Back home after a New Year’s Eve spent in Vermont. New Yorkers have an anxiety about what to do on NYE that borders on pathological, but it’s my favorite holiday. The great ecumenical holiday, breaking up the long slog of time into bite-size pieces. The calendar is required for historical memory, and yes I’ll drink to that.

Anyway, Vermont. Snow games and board games, day after day.

—

Snow games are elastic, open spaces. Snow and the cold often connote the freezing-up of totalitarianism, the unfeeling Soviets of my youth, but it’s always felt more anarchic to me. A disruption of rules, a free space within which to play.

But board games are pleasurable only in their constraints, right? This is probably why I’m in my line of work, but the agreed-upon framework of a ruleset is what makes a game satisfying. Ignoring the ruleset (whether out-of-the-box rules or some home-baked variant) eliminates the fun.

“There’s no need to keep score”
“There’s no reason to penalize that player for that minor infraction. In fact why have penalties at all, why not just stick to the fun stuff?”
“Why didn’t you go easy when playing that six-year old?”

I’m not a zealot? but I can sympathize with Emily’s “mad judge” approach to karaoke (even if I would clearly not pass muster there) (PS you’ll want to think that her piece is satire, but it’s not).

It’s not that I want what’s best for everyone. It’s that I want what’s best for the game.

—

Sometimes I read the comments that Emily gets and wonder, why even bother opening the gates if those are the barbarians that are going to come rushing in?