On Friday my good friend Katy and I went to a bar in Chicago that, along with serving beer and pizza, also has board games for it's patrons to partake in. Katy is one of my oldest friends and one of the things we used to do over ten years ago when we first became friends was play the board game "Life". Riding bikes through subdivisions, ice cream sundaes, and Life was a summer in middle school. So we played it again this Friday, having actually lived some of life at this point.
Besides getting "Life Tiles" that said I became President and won a Nobel Prize, as well as discovering a Planet and saving an endangered species, I found this one thing in the game really fascinating:
You had to get married.
The game starts with either begining your career or going to college first. (I choose college and got "You loaned your car to a friend and they crashed it. You owe $5,000). Then those two pathes converge, you get a payday, and then:
Stop. Get Married, Add another person to your car.
It doesn't say if you have to get married to a man or woman, but you do have to get married.
I was explaining this to a friend today, and realized that, while we may over come the discrimination we have against homosexuality (and I'm not saying that we don't have a long way to go in that field, cuz we do) the Game of Life mandates that you have to get married - it doesn't matter to whom, but if you don't you can't move forward. I can marry a girl, but we have yet to get over the stigma that I need to get married at all.
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I think an amusing metaphor can be had out of this.
When one is playing the game of life, one can obey the rules that come with the game or not. There is nothing stopping you from ignoring the rules and not putting that extra peg in your car. The game merely reflects what rules society has laid out. And the game's rules are just like society's, you are free to break them if you wish.
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