Best of Board Games

Jacob, he of the Gamer’s Eye, discusses how, maybe–just maybe–one can be both smart and not really be interested in games. I think there’s a tendency–I feel it, sometimes–to see non-gaming (or, worse, “Mattel-Gaming”) as a character flaw rather than as potentially a rational reaction to one’s world.

Sometimes, we forget that other people–yes, including smart people and gamers–might have different preferences or opinions about stuff. I’m always a little dismayed whenever people are shocked by the momentous discovery that other people, whom they heretofore assumed were rational, hold different political positions from their own. (Horrors!) Some people have said they can’t figure out why a “smart person” would like sports, or assume that since I follow NASCAR (yes!) I’m obviously a troglodyte. I think a lot of people have an intuitive syllogism in their subconscious that goes something like “I am a rational person. Therefore, my opinions and behaviors are based on reason. That means that people who are different are irrational.” Or, if we’re feeling charitable, ignorant. (Or, if we’re uncharitable, evil.) (Not that these couldn’t be true, but I’m guessing it’s true less often than most of us assume.)

(Not that I ever harbor such feelings, especially when I worked at the bookstore and saw someone buying the latest Nora Roberts epic when there were perfectly good copies of Master and Margarita and Brideshead Revisited still on the shelves. No sir. (coughs))

We’re never going to make everybody a gamer, not even all the Smart People, or the Right People, or even all our friends. Why? I dunno. I was only a psych major for two semesters, but I seem to recall something about “nature” and “nurture,” how we all don’t go into the machine called Life the same way and we sure as heck don’t come out the same way. Some of us, somewhere along the line, became gamers. Some didn’t, and won’t, no matter what “nature” puts in their way. In the history profession, we fret endlessly about how we should try to make everybody like history. Every generation gets its attempts, and every generation sees them deflate before their very eyes.

What I say, is we should lead by example–let’s have fun playing games, and be good people who have a hobby and maybe attract some new gamers to us, and the hobby, that way. Let’s not talk down to non-gamers, or Risk-players. If somebody’s curious about games, help ‘em out. If they’re not, find something else to talk about. It’s a big world, and games are just a little part of it. One might say: Promote boardgaming constantly–and, when necessary, use words.

(That turned into kind of a rant. Sorry. Blame the gram-and-a-half of medication rumbling around inside me right now.)