As we get closer and closer to huge breakthroughs with language acquisition with Wendy, the summer sinks ever closer to school time. I think this will be a good thing for the girl. She likes other kids, and we like to exploit others to help with her development. Ten days in school this past winter and she transitioned from cruising to walking. Something about watching the baby apes around you do more—and more interesting—stuff underscores your own potential. When you get older, you can refer to this as ‘peer pressure.’ Or you can keep the slightly more neutral term ‘zone of proximal development.’
I keep trying to develop my own ‘zone of changing frustration in a game into an engagement with the game itself’ but this attitude doesn’t seem to clear the filter of my skull. Or it sort of hovers an inch or two outside so that I still appear to be freaking out even as I’m trying to get a grip on what’s going wrong, where I took a misstep, and how I can correct that misstep—if not in this game, then in the next one.
For
example, tonight’s game of Kachina went woefully awry for me somewhere
in the mid-game and I never recovered (photos by howitzer_120mm). I apparently kept setting up Dana
for more points—I counted three times when my tile extended her score
from seven to eleven points; though at one point I thought I’d set her
up to score but I’d misread her strategy (it was not hummingbirds she
was developing; instead, she was thwarting the influence of koshari). Of
course, she still scored.
But I suspect that I should backtrack.
First, the game. Second, the nature of social play.
Kachina is a fairly recent Bucephalus Games release. It has a southwest Native American theme…sort of. The art is highly stylized, borrowing its elements from the traditional art of that region. Kokopeli is blissfully absent. But beyond the artwork and tile names, there’s nothing to tie this game to that culture. On each tile in the game is a figure with a particular strength and power. The very strong tiles don’t have extra powers. The very weak ones have extraordinary power in the right contexts. Play is very straightforward: each player has a hand of five tiles. Play one. Score if you have the highest strength in a row or column (or both) after the powers play out. Draw a tile. Play until you’ve used up all the tiles.
I have lost badly at this game both times I’ve played it. In part, this is due to the rigid way in which I view the board. I keep wanting to go for a big score, but in so doing—by playing tiles a bit awkwardly—I set up the person playing with me.
And so this becomes a larger issue: I have a hard time letting the future unfold as itself. How can you force it to become anything other than what it will become? Dana clearly is better at this. But the ugly thing that unfolded during the game was my intense focus and increasing desperation as I tried to figure out places to score for larger points as I slipped further behind. Dana read my expression as bearing upon her and so threw points my way. In fairly obvious ways. Now, we’re into an intense discussion about the comfort and expectations of the people playing with you.
With
a game like Kachina, at some point you can blame the tiles: I didn’t
have the right ones at the right time. The information is
imperfect—unlike, say, chess, go, checkers, or even tic tac toe—so you
can only form partial strategies. I would feel better about myself and
the world if I could find comfort in those facts, but I keep struggling
to understand where my planning went wrong. At work, I can point to
where I cost the journal money, face up to it, and move on. But here…
There are no good answers. Perversely, what I really want to do is sit
back down and start the game over, but my apparent intensity and
off-putting affect sent Dana quickly into the other room to settle in
with The Goddess of Fried Okra. We might play the game again at some
point, but I expect it will be a while, which is a pity, because it’s
damned intriguing.
So here’s a couple of questions: How do you read the people at the table? I want to make people comfortable around the table, but I’ve failed here; how can I avoid that mistake in the future? Is it ever OK to throw points to someone else (assuming that pretty much everything else is equal and the game doesn’t have that mechanism of shared scoring built into the structure)? How hard is it to let go of goal, even, and just see how the game plays out?
There’s a line somewhere in the social contract about how to behave when you’re losing. I wanted very much to figure out the game, and my intense focus put Dana off. I could have chosen the joking complaint mode to defuse the situation, but by that time I figured she’d take me as really complaining. So, a badly played metagame as well. We’ll start over tonight with my parents. I’m hoping for Keltis. That way we can celebrate Wendy, too.
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