Some games night thoughts. . .

[xiphias]

It occurs to me that the game Encore probably takes only an hour or so if non-geeks play the game. But I think that it's not fair to expect geeks to finish a game in under six hours.

There's a Saturday morning cartoon called "Recess", about a bunch of elementary schoolers. It's a somwhat clever show; this past week, there was a bit in which one of the characters, Vince, realizes that his older brother, Chad, is not, in fact, cool, but is, instead, a geek.

Vince confronts his brother, who explains that he is aware he's a geek, and is comfortable with what he is. Yet Vince tries to deny the evidence:

Vince: But. . . but -- you have all those CDs!
Chad: Webber, Sondheim, Gilbert and Sullivan -- geek music.

That's basically it. Geeks, even geeks who aren't specifically music geeks or theatre geeks, can be reasonably expected to carry thousands of songs around in their heads -- and songs based on lyrics. Besides having a solid grounding in lyric-based musical theatre, most geeks -- even geeks who are totally nonmuscical -- will have a usable knowlege of at least one of the following genres: historical folk, new wave, Sixties/psychadelic, filk, general audience showtunes, childrens' music, Seventies/disco, religious/spiritual, and/or techno/Goth. Some geeks will just happen to know everything ever written by an artist or group: cheshyre knows everything that Queen and the Monkees ever wrote; many geeks know everything Weird Al ever wrote. Many geeks will have a decent knowlege of several, or even many, of those.

And if you get four geeks together, you're likely to cover at least half of those genres. You're going to have thousands of songs to choose from, on any subject.

In the game Encore, on each turn, a word is drawn from a deck of cards, and the teams go back and forth singing snippets of songs which include that word. The turn isn't over until a side can't think of a song in a minute and a half or so. If, in your group of friends, everybody only knows a couple hundred songs, and they're mostly the same couple hundred songs, then I can see that you'd only be able to go back and forth two or three times on a given word. Turns wouldn't last more than three or four minutes.

If everybody knows thousands of songs, and they're all DIFFERENT thousands of songs, every turn is going to take ten, fifteen, twenty minutes. Turns end when a side goes into brainlock and can't retrieve a song which they KNOW is in their brain somewhere, and not when the actual knowlege of songs that would fit is exhausted.

I admit that we only came up with like two songs that had the word "boa" in them, but that was late in the evening, and everyone was tired. We probably went half an hour or longer on the word "white". The word "island" kept us for about fifteen minutes. "Days of the week" ended, not because we burned through our supply of songs with days of the week in them, but because our brains cramped and stopped supplying them. I mean, there were obvious ones we didn't use: "Seven Days" by Sting, "Except for Monday" by Lorrie Morgan, and the like.

I'm actually upset at myself for forgetting "Except for Monday", because I love that song. It's about how, now that the singer has broken up with her ex, she feels so much better and happier, almost all the time. . . "except for Monday which was never good anyways, Tuesday I get a little bit sideways, Wednesday I feel better, just for spite. Thursday and Friday take too long, before I know it, Saturday's gone, but it's Sunday now and you can bet that I'm all right."

Comments

[xiphias.livejournal.com]

Yep. That must be it. But if it is, then you're a very, very STRANGE nerd, which is every bit as good as a geek.

[mittelbar.livejournal.com]

As good as? {spocks eyebrow}