The games we play — part II

Some say life is just a game. And then there is the game of Life.

In 1860, Milton Bradley crafted the toy. It started at Infancy and ended in Happy Old Age. Along the way, you might find Happiness, but you also might find Ruin. The game was intended to teach its players a few moral lessons along the way too. The game enjoyed great popularity for years, before fading out of the public idea. A century later, Bradley's legacy — the toy giant — reintroduced the game. But not all was the same as it had once been. "Bradley’s game about vice, virtue, and the pursuit of happiness was reinvented as a lesson in Cold War consumerist conformity." (Sound familiar?)

The 1960s version of the game — and the basic skeleton of the version today — has each player start in a little plastic car at the beginning of their life. The first choice you make is whether or not to go to college. In somewhat realistic fashion, the player who attends is saddled with debt; the player who skips ahead to the working world has fewer career opportunities. Earlier versions emphasized wealth collection. Jobs could be traded for better ones, stocks could be purchased, insurance was advisable. Sure, a certain degree was left to chance — but hey, that's life. The game ended when someone landed on the millionaire spot. Others could gamble for a chance to get there too, but the probability of becoming bankrupt was far more likely.

Throughout the last half-century, the game has been retooled again and again. The vicious zero-sum wealth-collection mentality of the board — though fun to competitive players — led to a change at Milton Bradley. Now, the game prizes public service — awarding bonus points for trash collection or technological innovation. House purchase (complete with mortgage and insurance) is still necessitated, but you can trade up if you're not happy. "Life tiles" allow for a chance comeback — the poorest player can still come out with a win at the end. The ending dichotomy, though slightly more subtle, still produces a socioeconomic split: You can live in Millionaire Estates or Countryside Acres. The former is classier, but riskier; the latter is less exclusive, but you take fewer chances in selecting it.

The 2000s era version has less explicit competition. It also no longer mandates insurance purchasing, stock options are fewer, job training has become minimal (occupations once came with "skills") and it is quite easy to sue your neighbor. Socioeconomic divides still exist, even if they are subtler.

Is this an implied statement of what are lives have become? Is Milton Bradley trying to reflect how we live? Or is this merely a game meant to entertain children by the fireside? It's hard to claim that the moralistic undertones are entirely accidental. Even the small changes to the game are significant: the 60s convertible has become a clunky Chrysler minivan; the money has undergone serious inflation; the mortgage and home insurance card looks … different.

But on the other hand, the game is focused far less on wealth collection. Instead, there are arbitrary goals met on the way to becoming the so-called winner — a title that can be usurped if someone else happens to draw a better Life tile than you. So which was worse: the 60s version or the edition today? (*To note, many of these new changes have arisen even since the last time I played the game.)

"Like all earlier spiral race games, the Game of Life is essentially about fate, but it’s so relentlessly amoral and cash-conscious that a nineties redesign team, eager to make it less so, pretty much gave up. The new Twists & Turns game has no goal. In it, life is aimless," the New Yorker wrote, when reflecting upon the changes the game has undergone.

So why? What is the game reflecting? Does it reflect our lives and we just don't recognize it? Or has poor Milty gone off the map this time?

A cursory glance at customer reviews of the game on Amazon.com — mostly from adults who played the game when they were children — reveals that some were less than pleased with the design overhaul.

"Money isn't the way it used to be."

"The old Life game was more true to life. The new game isn't."

"There isn't as much interaction between players in this one … not true to the real world as we know it."

"There are at LEAST 9 spots to land where you're supposed to sue your neighbor and get 100,000. I have a real problem with that. Another is where you get cosmetic surgery … what?"

One woman bought the game for her daughter and as astonished at the life she "lived": "The college option is a sham; next spin had her "Engaged"; subsequent move,"Baby Girl" (each player had to pay $5,000 dollars for a new baby). By the end of the game she had 7 children, a (heavily mortgaged) mobile home, NO job & had just landed on "Congrats, You are a Grandparent." A TERRIBLE GAME."

Some still saw the underlying moral values: "I realize this game was truly a product of the 50's. You had to get a job, had to get married and buy a house. Great family game."

Not all who played the game saw it as so negative. Many felt it taught their children about "real life" and as one agitated commenter wrote, "IT'S JUST A GAME!"

Game or not, the comments can be interpreted as a metaphoric reaction to the changes that have happened in our real lives. Our values have changed — no question. Bradley's intention back in 1860 was to create a game that linked "virtue and success," a game that understood the complex relationship between "chance and judgment."

The inherent issue with the Game of Life is that, although different paths are laid out, there is only one goal, one way to achieve success. There is a disregard for Milbrath's idea that "quality in living is experienced only be individuals and is necessarily subjective." (1) In the world of Life, "consumption becomes an end in itself" (though not quite as dramatically as Monopoly) and the interactions between players on the board is minimal. (2) The concern one player expressed about isolation can be seen in society at large — today, more than 50 years ago, we live introspective lives, despite growing globalization.

Milton Bradley may have attempted to shift the game away from a solely consumerist lifestyle with the introduction of public service and a greater role for Life cards, but no matter how the game is drawn and redrawn, you still need to make the big bucks to win the game.

Paul Krugman warns about the dangers of competitiveness, and the obsession with winning that can take hold. This is more explicitly present in the earlier version of Life: the in-it-to-win-it version, the zero-sum bankruptcy-or-bust model. Today's game has eliminated much of the "mindless competition" — but now you can sue the other players, you can pull off a surprise win based on luck — and so the competition becomes more personal, more subjective. (3)

The game cannot be taken too seriously — in a board game, there has to be a winner, and there's a limit as to how far personal choice can be taken. But the Game of Life can serve as a vantage point from which to view our own lives: we take on loans, with the promise of future payback; we buy insurance (or not) because the unknown scares us; we gamble our chances at comfort for a shot at top-tier living; we often get caught up in our own lives and own choices, forgetting to interact with those living or playing around us. We question the fairness and validity of a roll of the dice — and have no choice but to live with the consequences.

The competitive nature of living has become less black-and-white, maybe less zero-sum. Life has become more complicated in the last 100 — even the last 50 — years. So what can we do? We can spin the dial, hope it lands on our lottery numbers and make the best of what Life (and life) deal us.

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(1) Milbrath, Lester. "Rethinking the good life in a sustainable society," Environmental Values. 1993.

(2) Sagoff, Mark. "Do we consume too much?" Atlantic Monthly. 1997.

(3) Krugman, Paul. "Competitiveness: A dangerous obsession."

(Related: The game gets a brief shout-out in R.E.M.'s "The Man on the Moon.")

Seeing the unseen

A blog post details why Frederic Bastiat — the candlemakers' advocate — would have supported Obama's stimulus package. From his point of view, intervention in times of crisis is a good thing and is crucial for the forward movement of the economy, IF there has been a crisis. (To redistribute unnecessarily, he argues, would be a "ruinous hoax.")

When the stimulus package was presented, legislators on both sides referenced the New Deal — some for its successes (the left), and others for its supposed proven inability to fix the Depression (the right). Is creating work — seemingly, out of thin air — a productive economic solution?

The fundamental underlying debate is related to the argument about the boy and his baseball: Are we better off with a broken window, if it means that we get to fix it? Nearly all sides of the debate would argue against deliberately breaking the window, but the question of what to do when the window shatters because of a hurricane remains. Will the recent earthquake be good for Haitian development? Or will it set the small nation back — further into poverty than it already was?

There is the idealistic hope that the deep plummet into wreckage will bring the Haitian people together, help them to better understand each other and move forward into a more equitable society. There is the reality, presented by the United Nations, that no matter what efforts are put forth, true recovery will "take decades." And then there is the underlying cynicism (or reality), that even if the infrastructure can be rebuilt (albeit with extensive outside aid), the nation will never change unless it can alter its culture, government and values.

Fun toy!

This Google dataset compiles 54 of the World Development Indicators, everything from national agriculture production to cell phone descriptions. Plus, maps, scatter plots, bar graphs and line graphs for nearly all the variables. Where was this website back in my Model UN days?

Was life better in black and white?

The 1998 film Pleasantville opens in a typical suburban high school with a montage of teachers speaking at their students.

...For those of you going on to college next year, the chance of finding a good job will actually decrease by the time you graduate. The available number of entry-level jobs will drop 31 percent over the next four years. Median income for those jobs will go down as well. Obviously, my friends, it's a competitive world, and good grades are your only ticket through. In fact, by the year 2000…
...The chance of contracting HIV from a non-monogamous lifestyle will climb to 1 in 150. The odds of dying in an auto accident are only 1 in twenty-five hundred. Now, this marks a drastic increase…
...from fourteen years ago, when ozone depletion was just at 10 percent of its current level. By the time you are thirty years old, average global temperature will have risen two and a half degrees, causing such catastrophic consequences as typhoons, floods, widespread drought, and famine...

High school senior David is appalled at the world he lives in and longs for what he believes was a better, simpler time — the 1950s world depicted in his favorite television series. His twin sister is the embodiment of the MTV generation. Through a twisted (and obviously unrealistic) set of events, the two are catapulted into the archetypal 50s suburb: Pleasantville. David is thrilled, insistent that people "are happy like this." Jennifer could not disagree more — "nobody's happy in a poodle skirt and a sweater set."

Throughout the course of the film, it becomes apparent that no one is quite as happy as the family dinners and school dances would lead the observer to believe. Stay-at-home mothers feel confined, occupational choices are limited, students barely question the material they are learning and no one has ever left the tiny little town they inhabit. Radical ideas begin to spread among the youth, prompting censorship and punishment. The town leader insists that it is necessary to "separate out the things that are pleasant from the things that are unpleasant," raising questions of discrimination and diversity of thought.

By the end of their journey, David's perfect vision of the 1950s has been shattered. He is forced to learn that "there is no 'right' life, no model for how things are 'supposed to be.' " (1) The good old days are not quite as "good" as they seemed. Though the people were able to live unhampered by technology and in tight-knit communities, they had their fair share of problems. Choices were more limited in terms of lifestyle, employment and even in what kind of thinking was permitted.

The movie was marketed to the very MTV generation it placed under the microscope, intended to serve as "a morality tale concerning the values of contemporary America by holding that social landscape up against both the Utopian and the dystopian visions of suburbia that emerged in the 1950s." (2)

David came away from his journey to Pleasantville disillusioned by the 1950s paradise, while Jennifer, the original skeptic, opted to stay in the past rather than return to her normal life. Though the movie does advocate some degree of nostalgia, it is "nostalgia leavened with a hint of danger or risk."

The take-away point of the nostalgia in Pleasantville is that one cannot make a value judgment as to who was happier: the teenager in the 1950s or the teenager in 1998. The differences are plentiful, but they span the gamut in both the positives and the negatives. Which is better (or worse): blatant discrimination and segregation or the stress and pressure of the college admissions process? Will innocent hours spent in the library or time passed on YouTube make us happier? Make us smarter? Make us more well off?

The movie's lesson is that even trying to make the comparison is imperfect. David envied the lifestyle of a Pleasantville teenager, but the Pleasantville teens had just as many complaints about their lives as he did. And with the experiences of a 90s kid, he could not appreciate all of the elements on Pleasantville — and quickly became disillusioned by the picture-perfect world.

Standard of living may have increased, health care may be better and information may be more acceptable, but it is impossible to state — objectively — if we are happier than we might have been in the 1950s (and vice versa). The best we can hope for is that we have learned from our mistakes — like the confinement of the Pleasantville social structure — and that we work toward improving the "unpleasant" aspects of life today. Like Billy Joel sang, "the good old days weren't always good and tomorrow ain't as bad as it seems."

_____

(1) McDaniel, Robb. "Pleasantville (Ross 1998)." Rev. of Pleasantville. Film and History May-June 2002: 85-86

(2) Beuka, Robert A. SuburbiaNation: Reading Suburban Landscape in Twentieth-Century American Fiction and Film. 1st ed. New York: Palgrave Macmillian, 2004. 14-15.

The implications of shopping period

Brown's Open Curriculum epitomizes the expansion of decision making. Forty years after the implementation of the curriculum, we have the ability to choose everything about our course load. While some schools have distribution requirements or a core set of required classes, Brunonians run free, picking and choosing what they would like to take.

For students at other universities, who are confined to more rigid tracks of courses, this complete freedom to make choices can be enviable. As a freshman, I spent hours putting classes into my Mocha shopping cart, much to the amazement of a friend at another school in a highly specialized program with little choice.

So our divergent curriculum — arguably at comparable institutions — beg the question: which one of us was happier?

While Brown's open curriculum encourages individuality and choices, for the confused student, this can be an overwhelming task, inducing questions of interest and identity. Our educational futures are placed in our hands and it can be a daunting burden — we are entirely responsible for the outcomes. There are even courses on self-discovery and decision-making for those of us who are just too conflicted to make up our minds.

The question of confirmation bias becomes dangerous in a requirement-free setting. For students who come to Brown, biased against math, the ability to avoid it all together both confirms and validates their dislike. Maybe this is not a bad thing — the social efficiency model of education would argue that students should specialize as early as possible in those subjects most relevant to their futures. And it is not 100 percent foolproof: pre-med students are required to take a writing course and most social sciences come with an attached statistics requirement.

And perhaps Brown is retreating from the free choice model a bit (to the chagrin of many students). Just today it was announced that the writing requirement will now be enforced for all students. Though it would be nearly impossible to go four years without demonstrating proficiency in writing, it is the perceived limitation on freedom that is upsetting to the liberal-minded student body. Brennan and Schmidtz wrote that "we can be mistaken about whether we are choosing," and in this situation, it's hard to know whether this will actually change the academic path of any students.

Choice is one of Brown's selling factors to applicants, but is too much choice a bad thing? Do we just need more guidelines? Or are we already making the best possible choices because only we, as 20-something individuals, know what is best for ourselves?

Being choosy

In a paper using complex formulas, one of the columnists at the NY Times' "Freakonomics" blog proves what many of us already suspected to be true: the more income we have, the more choices we expect to make and the greater variety we demand. The increase in choice is heavily influenced by a greater attainment of education: as we become more aware of our options, we long to diversify.

Brainteaser

Income inequality can be a difficult concept to stomach and turns out, it can be pretty difficult to compute mentally too. Evidently, "the reward centers in the human brain respond more strongly when a poor person receives a financial reward than when a rich person does.” No wonder reading the newspaper can give you a headache.