When I play with Lauren and Amelia, any game is fun. For a while, anyway. We all seem to get tired of games that don’t require the player to actually DO anything. Take an old standby, like Chutes and Ladders. You spin the wheel. You move your piece. Sometimes you go down a chute. Sometimes you go up a ladder. Wash, rinse, repeat.
The game is so devoid of decision or excitement that riding the longest chute (square 84) or the highest ladder (square 28…I play this too often) is preferable to actually WINNING THE GAME. That’s Chutes and Ladders right – Amelia pouts when she is about to land on square 100 and win the game, because it means there is no chance of sliding up or down the game board.
Maybe that’s why the game has been popular with small children since the Bronze Age: kids just like the random possibility of something happening that is both different and pointless at the same time. Adults prefer games that require either strategy and decision-making (like chess) or have real consequences based on random chance (like roulette).
Chutes and Ladders has neither. Like the proverbial itsy-bitsy spider, players climb up, slowly or rapidly, until they fall down, or the game ends. Nothing else happens. It’s just like King of the Hill, minus the bruises and grass stains.
To me, Lauren and Amelia’s relative boredom with is a sign of progress; they are becoming more clever, and more social, as they enjoy games of increasing difficulty and variation.
I hated that long slide as a kid. That, and pulling the Mr. Mint or Plumpy card in Candy Land.
ReplyDeleteThis is so true, when i think of playing a game as to working, I think about things going according to plan and a strategy being carried out but when you are a kid it is the unexpected that is fun.
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