Loading ...Why LIFE Sucks
By Evan ~ November 26th, 2008. Filed under: daily life, rant.
Wikipedia claims this is the most current version of the game, but it is not. It’s much worse.
Even the preeminent online encyclopedia can’t keep up with LIFE’s bullshit.
“LIFE, also known as THE GAME OF LIFE, is a board game originally created in 1861 by Milton Bradley, as THE CHECKERED GAME OF LIFE. The modern version was originally published in 1960 (then “endorsed” by Art Linkletter, with a circular picture of him on the box) by the Milton Bradley Company (now a subsidiary of Hasbro). Two to six players can participate in one game; however, variations of the game have been made to accommodate a maximum of eight to ten players.” you don’t want to play LIFE because it is a waste of fucking hours, it isn’t any fun, and they made obnoxious changes to the basic rules that make it impossible to finish the game if you start with more than one other player.
Before last night, I only remember playing LIFE once. I was very young and attending Brooklake Day Camp in New Jersey. It was a simple game, where you spun a wheel and maybe moved a few spaces. You had a job, you got some money and there was a space on the board where you were given a bunch of money and could gamble it. I guess this was because in the ’80s everybody was wheelin’ and dealin’ like in that movie Wall Street. The gambling option was cool because you could make some fast cash (and cash is what you need to win the game), and also because it reflected the times. At some point (maybe 45 or 60 minutes into the game), someone retired and the game was pretty much over. Since I only played once, I didn’t full comprehend the nuances of this version of the game. Amazingly, the 1970s/80s version of the game included a rule where the person with the least money could spin the wheel and miraculously win the game. I don’t remember that from the one time I played when I was seven years old.
Well, the newest version of the game (released in 2005) is totally fucking insane. Pat, Nicci, Tom, Thesy, Nate and I decided to play last night. It took almost five hours, and by the end of the game no one even cared anymore. We just wanted to finish and go to bed. Seriously, we started playing at eight o’clock and the game wasn’t finished until well after one a.m.. Unbelievable. Apparently if you want to go to college at the beginning of the game you start $100,000 in debt. I guess that’s realistic, but that’s like starting a game of Monopoly without any money. No one would agree to it because it’s fucking absurd. Apparently there are special benefits that come along with certain jobs, and there were maximum allowable salaries for certain jobs, but we didn’t fully read the directions (everyone thought it was the same as the old version) so no one actually received any benefits, and some players received more money than they should have.
The only redeeming factor to the game was watching Pat skip college, land a job as a hair dresser, and race around the board in an SUV with his gay lover and their three sons. Pat’s continued references to a gay couple raping their children made the maddening LIFE experience slightly more palatable.
Other than that, it was awful. The worst part of the game is how fucking long it takes. No, wait…it’s trying to figure out the money. Ah, forget it. There are so many problems with LIFE that it would take at least ten more paragraphs to explain them individually. Monopoly is great because you only receive money for rent and when you pass go. In LIFE, money is constantly changing hands. On every single turn, every player is either receiving money or paying money. Six people spinning a wheel and trying to take turns determining their current pay rate (with successive raises) or calculating debt payments becomes a nuisance really quickly. And since the board isn’t a simple track (circle or square), people are constantly falling way behind the front-runner and pausing to ask whether or not they got their most recent pay day, or their last pay raise (you know, because the person thirty spaces ahead of them just got that second or third or fourth raise!), or whether or not they have to pay this fee or that fee. It’s fucking horrible.
Which brings me to the point of this story. Why does the game of LIFE suck in every conceivable way? Because it is not only a stupid game that takes too long and makes you hate everyone you’re playing with, but because it manages to perfectly mimic real life. When I wake up in the morning I’m already trying to figure out if I can make it through the day without losing my job, or figure out how much debt I have, or wondering why I’m on such a shitty path in life, or silently hating everybody around me. It’s actually kind of amazing in its unabashed ruthlessness. It’s like the assholes at Hasbro are taking out their own (which is to say our own, as well) frustrations on the game-playing public. Fuck LIFE, and fuck life. Let’s all play a game with meaning…like Scotland Yard or Farkle or something.
