Fun and Games. Really.

Growing up I always loved games.
I remember wandering around my house, begging someone-- anyone-- to play Bernstein Bear's Nature Walk with me, or Sorry! or 13 Dead End Drive. "No, no...not now," my mom would say to me, shooing me out of the kitchen as she prepared dinner. I often played Uno with Koseli, but she always won every game, and would grin wickedly at me from across the table. My constant losses instilled in me a sense of deepening shame-- play? No. Win? I must!
In sixth grade I went through a small obsession with the game of chess, of which both my father and my best friend Kathy indulged me. My dad was good, but because Kathy and my skills were identically poor, neither of us were able to put the other's king in checkmate. Foolishly, we once embarked on a game played solely by our kings, the futility of which took us much longer than it should have to realize.
Because of my limited experience with games, they began to evolve into a hated thing-- the dreaded culmination to a single's ward party. An interminable evening spent in misery and boredom at the bottom of the food chain in Scum. The cheerily shouted words, "Let's play a game!" were inevitably followed by a sinking feeling in my stomach. Though I immediately liked Jason's family, it frightened me when I realized they are connoisseurs of games. My family simply never played them. I had no practice, and I absolutely refuse to try anything I'm bad at.

My first time playing a card game with Jason's family was with his grandparents. I was on a team with Jason's grandma, and it didn't take long for me to realize how unmatched I was with my partner. My cards were flopping around every which way. My shuffling was a catastrophe. Without her whispered instructions, I would have been utterly lost. She insisted that I use a card holder-- a little plastic contraption designed for small children or very inexperienced players to keep their cards straight-- because I wasn't holding mine right. Nevertheless, both Jason and his grandparents were incredibly kind, and I found myself laughing while we played. The allure of games began to unveil itself to me.

Jason loves seeing his brothers because they understand worlds more about games than I do-- worlds, that is, that are crawling with ninjas, assassins, orcs and super-soldiers. While I don't mind watching a video game in progress, I have never had enough guts to actually play one. When Jason bought the game Oblivion I spent an hour carefully crafting my character to look as much like me as possible. By the time I was finished choosing her eyebrow width and outfit I was so emotionally invested in the thing I could barely stand to play the game. A giant rat attacked me in the first five minutes and instead of punching the thing in the face, which is what you're supposed to do, I sat on the couch and screamed, my hands clutching my cheeks in horror as the rat bit out great chunks of my character's flesh. While in the past I have frowned darkly on video games, I realize that these, like all hobbies, require a certain amount of talent that I do not posses. Jason has honed his talent into a fine art, on top of which is some kind of deep and unbreakable connection shared by his brothers. No matter where their lives may take them, they will buy Mass Effect 3 when it comes out this year, and it will give them something else to discuss in short sentences over text. Perhaps it's not a deep connection, but when I think on it, it isn't any different than my sisters' shared interest in decorative pillows and small animals, which I consider at times to be quite profound.
During our last couple visits to Jason's parents', we have played only one game, Ticket to Ride. I'm not sure if it's the company, the game itself, or both, but since my sixth grade experimentation with Chess this is the first game I have truly enjoyed. I always come in last, though after a few games my point values have gone from the weight of an incredibly large cat to a baby tiger. I still have a hard time controlling my competitiveness-- swift kicks under the table are evidence to this-- but overall I like to believe that maybe I've grown up. It is only the beginning, but I am starting to understand the subtle harmony between competitiveness and having fun-- the very heart of the reason why people play games. And I'm beginning to suspect it has less to do with winning than I imagined.