Nowadays you can plop yourself down in front of your personal computer and play anything from a war game to chess to Donkey Kong or Pac-Man or Frogger. With a little diligence and some Google research, you can find just about any game that has ever been made in a computer version.
So, you might well ask, why does any company even bother to make an old fashioned, clear the table, open the box, shuffle the cards and spread out the pieces board game any more?
Well, the answer, quite honestly, comes in several parts. For one, there is absolutely nothing like the actual personal instant encounters you have in a face to face game. Let's face it, yes; it is fun to whoop someone's butt in a game, even online over the Internet. But it is NOWHERE near as satisfying as watching the expression on their face as you take that last piece off the board and win.
Everyone, especially Americans, enjoy competition. But we enjoy the winning more and a good half of the enjoyment in winning comes from your opponent's reaction to the event. The old thrill of victory and agony of defeat thing from the old TV show the Wide World of Sports.
Computers allow you to do things instantly and long distance with people that you normally could not but there is much more fun in a group of family or friends getting together and popping some cold beverages and having some snacks and turning OFF the television and actually enjoying each others company and the fun of being together and doing interactions.
Maybe it's the feel of physically moving your game pieces, or shuffling the cards and not depending on the computer to do it for you. Don't believe me? Get together with a friend or a few and dust off the old board game and give it a try. You might wonder how you ever got away from that feeling.
Granted, some things, like Television, music quality or the likes get better with age. I can't imagine having to sit through a whole day of black and white television shows on the old nineteen inch set when I have a fifty inch High definition plasma in the living room but it's kind of cool every once in a while to watch I Love Lucy re-runs on it. I also can't really envision playing my old albums when CDs are just so much better. But for some strange reason, I still have a turn table and every now and then, I crank it on and play some old forty five RPM records.
The old stuff is just COOL. Not to do on a daily basis, but it can really balance out your outlook on life, love and happiness.
There is a plethora of board games that are not only still popular but are enjoying resurgence in popularity today.
When was the last time you watched a chess tournament on the Internet? I bet you can't remember, but if you hit the television right now, I would wager that you would find, on one of the sports stations on satellite, a high stakes chess games being televised and it will have a LTO of people there watching it live and a bunch more at home.
Same with the game of Monopoly. There are still teams that play that game for fun and money all over the world. And it is off the old, grab the pieces and move them, physically roll the dice move and draw a card table game.
Computer games, in my opinion, still have a place; they work well to keep the kids quiet on a long trip. But the real thing belongs at home and it is high time that you dig them out of the closet, pull the kids off the computer and out from in front of the boob tube and enjoy time as a family.
A lot of families are doing that now and guess what? Those families are happier and the kids have less trouble at school and with the law and the parents are less likely to have marital issues because it promotes togetherness and the family as a functioning unit
So that, my friends are some of the reasons that Board Games have never, and will never - in the foreseeable future, go out of style as a form of entertainment.
Now, who turned off Monday night wrestling on me?
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