I think boardgames bring out the worst in people. You can tell if someone was weaned too soon by the way they grab at a pair in a simple game of SNAP; you can tell who resisted toilet training in infancy by the way they purchase property in Monopoly.
Personally, I can’t lose a game of anything. It kills me. I’m the sorest loser on earth and it compounds all my existing feelings of being stupid, incapable and basically… a loser.
Luckily for me, I don’t lose often and if luck deals me a bad hand [or a series 7 consonants in Scrabble] I’ll concede defeat early and quietly retire with feigned indifference and a stiff drink.
I had two eye-opening games in the past 24 hours. A painfully drawn-out 4 player Scrabble match (my kingdom for an egg-timer!) played out by the book, i.e no abbreviations, no acronyms, no utterances etc. and a competitive game of Hangman. The letter-guessing challenge was battled out by my class against another. Helen and I were appalled to find our students cheating on the first round but once that was settled it became a fierce fight for spelling supremacy. As much as I tried to present a fair and balanced game I desperately wanted my class to win. They didn’t disappoint me, winning narrowly with a lead of 5 points. We went on to have an excellent morning tea party.
I think this competitive streak developed in the womb, when my sister first cottoned on to what was happening to my mother and sent death stares to me through the embryonic fluid. Later in life it was severely exacerbated by mother playing us two siblings off against each other. The constant competition to be the most deserving of my mother’s love has worn me down and made me the shriveled and mean-spirited person I am today. However, this drive goes largely unnoticed and remains mostly repressed, seeing I have pretty much dropped out of competition in everything. That is, until someone presents me some dice and a board, it’s the peculiar theatre in which the struggle of ego and id is enacted, much to the irritation of my fellow players.
Despite this profound reflection, I essentially blogged about this to report –
I KICKED EVERYONE’S ASS AT SCRABBLE!
Your gracious victor,
C
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