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BGonline.org Forums
Why kids don't play BG (long)
Posted By: mamabear In Response To: Grass roots development needed (David Rockwell)
Date: Wednesday, 7 October 2009, at 2:09 p.m.
I am qualified to respond to this thread because I not only am a parent, but I am also a former kid!
I'm not sure the typical kid of the age you are targeting cares much for games where the weaker players win a decent percent of the time. Little kids play Candyland or Snakes and Ladders because they aren't yet able to think ahead far enough to play games that require strategy. But once they have that capability, they lose interest in kiddie games and take up checkers, chess, or maybe Go.
Games where the weaker player can win are still popular, but not taken seriously. Anybody here besides me used to play Mille Bornes? Did any others play Battleship in study halls, using folded graph paper for a grid? The monitors couldn't tell it from math homework, especially in my case if they knew what my handwriting looked like. But we wouldn't have dreamed of playing those or similar games that had a bit of strategy, but were perceived as primarily luck, against other schools.
And at that age, we would have (wrongly) put backgammon in that class because of the dice factor. We would have recognized it was more complex that Yahtzee, which has got to be the most boring game on the planet, but we wouldn't have recognized the depth of it. I suspect that would still be true today. (From the parents' perspective, there were additional problems with the game's reputation in the 1970s, but those probably no longer apply.)
Our school had a chess team and we played against other schools in the area. We liked the fact that if we played better we were going to win. Period! There are a few luck factors in chess, but they didn't decide any team competition in my school years. (For example, my winning chances on third/fourth board would have declined precipitously if my opponent playing White had opened with a queen pawn, and had any clue what to do next, since I hadn't studied those openings enough to have any clue myself. But they, like me, were Bobby Fischer fans and so played the king pawn openings the same as we believed he always did.)
And other posters are right, that video games are difficult competition for a board game to beat. Those games are an addictive time-waster that ...oh OK I'll skip the rant about what they're doing to our children's waistlines and health, and our nation's motivation and competitiveness... /(executive summary of rant)
Another competitor for children's game-playing time is lengthy role-playing games that can take over an hour just to set up. Parents disagree about the merits of these games, but I think they do more good than harm for kids well-grounded in reality, and when excessive time spent on them is avoided. It might be just as well when such children choose those games over intensely individual games such as chess or backgammon. They get the opportunity to learn verbal and logical skills, the delicate balance between collaboration and competition that is so important in corporate and managerial life, and to use their imagination a bit, perhaps counteracting some of the mind-deadening effects of television… oops, another rant about to start … /(beginning of rant)
So I’m with those who believe scholastic and/or intermural backgammon is essentially DOA. Perhaps a small, localized league would work in areas with many children of Greek or Middle Eastern extraction. But then, the parents in such districts might also be among the most vehement objectors!
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