Gaming With Chuck

It's a bit of a challenge for me to find a blog that is on the same topic as The Day the Board Games Died.  I usually walk a line between writing about online social networks and board games, but there aren't many others out there drawing similar comparisons.  But hey, we can't all enjoy trying to catch a greased watermelon in a swimming pool, amirite?  So anyways, I'm going to take a look at the blog Gaming With Chuck for the purposes of this Voice Post.  Why? Because when I went on a search for social network related blogs, I found a lot of malarkey strewn with a few angst ridden teenagers wanting me to look at their tumblr and be friends with them on Beebo.  Is that last sentence true? No.

The guy next door is watching Frosty the Snowman. I love October.  So, Chuck, not Charles or Charlie, or even "Chaz".  Though it does make me long for a friend named Chaz.  "Chaz"...I'm going to file that away under potential baby names if I'm old enough, famous enough, and rich enough to not give a shit.  Baby Chaz.  Future hall of fame shortstop for the Florida Marlins.  That way I can watch him by driving my golf cart from my retirement community in Miami where I plan to finally hone my skills at Backgammon.  Maybe Chuck can help me.

So, Gaming With Chuck, how did we meet? Google. And you had an inviting blog title.  So, in that sense, the voice analysis starts here: Nice title Chuck. You didn't say, "Games with Charles", or "Charles Gaming Emporium", or "Wednesdays with Charlie", all potential titles for Mitch Albom tribute novels.  (They have to start somewhere) You used your own nickname, and you invited me to read as if you yourself were inviting me to play a game with you.  So, I clicked the link and started reading.

Wowzers! You really like board games!  That's awesome! Even more so, you look to understand board games in an academic and explorative fashion.  Simply playing a board game does not suffice, you delve deep into enhancing the board game experience.  In calm prose, you provide an informative and self-reflexive look at board games.  One of your posts takes a look at Edgar Allan Poe in Music and Gaming.  Woah!  That title is smart. I definitely think you look at board games on an all new level.  The post goes on to take an investigatory look at what exactly the title suggests.

I like to think of you Chuck as a documentary filmmaker.  There are a couple different types: there are the Michael Moores that center themselves as a character in their films, and then there are Warren Millers who loosely dangle themselves in the film as commentators, and then there are ethnographic filmmakers who desperately try to remain entirely omniscient, remaining an outside observer to reality.  

You, Chuck, flirt between the two latter.  You choose to write almost entirely in third-person, which makes you more of an informant.  You provide insight: "Poe was an incredible influence on H. P. Lovecraft, who has had a huge impact on gaming", but you ground them in further support, "Robert Bloch (yes, the Robert Bloch that wrote the story used for the Alfred Hitchcock movie Psycho, amongst other horror tales) wrote a very interesting comparison of the two men."  I trust you Chuck; you're not inundating the story with your opinion.

That said, I can tell you still have an opinion.  You pose rhetorical questions as a method of communicating your own chain of thought: "All by Edgar Allan Poe, but how has Poe affected and influenced gaming?"  Other posts aren't necessarily as academic, some even delve into first-person, but you still carry a necessary honesty.  There is no heavy inflection or opinion, but more a presentation of facts.  You are the Edward R. Murrow of board games.  I think it would be worthwhile to find us a high-strung Joe McCarthy condemning 12-sided dice as the devil in our living rooms.  In your featurette "Wargame Wednesdays" you provide a thorough breakdown of the actual gameplay experience before providing any type of editorial of your own.  Thank you for your patience.

So, Chuck, here's to you shaker of the dice, weaver of the roads, and tallier of the scores.  Your passion for games is obvious.  You treat them almost like people.  Withholding judgement and given them time to breath.  You put wooden pencil to paper, tallying scores, and then you put hardened fingers to keyboards, reporting the news. The games may be foreign, but you take the time to make them feel at home.

1000 Awesome Things

One of my favorite blogs is 1000 Awesome Things written by Neil Pasricha.  Several years ago, Neil embarked on a journey to document all the awesome things about life. Okay, maybe not all the things, but at least the top 1000. Each day, Neil would document an awesome aspect of human life, ranging from "The Take a Penny, Leave a Penny Bowl", "The Smell of Play-Doh", "Old People Pants", and everything in between.  From the outset, Neil combats cynicism by exploring the world to find crazy things that make people laugh and smile, and he treats it with a rhetoric that engages his reader.  At no point in his blog does he claim or pretend to be an academic, but rather just a guy from Toronto, Canada who documents the human experience, one awesome thing at a time.

Neil started the blog on June 20, 2008 with a post titled "Broccoflower", and since then he has blogged almost every single day on a myriad of topics.  Some of his posts are only a sentence long while others can go out for a thousand words are more, delving into deep detail about the topic.  Each post, however, often elicits the response, "You're right! I totally never thought of it like that!" from the reader.  In addition, a staple of his blog is that he ends every single post by weaving his concluding sentence into the word "AWESOME!"  Neil completed his list on April 19, 2012 with a post titled "Anything you want it to be", and it is the only post that is entirely blank.

Neil found a perfect ending.  Over the course of almost four years, the blog took on a life of its own.  It's popularity exploded, and it even lead to two books being published titled The Book of Awesome.  There was a massive following of people that contributed in the comments section, some even contributing their own ideas.  As everyone sat on pins and needles to find out what was number one, Neil made it very clear that the list no longer belonged to him.  He shared it with the world.  This is perhaps what I find most fascinating about this blog.  There was comfort in its finality.

While most blogs can just go on and on forever, offering a new perspective daily, I knew 1000 Awesome Things was going to end.  I knew that at some point, there would not be another post, and I enjoyed that.  I enjoyed that at some point, I would turn the last page and there would be no more. Neil documented the human experience better than almost any academic I have ever witnessed because he chose to look at the big and small things that make everyday unique. At the same time, he looked at the big and small things that made us all relate.  In my blog, I am trying to understand the way the human experience changes when it moves online with a loose sense of nostalgia for old forms of communication.  1000 Awesome Things is built on nostalgia.  Neil explores his childhood, and at the same time he explores mine.

I won't be updating my blog nearly as much, nor do I expect to garner the same following, but there is a lot to learn from 1000 Awesome Things. It is easy to get caught behind a singular mind trying to combat the forces of deteriorating human connection, but I need to maintain a wide perspective.  Just because my opinion can appear predominantly cynical, when I open my eyes I can still take into account that the world really is AWESOME!

The People at r/BoardGames

While perusing the familiar website social networking site Reddit the other day (News Site? Community Organization?), I came across a subreddit for Board Games.  It was pretty straightforward, I mean, they called themselves r/boardgames.  I suppose "they" is a bit of a loose term though.  At no point was there any sort of democratic process where "they" selected their name, but alas this is not an investigation into the history of r/BoardGames and its origins.  This is a look at their conversation.

Reddit works in a fashion where people can "upvote" posts that they like and "downvote" things that they don't want to see.  I'm going to trust my audience knows enough about Reddit that I don't need to explain further, but what I will do is point to my method for understanding r/BoardGames.  In order to understand the general culture of any subreddit, I will take a look at their all-time top posts.  In r/BoardGames, the majority of their top posts center round the game Settlers of Catan.  Beyond just Settlers there is a clear preference for modern games with an emphasis on strategy and complexity.  While my favorite board game is Scrabble, which I have probably made pretty clear at this point, Settlers holds a special place in my heart.  Why? Because I'm really good at it.  That is until the American version screwed me over.

Settlers of Catan in association with Carcassonne and a few other European games introduced me to a new world of complicated and innovative board games.  I grew up playing Scrabble and Monopoly, you know, the classics.  These new games challenged me in a new way.  I lived in Germany at the time, so my family became avid Settlers fans, and I have been honing my skills for nearly 12 years.  Then, I played for the first time with a bunch of Americans.  They wanted to use their board, and I though there would be no problems. Whoops.

First, there was a language hurdle.  I had to learn what certain things were called in English, not because I don't speak English, but within the game there is effectively a new language.  That was fine.  I caught on quickly, and it did not affect my German-born strategy.  There were some gameplay changes that hindered me.  I couldn't build when I wanted to, and the game moved slower.  My aggressive building and trading strategy was regularly interrupted by bullshit rules that were foreign to me.  Even with all those challenges, I still put myself in a position to win.  Me being me, I set myself up for a dramatic victory.  The pieces were aligned, and nobody knew what was about to hit them.  BOOM!!! I flipped over my "Siegpunkt" or "Victory Point" auf Englisch.  The game was mine.  But wait...my friend protested.  The malarkey American rules prohibited my final maneuver.  I never got another chance at drama.  They stripped me of my medal.

Let's just say, I know what you're going through Lance Armstrong, Settlers can be a bit of a sore subject among my American friends, but I welcome it with open arms when we use my familiar language at home.  So, r/BoardGames, you're alright.  You're into some cool shit, and I might just have to stick around a little longer.  I just really hope you don't end up being a bunch of elitist board game fans because Scrabble is still #1 in my heart, and I'll even play it in English.

Daily Double

Howdy there reader!  My name is [...] and it has been 10 days since my last post.  I know, I know, you have been sitting on pins and needles waiting for the next Board Games post, and I am here to deliver.  I apologize in advance though, I fear this might turn into a sprawling, loosely anecdotal, borderline incoherent attempt at satisfying a word limit.  This blog has become a chore, an assignment.  At first, I was fascinated by my topic and by the open forum where I could write about it uninhibited, but alas the steam and motivation is gone.  The secondary reason I sat down to write is gone (the first reason is genuinely because this was a class assignment).  I don't care anymore.  This blog is an embodiment of what I am writing about.  I have become responsible for an online connection to nobody, but I carry the weight of a final exam with every keystroke.

I don't like that I have to write 500-750 words every week.  I don't like that I write 500-750 words every week because I am told to.  It is the same reason I did not like Animal Farm when I read it for a class assignment.  When I read it four years later on my own time, I loved it.  I was uninhibited.  I got to play and dance with George Orwell's words, and it belonged exclusively to the two of us.  If I wanted to share my opinions, I could.  If I didn't want to, it didn't matter.  Reading was safe.  It belonged to me.  It was not regimented or required.  It was not examined and tested.  Writing is not all that different.

I understand that writing for assignments is part of any course.  It is typical of every class I have ever taken, and I accept that.  I accept that there is a time and place where it is appropriate for me to fulfill class requirements by way of writing.  What bothers me about blogging for a class, however, is that it awkwardly walks a line between free-writing and classwork.  I'm not being graded so-to-speak.  I don't get my blog returned to me after 10 days with red pen markings and notes.  I don't know what makes one blog post better than another, and that is liberating.  I am free to write.  I still however, am required to write.  I am expected to complete a blog post every week that may or may not ever get read.  I'm pretty sure my parents never had this problem.  If they had to write an assignment they turned it in to a professor or TA or a mailbox.  At least they had the option of believing that someone would read it.  I actually know whether or not anyone is reading this.

Somewhere amidst this incoherent rambling is a point, and I'm getting to it, I think.  I like my topic, but I don't like this blog.  I don't like that I have very little idea whether or not I am doing well in this blog, or that there is some sort of benchmark, or that there is even some level of grading for what I am writing.  If a teacher gives me an assignment, I like that there is some sort of concrete feedback system.  I failed, or I passed, or I excelled.  Every time I hit "publish", I am submitting these thoughts into an empty "blogosphere" that is neither educational or academic.  It has sadly fallen to a similar fate of a math homework assignment in 4th grade.  I'm just doing this to get it done, and there is nothing liberating about that.

David Doesn't Do Drugs

My finger hovers over the mouse.  Or the touchpad.  Irrelevant.  The device I am using is somewhat innocuous, but the situation is the same.  My finger is hovering over some device that has the ability to click, and it is what I am hesitating to click on that carries all the weight.  My finger itself does not weigh all that much, in fact gravity has a relatively minimal effect on my finger, hence my ability to hover it over the clickable device, but all this information is ultimately irrelevant because my finger is hovering over a clickable device waiting to click (or not to click) on a phrase that reads "deactivate".  I chicken out.  This is all because of a conversation I had with a friend of mine who I will refer to as "David" for the duration of this post to protect his anonymity.  For anonymity is a ultimately the beauty that he embraces where I cannot.  Well done David, today's post is about you.

David does not have a Facebook. *GHASP* I know, right?  No Facebook.  All the questions that start running through my head became a scrolling diatribe of some of the most shallow thoughts I've ever had.  All of a sudden my shock takes an awkward journey to horror then confusion, but ultimately settling on envy.  David beat the system.  He is not cool or un-cool, he is a-cool.  He transcended what I sadly believe is a social requirement, and yet he is one of the most emotionally in-tune and aware people I know.  All without having to glance at Facebook.  He is a pro at holding a conversation.  He makes me believe everything I'm saying is the most important thing in the world.  He listens, he asks questions, and he genuinely cares.  Surely someone can have this pure character element even with a Facebook, but I don't think that's necessarily true.  He explained it very aptly.

"I used to have a Facebook," he confessed, "but I deactivated it for the summer and found myself not missing it when summer ended."  Here he is, two months later, Facebook-less and do I ever envy him.  He went on to describe how it was just wasting his time, and he wasn't really getting much out of it given the time he was putting into it.  I think his next point, however, is what really sticks with me.  It is why I really envy him.  He claims he knew too much.  I asked him to explain.  He knew too much about people without ever having to get to know them.  He is right.

The more I thought about it, the scary that thought became.  I don't have to get to know people because it is easy enough for me to look up their likes/dislikes/interests/vacations/family/job on their Facebook page.  If I ever have real life conversations with people, rather than spend the time asking them questions and getting to know them, there is an apprehension that I might volunteer information that I already know but shouldn't.  It's a weird feeling.  And yes, this is my confession that I "creep" on Facebook, but I don't do it to any sort of excess.  I also can admit it because I can almost guarantee that everyone does it, so get off your moral high horse.  The reason we "creep", however is because we secretly are fascinated with getting to know people, but we just found a safer way to do it.

David's got some big balls.  He wants to get to know people, but he knows how to do it by the book.  the real book.  He embodies the dream of The Day the Board Games Died.  I'm not going to stand on a pulpit and telling the world to start shutting down their Facebook.  It won't happen.  But I hope one day I get the cajones to do what David did.  I want to let my finger click on "Deactivate".  I want to walk away.  I lie and say that I can whenever, but I can't.  Facebook, it's a hell of a drug.  It's the kind of drug that gives me too much access to the world, and somehow I'm left with so little to discover.  Let's talk for real.  I want to know everything there is to know about you, but I just want you to tell me.  I want to listen. Come on gravity, I need you now more than ever.