Life as a board game.

This last Saturday I was cooking maggy in Wada 1 common room and, when I thought it would be a boring night, I saw a bunch of coming to play a table game at the middle of the room. All of them seemed to be very concentrated on it as if was something really serious. I went to see what was what mysterious and malefic game they were playing. They told me that the name of the game was ‘LIFE’. LIFE?! I said expecting for someone to ‘correct me’. Yes! Life, see you start as a citizen, who by the way is studying in college, of a city. Every time that you turn the roulette with number, you have to move as many spaces as it says and then read out what does your new position says. For example, if you are in the beginning and you need to move 10 steps until reach a spot which says that you are going to marry then you may get 5000 dollars from each of the other players. OH YEAH SORRY! I forgot to mention that this game pretends to make all its players to go to different stages of life. For example, they start supposing that their character (or should I say a kind of alter ego created by these kind of games?) is still on college so it needs to borrow some money from the bank to buy books, then, after 5 steps ahead , it graduates. Then he gets a job (from which he can be fired but, when this happens the player has to take a ‘profession card’ saying which job it is going to do next). After that it starts dating someone! And then it gets married and has twins! SO WONDERFUL ISN´T IT? Then, I started to think that this game is actually focused on entertain children and teenagers. However, it is a good idea to give them this idea of life being a table game? May be some people might say that these kind of games are better than violent video games. Well… at least those video games are quite realistic, violent yes but still more realistic that ‘LIFE’. For example, is it really possible for a poor unemployed man/woman with 4 children to pick up a card and see what job s/he is going to do next? Or is it useful for them to play a game where they have to marry without being able to divorce because I mean all the married people live a happy life! To think that every time they have children they will get money from the rest of the people to support them? This kind of games seem to be a kind of indulge to life. Does it, perhaps, represent a potential self deception to reality? It was funny to see how the game itself was meant to be politically correct. For example, one of the cards says that the player has to donate money to charity of to pay his/her taxes. It does not involve religion, it does not even specify if the player has to be in a straight or gay marriage! Those kinds of games also give the freedom for their players to ‘start’ a ‘new life’. For example, they can go to jail and get out of it just by paying 100 dollars without having any other consequence. It gives the freedom to play with life situations. Then, I was thinking that actually this life style proposed by this game is not bad at all. I thought that it was even better than my life. Who does not wants to get 5000 dollars for marring?