Disembodied Gaming

I’ll start my review by giving a little bit of personal background. When my wife and I were first married, we were counting our pennies. For a while, going out to dinner, going out to the movies (even at 1975 prices) was difficult to manage financially. What we discovered was the fun in board games. A one time payout for a good board game would fill up many evenings for ourselves and, often, for friends as well. Over time, I’ve become a collector with over two hundred board games on my shelves. This may help explain my reaction to online gaming.

I was drawn to try two of the three sites suggested in the activity description. The Multi-Player Online Games Directory seems to be geared towards people interested in role-playing games such as Dungeons and Dragons (the granddaddy of ‘em all). Yahoo! Games (@games.yahoo.com) and Vinco Online Games (@www.vogclub.com/) offered more traditional games, the kind to which I am more predisposed. After joining up on Yahoo, I tried my hand first against computer opponents in some of the more basic games: dominoes, backgammon, checkers. That computer guy is pretty darn smart. I have to admit that, in the final tally, the computer won more often than I did. Later, I tried my hand against a “real live human” opponent (explanation of the quotation marks in a minute). I’m an early riser, and my first attempts to find an opponent were frustrating. I’d log in, go to a “room” and wait. The first several times, I gave up and logged off without playing. At later times during the day, I managed to find people to play. Against a people person, I fared much better; beating some, losing to others. Pretty typical when one plays games. But my adversaries were namesless (OK, not nameless; although their names were all aliases) and, certainly, faceless. (Now, to explain my quotation marks.) True, there is a dialogue bar into which I can type comments and communicate with my opponent, but it just ain’t the same. I don’t think I’ll ever be a fan of online gaming. I miss the spontaneous gibing, the laughing, even the moments of dead silence when I’m watching (watching!) my opponent. So much of gaming is watching one’s opponent and trying to read his/her mind as he/she decides on the next move. The gaming system is, of course, much the same at Vinco. I lost big time to the computer in games such as Othello; I won my fair share against people in the same game and in others. But I can’t say I had a great deal of fun.

Whenever we have purchased a new computer, my kids (now 25, 22 and 15) would want to know what games came already installed. There was always solitaire, mah jong (which really isn’t mah jong), minesweeper, chess. Then we’d install a few more the kids really wanted (Wheel of Fortune, Oregon Trail, some form of miniature golf), and I have to say we had our fair share of fun with these. But the reason why we had fun was because we sat down at the computer together and played, so that all the opponents were on this side of the screen. There wasn’t anybody out their in the ozone or online whose face we couldn’t see. We were talking; we were arguing; we were laughing together. I just don’t get that when I play games online.

I’m going to go back downstairs and drag up Monopoly (classic or Pokemon or history of flight); I’m going to drag up Carcassonne; I’m going to drag up Acquire or a good card game like Golfmania. And when I do, they’ll be family or friends sitting around the table, and we’ll (communally) have a grand ol’ time.