Winning Ways

[from 10/14/09]

Yesterday I was traveling by bus with Anitra "She Who Is Not To Be Entrusted With The Transfers" Freeman. I struck up a game of "How Is That A Christian Allegory?" This is a fun game you can play with your friends that doesn't require equipment, hands, a direction in life, or any sort of skill. Someone names a movie you've all seen. You have to come up with a way in which the plot or some significant subplot is a Christian allegory. You don't have to be Christian to play the game, you only have to know as much about Christianity as anyone born in America must in order to squeak by.

We started with the Wizard of Oz, which is easy. A story of redemptions all around. Everybody's soul is saved by the end, or else they've been cast out, or the equivalent. Work out your own details. Anitra thought she'd stump me with The Graduate, thinking I'd go for "Dustin Hoffman forms a cross in the church window", a mere sign, but I zigged around that and pointed out that, in hopping a bus with Ben, Elaine is truly taking up her cross by renouncing worldly possessions for a life of sacrifice. Anitra then tried to nail me with Debby Does Dallas. I had to admit I'd seen it from beginning to end, but could not discover any allegory in the plot, as I could not have been distracted by any. Fortunately, Anitra hadn't seen it at all so it didn't count against me. But later I lost on Dr. No. Perhaps I could have got that one if I knew the Minor Prophets better, but I earned karmic points (part of a parallel game) for admitting defeat when I did.

There are lots of games like that you can make up. There are so many such games, in fact, that you can even play the meta-game "How Can We Turn That Random Fact Or Event Into A Game?" -Game. Wherein a player tosses out a random fact or event and all take turns suggesting games to be devised referring to it, and offer illustrations of game play.

For instance, let's take the extremely random fact that Barack Obama, our president, is a Nobel Peace Prize recipient. The game I would offer to play off that is "What's Obama Going To Win Next?" Players try to think of potential Obama wins the other players haven't, until they can't. Let's see, I might go with "a game of Horse", "a lifetime supply of Turtle Wax", "The Afghan War", "The War of 1812", "Constantinople", "The Publishers Clearing House Sweepstakes", "The Genius Award", "an Emmy for best leading man in a daytime drama", "the Super Bowl (by himself, with his hands tied)."

Another player might then counter with "What's The Nobel Peace Prize Committee Up To, Anyway?" The play in that game could get quite convoluted as it calls upon the players to put their best paranoia forward. He could offer as illustrations of play, "they confused him with Eddie Murphy", "they wanted to annoy Ahmadinejad", "they wanted to annoy Glenn Beck", "they're Norwegians, so they're socialists, enough said", "they picked the guy (Obama) who's making foreigners love America, so that Americans will then hate that guy and oust him, so that everyone outside America will go back to hating America again, which is what they (the American-hating Norwegians) actually want."

The overly attentive reader will have noticed that I have just taken the introduction of the aforementioned meta-game as an event and played a round of itself with itself. If you try this alone at home, keep a towel handy.

Here's another fun game you can play. Watch an afternoon of Fox News with your friends and pick out the games the talking-heads are playing. You'll find them remarkably similar to mine, except that they don't tell you when they're playing them, or what the rules are. And, sadly, no one ever drops out.