Just to Make Ya Smile

dumbthingswhitepplsay:

Imagine a board game. The goal is to get as many spaces ahead as possible, with a certain number of game coins. Your token starts out 100 paces behind the others, you have 100 less game coins than the others, and you don’t know the rules governing spaces or coins. You don’t even know why your token and your coins start so far back, but they do.

When you point out to the other players that you’re behind and don’t know the rules, they all give you funny looks. They say: 

“No you’re not, stop being ridiculous, see, we’re right here” or

“Well, you just got unlucky, it’s completely coincidental that you’re back where you are” or

“Stop whining and making the game unfun for everyone else!”

They might be right, you think, since they know the rules of the game. You are probably just whiny and ridiculous. And maybe you aren’t as far behind as you thought. And everyone seems to be having fun, and they seem to want to include you. 

The game starts. You spend a lot of time focusing and paying very close attention to the mechanics of the game, not wanting to get farther behind than you are. You watch the other players and try to imitate them because they know the rules, but for some reason they are getting everywhere, and you aren’t, and since you don’t know the rules, you don’t know why. Your game coins are also dwindling, since one of the rules is that the person in last place must give them up as a penalty. You miss a lot of relevant in-game information because you had to spend your time focusing on how to play. You aren’t even really having fun because it’s taking so much out of you, but you don’t want to be a spoilsport. You think, once you learn the rules, you can have fun like everyone else.

Occasionally, people who may or may not know the rules pop in here and there to give you hints about what they might be. You have no idea whether to trust them or not, and end up getting burned and falling back spaces several times thanks to bad advice. The good advice you get doesn’t seem to work that well.

You try. You try and try and try.

You finally realize that to get any substantial number of spaces ahead, you have to take them from your fellow players, putting them behind. But they want to win the game. They do not want to give up any decent number of spaces. 

Dilemma. 

Don’t fear, though. The game, according to the other players, has rules to help you.

They will agree to give you a space or two, if you sacrifice your game coins to them. You ponder it carefully. It’s a very difficult position, because to win, you need both a large amount of spaces and a large amount of game coins. But, game coins count less toward winning than spaces, and the more spaces you get ahead, the better your chances are to recover the game coins later. 

So you sacrifice them. You get a few spaces ahead, maybe catch up to the next to last player, who has been really lax the entire game, which is why they’re also pretty far behind.

That feels good. You start to feel accomplished. Why didn’t you think of this earlier?

So you start to rabidly throw the other players your game coins. You start shooting ahead, shooting ahead, but you’re still really far from most of the other players. And somehow, the player you managed to get in front of, who isn’t even really interested in the game, has shot ahead of you again with way more game coins than you could ever hope to have.

You find out about another rule now. When you have no more game coins, you cannot take your turn. You must instead forfeit your turns until you have an adequate number of game coins. While you do that, the others are leaving you in their dust. Even the person who doesn’t care for the game.

You finally regain enough game coins to continue, only to find out about another rule…once enough players have reached a certain number of spaces ahead, the last player must subtract spaces. 

And of course, the last player is you.

How do you win? You don’t. You can’t.