Kandyland?

It appears that I've screwed myself over in several avenues regarding my future academic pursuits. Not due to poor grades - due to absent mindedness, laziness, and apathy. I'm not at all happy with myself about this.

Memo to self: at some more reasonable hour, write a post about modernism and aesthetics.

I spent this evening at a fine bar named Guthrie's, which among other commendable qualities has a stock of board games for the usage of its patrons. Games played included Scrabble, Clue, Candyland, and a bastardized trivia session using the questions from a game without instructions. I continue to be baffled by my relative shoddiness as a Scrabble player. My verbal intelligence, standardized testing and anecdotal evidence would indicate, is fairly strong, and yet I routinely get schooled at Scrabble. Ms. Jones equates her skill at Scrabble with her skill at crosswords - another arena in which I'm fairly weak. Perhaps it's the imaginative/spatial element of both that stymies me. I've never tried my hand at Boggle, but I'd probably suck. This is all in fact a preamble to my thoughts on Candyland.

Candyland is, admittedly, a game to be playable by children who are barely (if at all) literate. Its rules must therefore be simple, relatively nonverbal, and the game ought not to require much in the way of skill or strategy. I had also never played Candyland before this evening. Although I fared decently, I didn't enjoy the game at all, because I had nothing to do with it. I was a passive participant in a series of events entirely determined by the shuffling of a card-deck. And it occurred to me that I don't enjoy, or even understand the enjoyment, of a single game of chance. The idea of playing a slot machine for any extended period of time bores me. Due to the late hour, I'm failing to come up with other examples of games which rely most heavily on chance, but I'm sure there are many to be found among the youth-oriented games of Milton Bradley et al. Why would a person engage in an activity in which he played no effective part? I'm not speaking of passive media consumption, but the gathering of a group of people to sit around and pretend that they have something to do with the events unfolding inside their circle.

The allure of money - and the attendant thrill not only of gaining it but of losing it, depending on your nature - is obviously powerful for some people (although most truly-random gambling situations, like the roulette wheel, concern brief events which rely upon repetition to create the promise of future success. Maybe the ball landed on Red 32 this time, but the game's starting over in a second and who knows where it's going to land?! I can't imagine anyone but the most pathologically desperate gambler laying money down on the outcome of a game of Candyland). Similarly, small children may derive pleasure from the colors, the activity of moving their pieces, the sugary overtones of the game - although I wonder if I would've found that rapdily boring as a child. I was an odd child in some respects, and for one example I remember Tic Tac Toe losing much of its lustre when my father explained to me that above a certain modest skill level the game was essentially unwinnable, a fact I learned long before I actually achieved that level of facility.

I don't particularly understand gambling, but I understand gambling on sports or poker much more than I understand gambling on roulette, to return to a previous example. Sports gambling posits that (a) there are overall predictable forces at work in a contest and (b) that I have enough understanding/insight into the contest to predict its outcome (I still feel confident that the Pistons will win the series, incidentally, despite their loss tonight). Poker or any number of other games even more directly involve betting on my skill at whatever is relevant. I can't imagine betting on roulette more than once or twice. I can't imagine ever wanting to play Candyland again, unless it was with a small child for whom I held a great deal of affection. I don't get games of chance. Perhaps I just have insufficient belief in the small scale powers of luck. Over long periods of time I waver between believing in karma vs. chaos; over short periods of time I just don't buy that there's any such thing. But maybe that's just because I have bad luck (despite doing alright at Candyland, I was in last place when the game was decided, because other people had the luck to get cards which enabled them to jump long distances ahead of me; the one such card I received actually reversed my progress).

Also: Candyland's board has such an intense focus on alliteration that it posits King Kandy as lord of the Candy Castle. Way to confuse the kids about spelling, guys.