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Playing from the Heart
By Corvus | October 10, 2008
Legend has it that my father wanted a daughter who worked on motorcycles and a son who played violin. I say legend has it, because despite having lived in the same home for 15 years or so, I never heard anything like this directly from him. A brilliant engineer, but not the most communicative of men, my father. However, when I was young, he would join us–my mother, sister, and myself–every week for family game night.
Games have always been a big part of my life and I’m just old enough that my earliest gaming roots are firmly embedded in traditional board and card games. My parents didn’t believe in playing down to us kids, so we rapidly outpaced the games like Hi-ho! Cherry-O and Chutes and Ladders. There were kid-themed card games I enjoyed, but most of them were just Rummy or Spades with bright colored pictures on the cards. A typical family game night involved highly competitive bouts of Monopoly, Masterpiece, Yahtzee, and the like.
In particular, I remember playing, and loving Masterpiece. This was a game where you bought great works of art for thousands of dollars. The catch was that the painting values were variable and you might just find yourself paying top dollar for a worthless forgery. There were opportunities to have works you’d purchased auctioned off from under you, so protecting your valuable paintings and foisting off the forgeries was important. I, the youngest person at the table, frequently did quite well in this game.
The family would laugh at me and remind me that the point wasn’t to only bid on the paintings you liked. That to win, you needed to try and get as many paintings as possible. In other words, be indiscriminate in your consumption of art. I didn’t care. I wasn’t playing Masterpiece to win, I was playing Masterpiece to pretend I was an art collector. I pictured the auctioneer, the type of clothes I was wearing, the home in which I’d hang the paintings. In other words–I was role playing. And I won. Not every time, but more often than any other game we played on family night. I credit my success with my ability to immerse myself in the story of the game. There was a social component, in which you tried to convince people to bid big on your low value paintings, and my reluctance to let go of a piece of art I particularly liked often worked in my favor.
Masterpiece wasn’t the only game I treated like a storytelling experience, but most of the other games we played were less enjoyable because of it. For example, I found Monopoly to be problematic. The point of the game seemed to be reaching a point where you could make it impossible for people to afford housing and utilities. Also… no libraries, no parks, no play grounds. Just bleak profiteering. Once the fun of being the top hat wore off, I just felt like the sort of landlord I’d never want to be, and there was little fun in that. Another game I couldn’t enjoy was Pit. Just listening to people playing this commodities trading card game got my stomach tied up in knots. Too loud, too contentious, too opportunistic. When the family had guests over to play Pit, I retreated to my room and resumed the ongoing soap opera that was the lives of my stuffed animals.
It’s interesting to me now, firmly ensconced in the role of examining games for their storytelling potential, to look back at these early days of gaming and realize that I’ve never actually been on a different path, as obscured as it has been at times. And when I realize this, I have to admit that while they didn’t raise me as I would have had them do it, my parents gave me my first taste of the storytelling power of games with those regular family game nights.
Post Script: I would be remiss if I did not mention the joyous presence of my grandmother, Marie Bergstrom, in my early experiences of play. She delighted in word games, silly songs, and jokes, and I have many, many, memories of engaging with her in mock battles of wit and word-play. Thank you Marie. You are missed daily.
Tagged:Blogs of the Round Table, family, Games. | 4 Comments »
October 10th, 2008 at 8:58 am
Ahh, Masterpiece! I remember that game with great fondness. When I was a child we played it on Saturday nights with my aunt and uncle. I still recall the rush of delight I felt whenever I conned my sister into purchasing a worthless forgery for large sums of cash.
My wife and I played it with my in-laws last Christmas, and the joy of the con had not lessened one iota. It may have been even better, since the victim was my Momsuch!
Thanks for the memories.
October 10th, 2008 at 10:05 am
Great post. Our family game nights (more common around the holidays) usually included Monopoly or Risk, with Pinochle added during my high school years. I preferred Risk, playing Black and starting in North Africa, imagining myself as a tribal warlord uniting my people to take over the world. My stuffed animals substituted as opposing players when my family didn’t feel like indulging my obsession with the game.
I didn’t even know about Pit until some friends introduced at a party a few years ago, but I have to agree with your assessment.
October 10th, 2008 at 7:43 pm
We never had "family-gaming-nights", however I had a great fondness for Boggle, a game which I previously excelled at — for my age.
Thankfully, my parents used to quite enjoy the game as well, so I could turn any Saturday afternoon into lesson in ass-whooping.
Then there was Mingh, a card game very similar to Mahjong, and dad really enjoyed playing Backgammon.
I like that you turned a game such as Masterpiece into a role-playing game. I often find that many games, including many PC games, lack a soul. Many focus on wealth accrual or domination and usually for no other reason than to win. Some are really a hollow experience, which you appear to have provided depth.
I’ve been thinking about this a lot, recently, how some people can make more of a game — investing themselves in it — and thus heighten their own enjoyment of it.
You’ve just provided an excellent example.
October 12th, 2008 at 5:03 pm
Thanks for bringing back some awesome memories of playing games. We played a fair bit of Monopoly and Careers as kids. Also Greed was popular, although it was a newer game, iirc.
Never knew about Masterpiece. Will have to check it out.
We played “Sword and Skull” with our two older kids (7 and 6) yesterday. Was a pretty interesting experience. Lots of fun.