, playing a game of aloofness, exhibiting how little they care in order that they can bear being a person who is there, playing a game. Many are not playing the game of winning the game, but of playing at someone who is playing to win. If they win, they feel the uncanny thrill of character and actor collapsing into each other. If they don’t win, they win at playing someone who wanted to win. Couples, especially married ones, are often playing at getting revenge on their spouses through the game, sometimes openly.
A game is a manipulation that, because, like everything else, it happens in a situation with others, is less than intentional in an absolute sense. It’s a less than controlled attempt to control someone else, that leaves one feeling out of control.
A game is an intent to mold another person, that for example a parent might have for a child.
A game is a desire for a shared memory. Barrelling fast toward a writing metaphor, “good” ideas of what to write always seem to occur to me right before going to work, probably for the same reason that parents look for evidence of their “good” effect on their children not in those children once grown, but in the young children of young parents. The mother of someone I wish I didn’t know met a ten-year-old who was reading a book with great interest, and whose mother is also a reader. My father has another strategy: He looks for his memories in my memories of childhood. “You remember the damnedest things,” he always says, on the stage of the scene he’s set, sifting through his memories of trips we took and asking me “do you remember that?” I’m always surpised he’s surpised we remember different things.
I feel like I was more well-adjusted in high school, when I, like everyone else, made mixtapes of songs I thought were cool. They were lightly cognizant of their audiences, and sometimes attempted to have aesthetic qualities such as balance, pacing, theme, or mood. Now I make playlists that comment on the life of or my feelings for a workplace crush, that I imagine playing on the speakers at work for maximum passive aggression, but I know at some level while making the playlist that I will never actually put it on. It’s as if the better the game, the more self-defeating.
I’m superstitious that in writing about games, I have invited games into my life. My airplane-flying engineer friends show up literally out of the blue, and invite me to a game store to pick a game to buy and then to play. They seem to have no game and thus I don’t know what game to play with them, and yet I see no choice but to play a board game with them. If I come out as being inamenable to board games, what will they propose instead? What greater horrors will I invite?