Until yesterday I was still unpacking from my extended stays in Cleveland and the City of Brotherly Love. Last night my wife got sick of watching me throw dirty shirts out of my suitcase into the laundry basket and demanded that I empty my luggage for real. It took a while, but I complied.
One thing I came across that I had completely forgotten about was a pack of cards emblazoned with the logo of The Atlantic. (Everything is a bit hazy, but I think I picked up these cards in Philadelphia at an event about female millennial voters.) It appeared to be a sort of game: "Question This: Intriguing prompts for lively conversation."
Here are the rules:
1) Deal 3 cards to each player.
2) Each player chooses 1 card to play.
3) Everyone puts their finger on the question they want to discuss. (If there's a tie discuss how to break it.)
4) Discuss the question until all players decide to move on. Each player draws a new card.
5) The player who played the card scores 1, 2, or 3 points, as shown in the bottom left-hand corner of the card.
6) The game ends when the deck has been played through. The player with the most points wins!
Putting aside the fact that this is a game only in the minimal sense that someone can win at it, one that involves no skill whatever (unless choosing the randomly dealt card you think is most likely to intrigue the other players counts), features no proper gameplay per se, has no potential for dramatic turnarounds, stunning reversals of fortune, dirty tricks, and all the other hallmarks of games from football to cribbage to Twister, I think the worst thing about this game is the questions themselves, which could have been about anything. Instead they are the sort of things employees of Vox and The Intercept and Five Thirty-Eight and, well, The Atlantic aspire to talking about when they are not trading Netflix Original Series recommendations. Imagine sitting down on someone's couch, putting Zep or Cult on the turntable, cracking open some Coors, and saying to the person next to you, "Have the hard sciences made philosophy obsolete?" (three points). So too, "Could machines ever become 'completely' human?" (three points) is the worst accompaniment to Bill Evans and chain smoking I can imagine. If somebody asked me with a straight face, "What is the best way to make a cup of coffee, from bean selection to brewing" (one point), I would ask him to leave my house, I hope politely.
But maybe I'm wrong and Question This is a blast. In any case, I shouldn't really go opening my mouth before I've even played it. Is there anybody out there who wants to come over on, say, Saturday night and ask me, "Can creativity be learned?" (three points) or "How responsible are we for our decisions"? The beers are on me.