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Guys, want to play this new board game? It’s called Life. No, it’s not “one of God’s impossible-to-understand games that take three hours to learn.” It’ll be fun, I promise!
O.K., so the board starts out with nothing on it and an infinite number of pieces packed into an infinitely small glass ball. To begin, everyone waits for an indeterminate period, because time hasn’t been conceived of yet in the game. Then the game master—yours truly—bangs the glass ball with a hammer, and all the pieces in the game explode outward to an infinite distance.
Yes, I’ll handle all the cleanup. Watch out for the glass shards, and don’t breathe in the radioactive cosmic dust.
Then we wait a few billion years in game time. You draw one random piece to be your player. For instance, one of you will be a thing called a “tail club,” which is a part of another thing called an “ankylosaurus.” Another one will be a “human being” named “Elon Musk,” which seems like one of the best pieces in the game, since it’s really powerful; the only disadvantage is that everyone thinks it’s a “fascist-adjacent dork with a shockingly bad sense of humor,” except for the pieces labelled “extremely online incel.” And you, my friend, will be a “guest star” on a “very special episode” of “Blossom.”
What? You want to quit because someone else got “acting-writing-directing triple threat Bradley Cooper” and you’re just a “pellet” in a “hot mound” of “sloth shit”? I know Bradley Cooper seems like an awesome player, especially since he is equally adept at “bromantic comedy” and “Oscar bait,” but sloth shit can be really cool, too. You get to just sit there, and everyone keeps a respectful distance. Trust me, you got lucky.
Game play entails rolling the dice to move your playing piece around the board, but the game master dictates where you land. Exactly—the dice don’t actually matter. They just give the illusion that the players are in control, so they don’t quit in frustration and flip over the board.
Brace yourself: here comes a “disaster,” which is when the game master pounds the board with his fist a few times or pours his drink over it. Many of you will die randomly—including “People magazine’s 2011 Sexiest Man Alive,” Bradley Cooper. But guess who survives to the next round? Not so bad to be a piece of sloth shit now, huh?
At this point in Life, each human player receives an arbitrary quantity of “money.” The amount you start off with almost completely determines how much you end up with. You know, you’re right—that doesn’t really make sense. The game master does have the discretion to change the rules. . . .
Eh, too complicated. So Elon Musk begins with several billion “dollars,” and the rest of you get “usurious student loans.”
Hey—who’s this “icicle” player, and why are you placed in “Egypt”? Did you guys play while I was in the bathroom? Do I have to go through the entire board and make sure there are no other mistakes? No? Then please explain to me how “Vladimir Putin” became a “ruthless dictator” and not a “beloved mime who sells quilts on Etsy.”
Forget it—you guys aren’t even trying anymore. What year are we up to, 2024? Maybe that’s a good time to stop, anyway. I’ll do a game-ending disaster, either from “climate change,” an “asteroid,” or “Lauren Boebert” becoming the “President” of the “United States” owing to a staggering number of deaths in the “line of succession.”
O.K., we’re done. And the winner is . . . “medieval peasant woman with leprosy”! Wait, that’s wrong—I was looking at the board upside down. The winner is Elon Musk. That’s kind of expected; the winner is usually a “friendless psychopath” driven by “textbook Oedipal issues” and “rejection in middle school.”
Why are the rest of you complaining? Nobody ever said Life was fair. ♦
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