don't bogart that game

Games are in the news this morning. The paintings of dogs playing poker sold at auction yesterday for more than half a million dollars. The picture I saw this morning shows a St. Bernard in a draw poker game with a hand full of rags and apparently no paint at all pushing it in and stealing the pot. It’s a nice picture, but it seems pricey. It’d look good on the wall of my office, but Jimbo doesn’t play five-card draw-- just no limit hold ‘em. Plus that, Jimbo doesn’t have the free cash flow right now to spend more than half a million on a picture, as the private bidder from New York must have had.

The other game I read about in the news is one that was discarded from the New York toy fair. It is a board game (marketed by a company called Bored Games) like monopoly, in which the players try successfully to run a marijuana growing operation. The story says the guy who conceived the game did so while serving time in jail. It doesn’t say why he was in jail; we just have to leave that to our imaginations. It does say, however, that the inventor wanted to demonstrate the pitfalls of the business. This, I infer, gives the game redeeming social value. The spokesman for Bored Games says that they consider the game to be like an education and that it will show you that running a dope farm will be hard.

By the way, the name of the company is a great play on words, but don’t you imagine the name would create marketing challenges?

I’m also wondering whether selling such a game would limit your market to dopers and “hip” teenagers. I can’t see many parents buying the game for their children. Let’s buy little Johnny that game for his birthday. It’ll teach him not to grow the ganja when he grows up.

And what is next? Will someone come up with a new version of the monopoly game in which, instead of building houses and hotels, the players find more lucrative illegal activities with which to build wealth? Will players find it is more profitable to run a crack house out of a tenement down on Baltic Avenue? Or will they make book out of a storefront on St. James Place? Will someone sell “protection” to the upper middle class merchants along Connecticut Avenue? Will someone run a high priced call girl operation out of a penthouse somewhere along Park Place? Or, will someone realize the ultimate, sure-fire method of milking the cash cow and become a public official and make “free parking” a thing of the past?

Either way, we are not going to learn morality from board games. Board games should have fun objectives, like monopoly, where the object is to bankrupt your opponents and take all their money. Or chess, where the object is to wage war and capture or kill your opponent. Okay, I guess I have talked myself into a corner, again. But somehow, I’m thinking that a game based on growing dope is not going to catch on with the kiddies. Although I have been wrong before…

In Jimbo’s world we say what we mean, even when it doesn’t mean anything.