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game review: funemployed

8/25/2015

Recently, I started attending a local board game night to meet some new gaming friends. At my first event, one of the other attendees pulled out a party game, Funemployed, when we were in between games and I cannot stop raving about it. It is in the same vein as Apples to Apples, but with a storytelling element that makes for a more exciting and raucous game.

For each round, a different player takes on the role of the hiring manager who will judge which candidate is best for the current job opening. The job cards cover a wide range of occupations, from Televangelist to Butcher to Mall Santa (if you use the seasonal help expansion pack). All of the other players are applying to the job and have to pitch themselves to the hiring manager, however, their pitch must include the qualifications listed on the cards in their hand.

Each applicant is dealt four qualification cards at the beginning of the round. There is also a slush pile of ten additional qualification cards face up in the middle of the table. After the hiring manager flips over the job title card, the applicants have a minute to craft a pitch using their cards and, if necessary, swap out some of their cards for options in the slush pile. After the minute is up, each candidate has to explain why they should be hired for the position, using all of the words or phrases on the cards in their hand. You can add in as much additional information as you want, so you can end up with some really well crafted and amusing stories.

Click through the slideshow below to get a sense of the game mechanics and then check out what my pitch would be based on the cards left in my hand at the end. You can order the cards anyway you wish, just remember to reveal each card as you use it so that the other players know what your qualifications are!

"I am applying for the position of School Nurse because nothing can rattle me. I am Deaf in One Ear so I can barely even hear the hordes of screaming kids running down the hallways. I have years of experience dealing with all sorts of emergencies, from teachers eating poisoned Apples to students using safety Scissors in a very unsafe manner. I heard that your last nurse was sued for putting a Hello Kitty Bandaid on a student who specifically requested Dora the Explorer, but I have Diplomatic Immunity so litigation doesn't worry me.

What story would you create to get hired for this position? Share your ideas in the comments and let me know if you have played this game before!

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the joy of footnotes in fiction

8/6/2015

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Most of the people I’ve met fall into two categories: those who find footnotes to be disrupting and irritating, and those who look to the bottom of the page with great anticipation. I fall firmly into the second category. Footnotes are expected in nonfiction where the additional information adds citations, guides the reader the more resources, and offers definitions for ideas or words that may be unfamiliar to all but those most entrenched in the subject. When reading nonfiction, there is always the option to do your own research on the topic to discover more, but in fiction truths have been created or stretched by the author so outside source material is generally off-limits. In fictional works, footnotes become a space to explore the far reaches of the story. They give insight on the details that may be too mundane for the narrator to address or are best appreciated as an aside.

I first experienced footnotes in fiction when I read Foundation by Isaac Asimov and I immediately fell in love with the concept. The singular footnote in Foundation is a citation with publishing information for the fictional encyclopedia that is quoted throughout the book. It is not exactly integral to the story, however, it instantly makes the world of the book feel bigger. Early on in Foundation, the encyclopedia project is cast-off as a non-priority, yet that footnote informs readers that the encyclopedia is not only eventually completed, but published in at least 116 editions. On a more comforting note, the reader also knows that in the future the world still exists in some recognizable form. We don’t know whether the interceding years were a cultural Dark Ages or maybe even a time of great innovation, but we at least know that we are not heading towards a post-apocolyptic world.

Footnotes in fiction do not always take the form of formal citations. Ruth Ozeki’s novel, A Tale for the Time Being, and The People in the Trees by Hanya Yanagihara both feature annotations of first person material. In Time Being, one character annotates a diary that washed up on the beach. In them, unfamiliar words and concepts are defined, commentary is offered, and a social reading environment is created. The translation of Japanese words in the footnotes keeps the reader engaged in the story and not constantly flipping through a dictionary. Other commentary provides feedback on the text in real time which turns a normally solitary activity into one that feels more like a discussion at book club. It is like reading along with a friend who pipes up with interesting facts and clarifying context.

Annotations also add an interesting layer to the story because they are seldom written by an unbiased voice. In Trees, a Nobel Prize winning, but now-disgraced medical researcher writes his memoir from prison and it is edited and annotated by a long-time colleague of the inmate. The memoir unabashedly discusses some unsavory parts of the inmate’s past, which the colleague attempts to justify and whitewash in the annotations. The closeness of the relationship between author and editor eventually leads the editor to excise a passage that he feels would be damning to the inmate’s reputation. However, even that footnote is telling because it confirms the reader’s worst fears about the main character.

Of course, not every book in the fiction section would be improved with the addition of footnotes. They force the reader to acknowledge that the text they are reading has been edited and adjusted along the way. The end result is less that you are swept up in current of the story and more that you are collecting pieces of the story and watching them fall into place. But the act of collecting pieces gives you the freedom to rummage around a bit in the story as you synthesize the information. Maybe commentary in the footnote prompts you to reassess the reliability of the narrator or slows you down long enough to wonder about what seems to be an inevitable course of action. A useful footnote should either clarify to improve your comprehension or obscure in a way that forces you to think deeply about what you have read. Great books aren’t only a single layer deep and footnotes provide one of those extra layers.

I feel a tiny burst of joy when I see a footnote waiting for me at the bottom of the page, like the prize at the bottom of the cereal box, an extra nugget of plot to devour. You never know what exactly you will find in those unassuming sentences in tiny font. But beware, footnotes are very easy to fall in love with, so don’t be surprised if your heart starts to leap when you see one at the bottom of the page.

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choosing a book by the width of the spine

8/1/2015

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In elementary school everything could be turned into a competition and the weekly trips my first grade class took to the school library day were prime time for friendly rivalries. It was far from the most exciting hour of the week since the book options were limited and we were only allowed to browse the stacks in small groups. During the inevitable downtime, my friends and I created ways to demonstrate our literary prowess, including the perennial favorite of timing how fast someone could read a page. One day the ante was upped and my friends bet, for bragging rights only, that I could not read the biggest book in the library in a week. Since my school only housed kindergarten through third grade, most of the books were fairly slim and the real heavyweights, the encyclopedias, were never allowed to leave the confines of the library. In fact, I don’t remember them ever even being moved from their shelves. As a result, the epic that I ended up being tasked with reading was the quite manageable Nightbirds on Nantucket by Joan Aiken. When I got my hands on the book, it had not been checked out in several years, most likely because the thick cover it had been rebound into made it appear significantly larger than its neighbors on the shelf. I gained some short-lived admiration from my peers the next week when I returned the completed book, but more importantly I had discovered a new favorite book.

I re-tried what I thought was a winning process when I moved up to the intermediate school and on my first trip to the school library, I once again looked for the biggest book available. I am still not entirely sure why a school library that only served fourth and fifth graders had a copy of A Tale of Two Cities, but I had it checked out for most of my fourth grade year. I don’t look back on that year of reading with much fondness because my battle with Charles Dickens overshadowed the books that I did enjoy. I didn’t want to lug such a heavy book back and forth between school and home so I left it in my desk for quiet reading time. However, in-class reading time only happened in fifteen minute increments a few times a week and A Tale of Two Cities required a little bit more of a time commitment. I never got into the story, but I was too stubborn to return the book unread to the library so I struggled through it until summer break when I gleefully abandoned it. Unfortunately, instead of learning that I shouldn’t judge a book based on its size, I came away from that year doubting my strength as a reader and I have avoided Dickens ever since.

This myth of bigger books being for better readers followed me into high school. In a class on European history, we were required to read a book from a list of relevant titles. However, it wasn’t as simple as just choosing what sparked my interest. The bigger the book, the more points you would earn from the assignment and that in turn improved your overall grade for the course, so I chose the high point value Crime and Punishment. I think it is safe to say that diving into Russian literature based on page count instead of content is not a great way to foster a great love of the genre. But, everyone around me seemed to be saying that the only way I could “improve” as a reader involved choosing increasingly large books, so I did. The problem, of course, is that eventually the pool of available books gets pretty small.

I picked up a small book completely by accident last year. A review for Your Fathers, Where Are They? and The Prophets, Do They Live Forever? by Dave Eggers intrigued me so I preordered it from my local bookstore. When it arrived, I was startled to discover that it only contained a mere 210 pages of large font. Yet somehow in that short span a world was created, characters evolved, and the ending satisfied. My brain did not atrophy and no one pinned a sign on me saying that I was a subpar reader. I read a short book and survived.

I still get flustered when someone catches me reading a thin book, but now in the midst of justifying my choice, I will recommend it. I will tell you that a story doesn’t always need to fill up 400 pages to be told well, even as I hurry to say that this is a palate cleanser after finishing a tome so heavy that it gave me wrist pain. I might also mention that thin books are great for the over-crowded shelves in my studio apartment and are convenient to carry around in purses and pockets. One day though, I will answer without all the baggage and just describe how the words and characters speak to me (or not) and avoid all mention of the width of the spine.

Did the cover of a book in the photo catch your eye? Let me know in the comments and I will happily provide the title and author information if it is too small to decipher.

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game review: funemployed

the joy of footnotes in fiction

choosing a book by the width of the spine

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