Few childhood board games had the fascination for me that The Game of LIFE had. In the stack that included a well-worn copy of Candy Land, one or two iterations of Battleship, some incomplete chess sets and several games that had educational or developmental purposes, there was The Game of LIFE—executed in candy colors like the icons on today’s iPhone, promising within it many experiences of life, illustrated by vivid and chaotic images on the front cover of people rejoicing while doing adult activities like graduating from college and driving cars. In my head, it was spelled The Game of LIFE, like LIFE cereal or LIFE magazine, which is not technically how it’s spelled but is how it looks on the box:
Inside the box, it became apparent that many of these vivid images would need to be supplied by one’s imagination—though there were some excellent miniature replicas of highways traveling through trees, a good preparation for my adult future. I always had a distinct set of priorities when playing The Game of LIFE—I always took the “college” rather than the “no college” route, taking out paper money loans in keeping with my strongly instilled (and later specifically dropped by my parents) 2002 awareness that everyone who doesn’t go to college ends up working at McDonald’s. I always wanted to Get Married and fill up my little plastic car with as many pink and blue child pegs as it would hold.
But other than that, my priorities were aesthetic. It’s relatively easy not to go broke in The Game of LIFE, especially when you’re playing only with siblings who are at least three years younger than you. But what LIFE captured for me, and what drew me to it over and over, was the vividly imagined tapestry of a future life that was at least partly dependent on the luck of the draw. I always wanted the Tudor house whose description was riddled with “2” puns, but you couldn’t bet on it. You would get a choice of three houses, and you had to hope for the best. The house you have in LIFE has no effect on the game, really—you could sell your house money at the end (just like life) and you win the game by having the most money at the end (unlike life). But I knew what I wanted—something that was beautiful to me, even if impractical.
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