Are Board Games Hip Again? Hot

No

I don't believe that NPR is ever the barometer of "hip". All the soft voices and polite chuckling...

Yes. Also hip again: Charlie Rose.

I'm thinking of stopping by Real Arts Ways - a game night hosted at a place that serves drinks.

I actually enjoyed this, but mostly due to Scott Nicholson and Curt Covert. It was interesting to hear a casual boardgamer's perspective...Catan, too complicated?!?! Ooookay.

My favorite thing to say, to instantly lend credibility to anything to the extreme liberal contingency in my department is....

"blah, blah, blah,......I heard that on NPR"

I'm pretty sure that the last time board games could be even somewhat credibly described as hip was the middle ages, so using the word "again" is being pretty charitable.

Then again, Rhianna is attached to the Battleship movie. She's hip, and that movie is pretty much the best idea in the history of ideas, so yes, yes they are.

not too mention "edgy"....really?

From the link:

Hipsters? Finger moustachioed, PBR drinkin', fixie ridin', 'I liked it before it was so mainstream' hipsters? Now I want to punch something.

While it would be cool to talk board games with people the same way as football and movies, I hope board games never become hip this way.

When I knew hipsters, they were always playing boardgames---generally it was monopoly or whatever, but there you go.

I don't hate hipsters. They're no worse then the metal heads when I was a kid or the grunge kids later on. It's just another fad and it to will fade. Our bass player is a bit of a hipster and he's a nice guy. I haven't heard him mention even one indie rock band, but he also plays for Dan Mangan and that makes me a little sick sometimes.

Boardgames have never been hip, never will be hip, and it doesn't matter. None of my hobbies are hip and it's kind of why their hobbies. Not because their not hip, but if they were then no one would call them hobbies.

To begin with, the word "Hip" itself is fucking garbage.

Boardgames are "FUCKING AWESOME", "DOPE AS SHIT", "COOL AS A MOFO", or according to Mickey, "Some Straight Up Mandingo Type Shit".

Just the idea that such a shitty word would be associated with my beloved hobby pisses me off.

And FTR: Fuck hipsters. Delusional, self-important cunts, the lot of them. Maybe getting a real job would snap their shit loose and get back to reality.

Fuck NPR too. My reporting on Crokinolegate rivals their reporting. And that's SAD.

http://www.urbandictionary.com/define.php?term=hipster

"Rejecting Mainstream Culture". Does that make Charles Manson a hipster? Or how about Dahmer...eating the eyeballs out of young children is certainly not mainstream.

Bah.

ROFL

Pete, you can do that with any group of people. Hobbyists, ie: boardgamers, are just as easily generalized.

And it's a load of shit then too.

Generalizing by race, color, sex, disability is bullshit.

Generalizing by behaviour is absolutely appropriate.

:P

Preach on!!!

Also, www.stuffwhitepeoplelike.com . Like, it was better when it wasn't so mainstream and they've really gone downhill since selling out, but like, the earlier posts are okay or whatever.

And this is a prize piece of comedy. http://www.cracked.com/blog/an-apology-to-hipsters-whose-lives-ive-ruined/

The funny things is I've met people who look like hipsters and they seem ok. But I've never met one that fits the internet, thousand bad youtube parodies of, stereotype that's portrayed. So maybe I don't really know any, or maybe they don't exist.

I'm thinking it's mostly just a way of dressing, which admittedly makes me want to hate them, but then I just feel old and pathetic and focus my hate on me instead.

Some of this show is cringe worthy. I couldn't listen to all of it.

You shouldn't use gamer jargon, like resources and mechanisms, when talking to non-gamers. It makes you sound like a Chess Club Dork. It is also difficult to follow and makes everything sound far more complicated than it is.

Compare Scott's game descriptions to the old game ads they played. The old game ads make the games sound fun and easy. I like Scott, but his description makes it sound like you need a degree in economics and resource management to play Settlers of Catan.

When I need to describe Settlers to a non-gamer, I tell them it's like shooting craps.

If they are really interested and what a more detailed explaination, I tell them that everyone starts with two markers. You put your markers on numbers that are on a game board. Players take turns rolling the dice. Whenever anyone rolls any of your numbers, you win a prize! The prize is a card with a picture on it. Save up enough cards and you can turn them in to buy another marker to put on the board. You can trade cards with other players to get special combinations of cards which lets you buy markers sooner. First person to get 5 markers on the board wins the game.

Yes it is a lie, but it is also essentially true. It also makes sense to people. It sounds easy enough that a child could play, which is absolutely true of Settlers.

Well we've had lots of discussion about hip -- which is just a poorly chosen word from NPR to discuss the resurgence of boardgames.

Listening to the broadcast, I'd have to say NPR definitely isn't hip by any definition of the word. They're talking about Monopoly, Scrabble, Chess, Checkers, Dominoes, Life and Clue. They obviously don't have a clue themselves.

They actually brought Scott Nicholson on and then the discussion devolved into this BRAND NEW game that's currently the rage: Settlers of Catan! And what is it Scott about those Germans that have them producing these new games?? Well Colin...it's something called the Spiel de Jahres and the Germans play more family boardgames than we do....and after the war they couldn't produce anything with guns in them so....zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Are Board Games hip again? Were they ever "fashionably current" or "cool" which is the dictionary definition. You'd never know it from listening to NPR that's for sure. They're not talking about anything we'd recognize.

EDIT: You know what is hip though?! A place that serves drinks on game nights. Yum! (Just noticed Uba's post. I think I need one after listening to that broadcast.

There are a lot of hipsters in the Twin Cities, concentrated in certain neighborhoods. They strike me as fake nerds with a pretentious attitude. Why would anybody want to fake being a nerd?

I loathe the concept of hipsters, but there is one local boardgaming group that I sometimes play with that is mostly hipsters. They seem to find me unsettling... crude, barbaric, and aggressive. It's like a punk hanging with a bunch of goths. They always want to play Settlers and Carcassone, but I refuse and get them to play games like Mall of Horror and BSG. I got dropped from the invite list for a couple of months after the time when we spent the whole evening playing an 8-player session of the Paranoia cardgame. Now I'm back on the list.

It really sounded like two ships passing in the night to me. The hosts couldn't reach into the detail and the guests couldn't cast it off. To be fair to Scott he switched off most of his usual wild-and-zany approach and that served him well given the venue and the people interviewing him.

The woman representing the game night has never tried out Settlers of Catan? Someone needs to get an extra beer in her so she can take that leap. I can't help but think she'd land on her feet.

Great news people! There's cooperative games to choose from!

S.

And to be fair to Scott, he changed gears when the woman representing Real Art Ways said "Oh Noes. Settlers of Catan is too scary complicated for mes." I think neither of them expected that. You could almost hear both Scott and Colin's gears grinding as they both tried to break, clutch, down-shift two gears, and turn together.

They exist. My game group has a hipster couple exactly like Superfly's #6 description. But you're right. Just like not all jocks are this way or that or gamers are this way or that, hipsters are more a cultural phenomenon than a firm category of person. What makes me mad is board games being incorrectly lumped in with the cultural phenomenon. Especially when that phenomenon makes my skin crawl.

As for the NPR show. Ugh. I like Scott Nicholson, and it was great they got him on there. But if I didn't know he was at MIT currently, I'd think I was listening to a show from 5-6 years ago.

One of my gaming buddies is The Anti-Hipster. He looks like a young Mark Harmon only with blond hair, and is built like a former high school sports star, but he is a hardcore gaming geek who is addicted to both WoW and D&D.

I listened to the vox pops at the top of the show, laughed a little and turned it off before the show got to the guests. I like NPR - but got the feeling this was going to be toothless.

Yeah I've got no problems with Scott. He's obviously way more up on games than these guys and he didn't want to alienate a national radio audience.

LOL...yep!

Missed this post, but found it surfing back through Google Reader headlines. :D

All I could think of was this...
Your Picks: Top 100 Science-Fiction, Fantasy Books

My brother pushed the above link my way last week, and I was apoplectic by the the time I'd gotten through the first 20 or 30 "classics"...

Just considering the huge body of legitimate classics in the last 150 years of so of "speculative fiction", I'm not sure any book should top any "Top 100" list, unless it's at least a decade old. It takes that long just to differentiate if it's got legs, or is just fashionable. *shrug*

I mean, "Xanth?". Come-on!

NPR & their audience are "authoritative" on... well, not many things. :D But they love to _*think*_ they are. :D