game night

Monday night, after dinner at my parents' house, they busted out their birthday present from my sister: Blokus. If you haven't played this game, you should. It's a strategy game with four players and pieces that look like tetris blocks. Basically, you lay down your colored blocks corner-to-corner across the playing board, working around the other three colors, blocking them out sometimes and laying claim to sections of the board. The object is to use up all your pieces, or be left with the fewest squares when there are no moves left.

Family Game Night has been a solid institution throughout my life, and with Family Movie Night and our family dinners they have made up the core of our Family Togetherness Mission.

I know this all sounds a little bit like a TV commercial for the All-American Family circa 1972, but there is an element to our dinners and Togetherness Events that goes a little against the all-American grain, at least in my mind.

Here it is: we are hardcore collectivists. On Movie Nights, the film selection process was usually more of a production than the actual watching of the movie. We very rarely took a vote; typically, we didn't hit play until we had all expressed some level of assent to the same title. A friend of my dad once commented that he had never seen any other family completely stop everything to solve one member's crisis.

And our gaming strategy always had a lot more to do with making the other players laugh than winning.

I realized this just this past Monday night, when two out of four players grew up in other households. My dad and I spent extra time looking for moves that opened up new areas of the board for our own pieces, without cutting off anyone else. And when we realized what was taking so long, we all had a laugh. "Yeah... At my house," J. said, "we would have probably been beating each other up and yelling trying to get our pieces on the board."

It occurred to me briefly that it's easy to "win" against people who are not playing for themselves. Flashback to the last few months of Mr. McKnight's sixth grade social studies class, spent on a capstone group project called (if I'm remembering right) The World Game. We were split up into teams of four, and each team had to create a country, a name and a map and a government, and identify the key resources of this country, and for every element we created we got points. And then we went to war.

The World Game took over our relationships, inside and outside of class. I spent some time making deals with a friend from another "country," that if it came down to our two great nations, that we would call it a draw and rule together.

And in the last week of school, it did indeed come down to our two great nations. My country (Claustinora) was faced with the decision to attack, and we had enough points that we could have taken them cleanly. We could opt to pass on attacking, and if we did, then they would have the option to accept and end the game with peace, or to take us over and win the game.

We spent a long time in deliberations. It took all my persuasive power and the better part of one class period for me to convince my team to pass, that I had made a reliable deal with the enemy to end the game in peace. But they eventually took my word for it.

And my friend was overruled, and we were defeated, and I will never forget the look on Mr. McKnight's face. Disappointment. I was a star; how could I let victory slip away?! We had it in the bag.

To this day I do feel a little bad for letting my fellow Claustinorans down. My friendship with the girl from our conquering country took a bit of a beating; we got over it, but it wasn't looking too good for awhile there. Silly or not, the trust had been broken.

My innocence took a hit that day, too. It was the first time I remember understanding, with clarity, the inequality of persuasion. I remember, once she had convinced me that she was overruled and could not persuade her teammates otherwise, the sudden comprehension that I had done something she couldn't do, and that this was an important difference between us. It was bigger than The World Game. This was middle school, and high school, and the corruption of the world beyond.

But you know what? On principle, I don't regret my decision. I do not regret successfully convincing my countrymen and women not to attack. I'm proud of that. Even at the ripe age of 10 I think I had my priorities in the right order. What I would have won by letting my team attack, by breaking my agreement with my friend, was in no way worth getting the highest grade on the project, and being responsible for breaking a friendship.

Family Togetherness Activities used to be a lot simpler, back when only some of us could talk. Now things are a lot more complicated. We all have different interests and it doesn't go quite as smoothly. But we still operate the same way.

The point of playing the game is not competition, and our choice in games has changed a little because of that. We play Scattergories and Bananagrams and creative strategy games that give us something to think about, or games that just make us laugh. That's the point. Laughing together.

The world is a lot more complicated now, too. It's a lot more complicated than waging war for grades with a point system (which also, in retrospect, is more flawed than I realized at the time). Most people don't operate from a collectivist standpoint; I think if we did, if that was our modus operandi, the world would be better. But I understand. It's hard to wrap our minds around being a collective with millions and billions of people. It's hard to wrap our minds around being a collective with so many different kinds of people, who have different kinds of experiences and want different things.

But we have lost sight of the fact that what affects others affects us, and vice versa. There is some game theory, some butterfly effect, some totally random universe-at-work business involved here. When we categorically ignore what is good for people who are different from us, even if we ignore what they say is good for them, if we have a different idea of "good," we are doing ourselves a disservice. We are doing our collectives, however we define them, whether we believe in them or not -- we are doing a disservice to our communities and to the world we live in.

Give it some thought. What do we win, really, that's important, when we "win" this game? What do we win by letting this one go?

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