What a Fool Believes

lucaluca: ameaningfultitle: adeandabet:

When I was still living in Oshkosh, WI, about twelve years ago, my cousins would drive up from Crystal Lake, IL to visit. My brother and I would hang out with them the entire visit, all of us staying at our grandmother’s house. We spent most of the time in our youngest uncle’s old room, which was exactly how he’d left it before going off to college seven years earlier—sports car-patterned curtains; photos from his high school track and field days; a one-wall panel of a cityscape in sections of alternating primary colors; dresser drawers filled with ski goggles, a Rubik’s Cube, and other 80s artifacts. In our uncle’s room we’d watch TV, listen to CDs (various volumes of the Grateful Dead’s Dick’s Picks, Wesley Willis’s Greatest Hits, Bizarre Ride II The Pharcyde, and Ween’s 12 Golden Country Greats were in rotation at the time), secretly drink now-warm Rolling Rocks smuggled in socks, and play video games.

One of our favorite video games to play was Mario Party (2 & 3). We’d walk the few blocks to Hollywood Video, smoking cloves, talking, and rent a copy for the weekend. For those unfamiliar with the Mario Party franchise, it’s basically a four-player board game, featuring the characters of Super Mario, made up of different mini-games where you’d collect coins to obtain stars, which would then unlock more mini-games. It’s all about the mini-games. Some examples: “Bobsled Run”; “Rainbow Run”—players shoot cannonballs from a cloud at another player walking a rainbow tightrope; “Bumper Balls”; “Face Lift”—where you pulled a character’s face around to match a still of its expression; “Slot Car Derby”. We’d play it for hours, keeping ourselves awake with copious amounts of Mountain Dew. And, despite the game being targeted at eight year-olds, the four of us, eight to eleven years older, loved it.

Much of Mario Party consists of battling the other players in the mini-games. As the maker of the above photo can no doubt attest to, that can lead to fighting that spills out of the cartridge and into real life. My cousins, brother, and I never really had that problem. There was definitely a lot of trash-talking—and some charlie horses to the arms and legs of my brother (who deserved it)—but no ruined relationships. This was due to our collective goal to unlock more mini-games, a team spirit that pervaded our playing, sweetening even the most sour mini-game three-on-one gang-up. We even had “The Honesty Rule.” There was one particular mini-game that consisted of nothing but slapping the buttons to pillage the coins from another player. We were all for winning coins through competition, but outright thievery was unsportsmanlike. Thus, “The Honesty Rule” was invented and, during this particular mini-game, the player would enact it by refraining from stealing a single coin, receiving a warm round of applause from the other players. Who says video games create monsters?, we thought. Behold the ethics of Mario Party players!