The Game of Life is risible propaganda
Routines are important and one that my family has inadvertently established is a near-nightly game of Life. For those of you who are mercifully unacquainted with this board game, its premise is simple: You travel a path from the beginning of your adulthood to the end, hitting assorted big life milestones like getting your first adult job, marrying, buying a house, having children, then retiring. Whoever retires with the most money wins.
The Game of Life confuses me for multiple reasons. There have been some attempts to make the game feel more modern and fresh: the action cards are often cheerfully goofy, like requesting the players engage in a dance-off before spinning the dial to see who's going to win, and the careers available include mobile app developer and videogame designer. Yet the whole thing is horribly regressive in a few key ways and every time we play, I end up finishing my bongo competition (actual action card requirement) or my dancing robot move (same) by reminding everyone, "This is insane late-stage capitalist propaganda, right?"
My first objection: The bank pays you if you go on an enjoyable and eminently Instagrammable vacation to someplace like the Great Barrier Reef or the Great Wall of China. But if you have a bad vacation -- it rains at your local campsite or it's the off season at your local beach, you pay the bank. It is a sneaky little reinforcement of the idea that one's private life is only valuable inasmuch as it's commodifiable, either for you or for the social media giant to which you pay your data tithe. Check out of the experience-industrial complex and pay the penalty.
My second objection: You can't opt out of marriage. Your car lands on the space, you must pick a spouse, then all the other players must give you money.
Players have the option to go on a college-education path or a non-college path, they have the option to go on a night-school path or continue without the additional career opportunities provided by night school, and they have the option to take the "high risk/high reward" path late in their career or stick to a steady paycheck … but they literally cannot opt out of marriage. The most freedom any player has in their path in the Game of Life is tied directly to their money-making choices.
It's interesting how marriage is mandatory in an age where marriage rates are declining across so many cultures. And this brings me to my third sticking point with the game …
My third objection: Players who choose to have lots of children end up with higher bank balances at the end of the game than those who choose not to have children.
The first time I realized this -- when I had chosen to remain child-free during a game -- I said, "That makes no sense! Nobody is ever richer after having children unless they're press-ganging the little goblins into work as child actors! Where is the card levying daycare fees for each of your little peg progeny? Where is the card requiring you to set aside money for college educations? Each of us started off the game with $100,000 to pay for a college education -- that had to come from somewhere! Where is the card that cuts a woman's lifetime earnings as the parenthood penalty? Literally nothing about this game is remotely realistic. First the forced marriages and now this."
My heartless family members couldn't answer because they were laughing too hard. But I've been tracking the results of every game, and the most reliable winning strategies are these: Get a career that requires a college education. Get married. Have kids.
Nothing is wrong with any of these things. ( … writes a college-educated, married parent of one). In fact, statistically speaking, U.S. college graduates have higher lifetime earnings and assortative marriage is strongly correlated with higher socioeconomic security, i.e. the real-world analog to winning the Game of Life.
What I object to in this game is the complete erasure of the privileges that make any of these advantages possible: Why not have people spin to find out if that $100,000 college education is funded by the bank or if they're starting the Game of Life $100,000 in debt because they picked the wrong parents by spinning a 3 instead of a 6? Why not build in some economic friction by reducing one's paycheck by 10% for every child -- that'll show who can really afford to have kids (the mobile app designers) and who will be struggling (not the techies!). Why not make the marriage question one where the clear economic benefits or liabilities are laid out via an action card and a spin of the wheel?
And what I object to is a game that doesn't allow any room for the biases that circumscribe the choices people have in real life. In the U.S.A. of 2020, it is irresponsible to promote a narrative around college, marriage and children without acknowledging that everything from who struggles with student debt to who gets to weather the economic shocks of the pay hit a working mother's career takes is gilded in privilege. It takes real-life money to make the kind of money that wins in the Game of Life.
Now if you'll excuse me, I have a dancing robot contest to win.
ADDITIONAL READING
"The Real Reason You'll Never Be Able to Parent Like a French Mom" (The Cut, March 15, 2015) -- "Their government supports them. They live in a country that has accepted the reality that most people eventually have children, and then continue to work outside the home."
"Americans Are Having Fewer Babies. They Told Us Why." (The New York Times, July 5, 2018) -- "Financial concerns also led people to have fewer children than what they considered to be ideal: 64 percent said it was because child care was too expensive."
"Marriage Has Become a Trophy" (The Atlantic, March 20, 2018) -- "The dominance of marriage may simply be due to what the sociologist William Ogburn called 'cultural lag': the tendency of attitudes and values to change more slowly than the material conditions that underlie them."
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On the advice of some very wise friends who listened to me moan about my writers' block, then gently asked, "Do you want us to listen or do you want advice?" ... I'm just writing my way out of a block and toward whatever big writing goal will emerge after I've just kept writing for a while. As always, any feedback, questions or suggestions welcome either via email (reply to this) or via Twitter (@lschmeiser).