THE NAME OF THE GAME
The other day I went into my 10-year-old son’s room to ask him a question and found him and his buddy glued to a 10-inch TV screen while they maneuvered joysticks with the precision of fighter pilots. They were so intent on avoiding land mines in the latest iteration of The Legend of Zelda that real bombs could have gone off around them and they wouldn’t have noticed.
“Have you seen the good scissors?” I asked.
“Huh?” Said my gifted son with the intelligence of a tree stump.
“The good scissors. I need them to cut off your brother’s head.” I replied, testing his comprehension.
“In a minute, Mom. I still have a little life left.”
“Well, hurry up and kill yourself so we can have a normal conversation!” Now there’s a sentence I never thought I’d say in my lifetime.
As I watched my son and his friend do battle with evil trolls and other vermin of the underworld, I thought to myself, how did we come to this? What did kids do before video games? What did I do when I was a kid? How did I spend my time with my friends? I had plenty of time to soul search on this since my son and his buddy suddenly found a bottle of life potion so now they were nowhere near ending their game.
That weekend we found ourselves as a family at a local mall looking for a wedding gift for a cousin who was on her fourth marriage. Since she’d already built up her household three times and was the recipient of multiple alimony checks, she was rather hard to shop for. I mean, what do you get the woman who has already taken everything?
“I know,” said my seven-year-old son, “let’s get her some toys.”
“But she doesn’t have any kids.” I replied, and thankfully so I added to myself.
“Which is exactly why she wouldn’t already have toys!” My son rolled his eyes as if I were the biggest idiot in the world for not putting this together myself.
Giving up on the silver gravy boats and useless crystal candy dishes, I followed my family into a toy store, where we meandered around until we found ourselves in the game aisle.
“Boring!” My older son sang. “Where are the video games?”
“Now, hold on there, look at this.” In the middle of the aisle I found a lonely demonstration copy of the board game Battleship set up for anyone to play. I loved this game as a kid and quickly explained to my children how you play it. They said it sounded too easy to be fun, but agreed to humor me until one of us actually sunk one of the other’s battleships.
After just a few guesses, my kids actually found one of my battleships, and they were so excited, you’d think they’d found the Holy Grail. We continued playing, laughing and barking out coordinates like a family of demented bingo players. Soon other kids gathered round and watched intently, occasionally joining in by shouting out a spontaneous “B 20!”
It took almost an hour of this playful banter before it finally hit me. Now I remember what I did with my friends when I was little. We played games. Not just made up games, but board games, card games, even dice games. (Remember Yahtzee?) How could I have forgotten about my beloved Monopoly? One game could go on for an entire season.
I grew up in an unmanageable family. We all (even the adults) fought like rabid dogs and none of us had anything in common; except for our love of games. We never planned a family game night, it always just kind of happened on its own whenever it needed to. Back then there were only three network TV stations, but no cable or satellite TV, no VCRs, DVDs, or video games. Television programming was still in its infancy, so we never considered planning our lives around it. But we did plan our evenings around Clue, Tripoli, Chess, Canasta, and Parcheesi. It was the one thing that brought us together, even though as a family we were about as functional as a broken clock. We could never agree on anything, except that I always got to be Mrs. Peacock (in Clue) and my sister always got to be the boot (in Monopoly).
Even though my own family now doesn’t have that problem, I decided it was time to start the tradition of games with my brood. In the last year my sons have learned the joys of Operation, Uno, Trouble, Sorry, Junior Pictionary, Yahtzee, Monopoly, a variety of Rummy card games, and of course Battleship (which by the way, is great on airplane trips). And just like when I was a kid, family game night at our house evolves organically whenever it needs to, but thankfully for different reasons.
Part of the joy of sharing my love of games with my kids is watching them share that same enthusiasm with their friends.
“Do you like Cribbage?” My son recently asked one of his friends.
“No,” replied the friend. “It gives me gas.”
I just sat back and enjoyed the puzzled look on my son’s face.
In retrospect, our kids want to know why we didn’t come clean about games sooner, but honestly, I didn’t think Uncle Wiggly stood a chance against SpongeBob SquarePants popping out of a PS2. Apparently, I was wrong.
