What's In A Game?
 
There were these commercials on television a while back about “family game night.” I mean, it was nothing but propaganda by one of those board game manufacturers disguised as a wholesome kind of thing; spend time with your family… bond over a game. You know, like “Sorry!” or “Monopoly” or “Life.” Yeah, you probably know the one I’m talking about. It probably worked pretty well, too. All those wholesome middle-America families went out and bought that stuff, and now it’s probably been sitting on the top shelf of their coat closet for a month or two.
 
Is it that “old fashioned” board games just can’t compete with stuff like television, DVDs and video games? Maybe. I’m not gonna argue that playing games around your dining room table doesn’t take a lot of attention and time, which we seem to have less of nowadays. But that wasn’t the case in my house. The reason we stopped playing games around here is that we’re all a bunch of fucking sore losers.
 
Yeah, it’s bad. The wife and I are both kind of competitive. Maybe even to the point of cheating occasionally. Okay, it IS to that point. I’ll admit it. We cheat. When we play against each other, there are no holds barred because neither one of us wants to get their ass kicked by the other.
 
The last time we played Scrabble, which was probably over a year ago, I caught her trying to sneak a look at what letters she was picking up from the box whenever I was distracted by something in the room. That pissed me off more than anything, because she’s the one that wanted to play in the first place, and probably would have won anyhow, since she was a freaking English major and knows all kinds of shit. I suppose I can’t really talk though, because when we played Monopoly the last time, I kept taking money from the bank when she wasn’t looking. Small bills… you know, harder to trace that way. Just enough to get an edge early in the game, then you can play legit the rest of the way, once you start slamming those little freaking hotels down everywhere.
 
But even when either of us doesn’t get caught bending the rules, bad shit happens. Both of us hate to lose enough that stuff can get thrown. Boards get flipped. People get cussed out, and other people end up storming off to pout in the fucking bedroom and won’t talk to me the rest of the night just because I landed on “Free Parking” AGAIN. I can’t control the dice, you know. Not my fault I kept landing there, for Pete’s sake.
 
I guess it does get fun when we partner with each other and play something against another couple. Since we’re both kinda good Euchre players from college days, we like to play against friends sometimes. If we start to lose, we can pretty much start talking in code across the table to let each other know what we’re holding. Shit, half the time the cheating is more fun than playing the game, isn’t it?
 
Probably it’s stuff like that that’s probably killed off that whole “sitting around and playing games” thing that used to be pretty common. Sure, all the distractions of modern life play a hand, but in the end, I think we’re all just turning into to bad losers, and even worse cheaters.
 
But I can see how it’s hard to break the cycle… I know the day’s gonna come when I’ll be playing “Candyland” with the kid, and I’ll suddenly have to try and pull a fast one on him to save a victory for myself. The wife says that I should be letting him win, just because he’s a kid, but I think that’s just going to be teaching him the wrong attitude. If he wins all the time, he’ll turn into a sore loser just like dad. Maybe instead, I’ll trash the kid up and down the board all the time, and teach him to dig the sweetness of the occasional victory instead. Besides, I’m like 500-2 in Candyland, and I’m not letting anyone get any mercy victories off of me. I’ve got a record to maintain, after all.

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Fingers O'Reilly is a frequent writer for the footnote, and a horrible, horrible role model.