Wow, this is a pretty epic thread. Okay, I get one post then I’m backing out. (And it isn’t a criticism,but an observation about the game).
The funniest part about CAH is the meta game. How do you figure out how to make not the funniest joke, but play the card for the specific person that has the highest chance of awarding you an awesome point.
Some people you will never figure out. Some have easy tells. And even though this is a tad pretentious I always try to figure out who played what card and why.
I rarely win, but I absolutely know my friends better because of that game.
It still includes cards that say “African Children,” “Poor People,” “The Jews” “AIDS”, “Child abuse” and “Amputees.”
This seems to be saying that the inclusion of these topics in the game is itself a problem - effectively that these topics are off-limits for jokes.
Oppressive attitudes and “microaggressions” are a real problem, but I don’t think it’s reasonable to point to CAH as the cause. I think it’s better to directly address the actual problem: people with fucked up attitudes, or a lack of empathy and understanding of other people’s situations.
The reality is that both humor and microaggressions are highly contextual, and therefore so is CAH. I have no doubt that the game is used in ways that make people feel disrespected, threatened and marginalized, and that is not cool. But even without CAH, frank discussions about sensitive topics can be used to make people feel that way, and that’s not a problem with frank discussions. Frank discussions are great, the problem is with your friends’ fucked up attitudes.
Making rules about what topics should not be joked about, or what jokes are universally Not Funny By Definition is often not liberatory at all, it’s suppressive. It can end up smoothing over social interactions so that we can get along pleasantly with people with fucked up attitudes and deficient empathy. This should not be a goal. If someone has these views, I want people to know, and to have an opportunity to engage with it. I want to either change their mind or I want to not be their friend, let alone play CAH with them.
What regular people think of problematic: oh no, not this again.
what humanities grad students think of problematic: hurray, something to go in my dissertation!
You seem to confuse “darling of Boing Boing” (as an aggregate entity) with “a BB contributor posted a contrary piece.”
You realize BB isn’t a borg with a unitary consciousness, right? It is a collection of people with a variety of opinions and not everything they allow posted to the site is suddenly an official, endorsed opinion of BB as a whole. Somethings things are just thought provoking or interesting.
Seriously, this “conservative heyday of Boingboing/Mondo” or whatever, bereft of “SJWs” never fucking existed.
People always make this claim in threads that discuss racism, homophobia, etc. Bigotry isn’t a Happy Mutant trait and never came across in any post, article, or book I’ve read from the team.
Yes, you can play CAH and not be one. But the people posting here defending it by attacking any discussion of problematic works are defending “righteous bigotry” and becoming the idiot counterpart to the “politically correct” nanny-supervillain they loathe.
Yes, actually I do realize that. But thanks for checking. And I am guilty of preferring the days when BB was Mark and Cory. As @Ladyfingers pointed out, it’s tumblr now. Yay.
Probably not for a long, long time. He hardly contributes anything, but that’s understandable, he’s moved on to other things. I was just pointing out Rob’s use of Cory as an example that one person on BB had a favorable opinion of CAH. I would love to know his thoughts on that though.
CAH succeeds not because it “dirtied up” apples to apples but expanded on it. The mad libs approach is a definite improvement. I think there was a forgettable game that was basically just “apples to apples but dirtier” and it didn’t live long.
Well, we could discuss it in some detail as I know an involved party but then my comments would be deleted (as happened before). I actually got banned by the old old community moderator for bringing up Violet Blue when the incident happened (before the ban was later reversed).
Yeah, seriously. Now Munchkin - THAT is a bad game with bad mechanics no one should play.
(The bad game with bad mechanics part is serious, the no one should play it part is not. Just stop asking me too, god damn it, it’s so goddamn terrible)
And I will delete the reply to your comment! It is fine. Just know ye that in doing so we deleting HISTORY, but people read it, and will keep pointing out that it is unseemly for anyone giving themselves the title of Commenter.
Both munchkin and fluxx are somehow, simultaneously, the worst games I´ve ever played. I’d rather do some house chores before being subjected to -that-.
