I feel that it is necessary to point out that most people who play games don’t have the same experiences with them that I do. It started during high school and escalated insanely into my college years, when it became clear that I had friends that were very “special”.
Now one type of friend that I’ve experienced is one with what we call the “good game seed”, which derives from the fact that they have an alien inserted spore inside their body that grants them amazing winning abilities and, from what I hear, massive man-parts. However, this article is neither the time nor place to explain this grotesquery of human existence.
The other type of friend I have come to know and love is the game designer. Now, these people should be beloved for their deliverance unto the masses of generally fun and entertaining games, however they should also be abhorred on certain levels for their ability to rend players from their ignorance like the red pill did to Keanu Reeves in the Matrix, leaving you moist and naked in a pool of liquefied babies.
One of the earliest examples of said happening is when The Game himself informed me that Risk is a horrible game and that he never enjoys playing it. “But Why?” I would ask him. To which he would simply respond by smacking me in the face and kicking me while I squirmed on the ground crying out in pain. “Because the person who goes first has a huge advantage and generally wins because of said advantage!” He blathered into my ringing ears. Now neither of us really had much problem with speaking in sentence fragments at this point, because we’re not f-ing word processors, so we continued on in our faux-english mannerisms. (< This sentence is also a fragment.)
Now that certainly was not his only reasoning for disliking the game, I’m sure, but it was the main thing I took out of the conversation and I didn’t let it stop me from playing Risk. This is not where it ceased, oh no, it went on. Soon a secret society of game designers was discovered just outside the heart of College Park, which soon led to the introduction of a whole lexicon into our world of gaming. Soon some pieces became “hidden-trackable”, which my processor points out is also bad English, and many popular board games were quickly adjusted to “improve” upon their game play. Now I will certainly admit these were always improvements upon the game, but my world had already become tainted.
I soon receded into a torpor within my own mind where rather then focus on the changed rules to the game, I simply took it as the game should have originally been made, and latched onto the edited box cover that added an “!” at the end of the title, taking it as a clue to announce loudly the title of the game at every possible instance I could. How could these people, these crafters of gaming justice, have possibly improved upon a marketed product so incredibly? The game clearly called for an exclamation rather then a question mark, it simply made the game more fun. Never mind whatever actual rules changes or alterations they may have made, the changes to the game box were astounding.
Suddenly I realized, this is what game designers do. They make games better by tearing them apart piece-by-piece, and then reassembling them with an ‘!’ at the end. How could it be so simple? Now this phenomenon is not nearly localized to simply The Game, but also to many of the game designers that I know and enjoy, whom have taken to renaming games and sometimes even disregarding the printed rules entirely. Nonetheless, they have made the world a better place with their efforts. The only crux seems to be that the system seems to be impossibly keeping them beneath its steel-tipped tentacle of spite, and any original material, no matter how golden, has an impossibly hard time making it to the masses.
Perhaps more exclamation points are needed!!!
It’s a shame that this article has been overshadowed by the big debate. It’s a great article because it shows how much of a genius I am.
Perhaps I just didn’t use enough !’s…