Games of Youth

by Conroy

"Play is the highest expression of human development in childhood, for it alone is the free expression of what is in a child's soul."

Chess - one of the first "adult" games I learned to play

This quote is from Friedrich Frobel, one of the fathers of modern education and inventor of the concept of kindergarten. While the language is grandiloquent it must contain some truth. What I'm sure of is that the word play is synonymous with childhood as the word work is with adulthood. As a child I would play; as an adult I work. This is a reality so firmly ingrained that until just recently I had given little thought to the matter.

The truth is I'm not prone to sentimentalism of nostalgia, no more than the next man anyway, but I do have a sharp memory. That memory was jolted the other day as I was searching through some storage bins in my basement - the common repository for forgotten possessions - and came across my classic board game Axis & Allies. Like Proust's response to the madeleine, my mind whirled over all those games I played in my youth. As I thought further I realized that play, that games, must be one of the defining features of my younger years. Games of all forms and varieties. Games of skill, of intellect, of speed and strength.

Today, my adult years, I rarely play games, and I thought of why that might be. I had to go back to the games I played as a child to understand.

World Domination

"No human being is innocent, but there is a class of innocent actions called games." - W.H. Auden

I thought of my dad teaching me chess as a young boy. I wasn't the next Bobby Fisher, but I had a knack for strategy and other games beckoned. I thought of playing Stratego and Risk, imagining myself as the youthful Napoleon as I led my triumphant armies to glorious victories. I thought of Axis & Allies and how even as a young teenager I was aware that the game makers made it palatable to play as the Germans by showing the Iron Cross on the game pieces instead of the Nazi swastika. But I thought most about Empire Deluxe.