Opinions. Subliminal instructions to this game called life Family game night teaches us all the rules we didn’t know By Jacey Gibb, Opinions Editor veryone knows that kids are HE a bunch of impressionable sacks of flesh. They’re so hopelessly eager to absorb new information, that a lesson’s content is often irrelevant. So it’s not surprising that while in the midst of a recent board game session with my Little Brother, I began to realize just how many lessons can lie within a game’s instructions. The most obvious example of this would be in The Game of Life, which is specifically designed to walk you through the successes and failures one can expect over their lifetime. Nowhere else are society’s basic norms laid out so blatantly for you. STOP! Get married. STOP! Buy yourself some real estate. Both are unavoidable in The Game of Life, but if we’re to be realistic, we realize that not everyone has a ring and a mortgage to their name. The game enforces a traditional lifestyle, without much room for individuality. At the game’s end, it doesn’t matter how many kids you had, that you won the Nobel Peace Prize, or if you enjoyed everything along the way; the winner is whoever has accumulated the most The abolishment of best friends in Britain New policy hopes to remove close friendships and the accompanying heartbreak @ Illustration by Oliver McTavish Wisden wealth—because everyone knows that money is the most important thing in life. The same can be said about Monopoly, everyone’s favourite form of capitalism in a box. Your goal is to buy up as much real estate as possible, build up an empire on your monopoly of properties, and force your competition into declaring bankruptcy. Sounds a bit like the Vancouver scene, doesn’t it? While we're on the topic of games that take an eternity to play, Risk, the game of strategic conquest, revolves around players’ abilities to dominate their opponents and wipe out opposing armies until they’ve successfully conquered the entire world. Personally, I’m not a fan of war glorification and war in general, so that might explain why half of the times that I’ve played Risk have ended in myself and another player simply declaring world peace. Either that or the game takes an unbearably long time to finish. My favourite board game of all time is 1313 Dead End Drive, a lesser-known game by Parker Brothers. Rich Aunt Agatha has recently passed away and your goal is to murder everyone else and @ Illustration by Oliver McTavish Wisden Do Not Pass Go! De not collect (im escape with the most money. While everyone starts with $1 million, that’s not considered sufficient enough to be a winner. Greed is incredibly prominent in the game, while homicide is strongly encouraged. In my opinion, few games actually endorse healthy habits and reward ethical qualities. Scrabble encourages proper spelling and rewards people with extensive lexicons, while Scattergories forces players to think creatively. Even By Eric Wilkins, Staff Writer is beyond our control, it’s comforting to know that there are still some things we can manipulate at will. With this in mind, it was like a breath of fresh air to me when I heard that several schools in Britain had taken chaos by the throat and wrangled away control of yet another aspect of life previously thought to be unpredictable: friendship. Several institutions have warmed up to the idea that children shouldn’t have a best friend. The reasoning is perfectly logical though; best friends often create strong emotional ties between each other, but should the two ever have a falling out, the emotional trauma is off the charts. This can be astronomically depressing for one, if not both parties. The solution? “Encourage” students to avoid hanging out in pairs and have the juveniles play in groups instead— [: a world where so much the larger, the better. When children are in a group, it’s harder for them to form meaningful connections with any singular member of the troupe. Really? If at any point while reading the above you found yourself nodding along in agreement with this “no best friends” policy, then you should put down that Aldous Huxley novel immediately. No best friends? Words cannot sufficiently describe the ridiculousness of this situation. Friendship is not an artificial commodity. You can’t manufacture it, and you can’t really prevent it from happening. If it’s to be, it will be. And if there is ever a painful time when the two end up separating, no biggie. The kids will get over it. Forrest Gump had it down: life is like a box of chocolates, and sometimes you get stuck with the salted coconut cream. It’s brutal, but you learn to live with it. I actually had a experience Sorry found a way to incorporate proper manners instead of just having players massacre each other until there’s only one person left. People may argue that these are all just games and shouldn’t be considered influential, but if violence and other mature subject matters in the media can be considered to be affective, then aren't board games also agents of influence? similar to this when I was in elementary school. My teacher was determined to find a way to separate me from my best bud. She told me several times that I should hang out with other kids more, and even went so far as to seat us in desks on opposite ends of the classroom. Needless to say, her attempt to broaden my socializations was horribly unsuccessful that year, though | swear she had a hand in ensuring that we were in different classes the following year. I suppose, if you’re looking for a complimentary term for this woman, progressive would fit. She was ahead of her time! While I understand the angle of trying to spare children from the pains paired with platonic friendship breakups, it doesn’t make the initiative any less ridiculous. Friends come and go and the sooner children are exposed to this basic fact, the better off they’Il be.