The games of life

Now my actual time in college is waning, and I approach the starting line for The (real) Game of Life

As a child, I spent hours playing The Game of Life, that seemingly endless game in which you travel through life, picking up a career, a house, a spouse, and some adorable little pink and blue peg children. Yet for all the time I spent modeling my grown-up life, I rarely considered that the game erases the player’s first 20-odd years. In Life, life begins not at the moment of conception or the moment of birth, befuddling pro-lifers and pro-choicers alike, but instead at the moment players embark on their careers or go to college. In fact, college itself is compressed into a few squares, represented as an endeavor that drains money but may help players down the road, allowing them to work as teachers or accountants or... well, actually, that’s it. College is good for a few extra dollars in salary and the ability to get the coveted teaching position, as opposed to the far less glamorous “rock star.”

Although picking college often meant that I was stuck in the split-level and not the mansion, I always went that route, assuming that in the real world, college would somehow improve me. (Of course, I didn’t yet know that all you need to succeed in “The Real World” is a willingness to be labeled “the slutty one,” “the gay one,” or “the Republican”).

Now my actual time in college is waning, and I approach the starting line for The (real) Game of Life. I think of the game and the implications built into it, and I’m convinced that my life over the past three and a half years can be better represented by other games—ones that don’t explicitly assign life paths, but that do require me to employ that great collegiate tool, the metaphor.

Perhaps college is a game of Bananagrams, in that “this shit is bananas, B-A-N-A-N-A-S.” For the uninitiated, in Bananagrams, each player makes a crossword, trying to use all of the letter tiles before other players and to make something meaningful out of the many tiny pieces. Like the game’s mosaic composition, my time here has been composed of countless discrete experiences—classes, nights out, moments with friends—and my task lately has been to figure out how all of these things join together, how they fit with my sense of self and my goals. While I'm struggling to reconcile these disparate pieces, I look around and see that my classmates and game-mates are doing the same.

But sometimes, in Bananagrams and in life, the tiles pile up, and suddenly you have five Qs and a J and no vowels, and everyone else has finished, and you gaze at your pieces, perplexed, trying to make QQJQQ sound like a word. Then maybe you realize that this metaphor isn’t working and decide to try a new one.

College is exactly like a game of Catchphrase. It’s a direct competition, and it’s chaotic, and as time winds down, the alarm blares louder and louder, and you grow more frantic and realize that you’re graduating in exactly four months, and still you have no idea what your teammate could possibly mean by “German car, Olympic rings,” so you desperately guess Mitsubishi, and it all snowballs (“It falls from the sky, and the second half is base-blank, basket-blank, foot-blank!”). There are moments of glory, like when someone correctly guesses “drop the Chalupa,” and there are moments when people are so ignorant, describing France as a third-world country for example, that you just laugh. Wait, maybe Catchphrase isn’t college. Maybe it’s just a sociology class.

Maybe an entire college experience cannot be summed up in a board game. But this semester, my friends and I have instituted a weekly game night, and that amalgamation of games and nights sums up how I’ll remember college: as a rotating collection of dorm rooms, of talking and laughing and ignoring reading and looming deadlines, of cheap beer and occasionally educational moments (I did use “zaftig” in a recent round of Bananagrams).

It’s muddled and it’s messy, and I haven’t yet rubbed the rough edges off these memories to fit them together into a meaningful idea of what college means to me or why it was worth my four years.

I do know this: College has been worth more than some extra Life dollars, worth more than a few squares on my game board. It’s not something to be left behind in the first minutes of play. Rather, it’s something to pack into your little car, right alongside those pink and blue pegs and that career card, something that still signifies when you retire to Countryside Acres to take stock of your winnings and the game you’ve played.

Anna Arons is a Barnard College senior majoring in urban studies. Two Cents and Sensibility runs alternate Wednesdays.