Chutes To Gehenna

I believe I have iden­ti­fied my least favorite part of par­ent­ing: play­ing Chutes and Lad­ders. My epiphany came about as I was play­ing the longest round that I’ve ever seen. It was all chutes and no lad­ders. Play­ing was like watch­ing crabs in a sty­ro­foam cool­er: as soon as one char­ac­ter was close to escap­ing it was sent tum­bling back down to the bot­tom.

While that most recent round was par­tic­u­lar­ly tedious, I don’t like the game even when it takes ten min­utes because it’s a game with no skill com­po­nent what­so­ev­er. I will con­fess to think­ing — often — that we could deter­mine vic­to­ry by flip­ping a coin instead of through the inter­minable process of mov­ing the game pieces in accor­dance with the dic­tates of the spin­ner and the require­ments of the board.

That’s bad enough, but there is one more fac­tor that evokes dread in my soul when asked to play. It is this: chil­dren young enough to tru­ly enjoy the game are usu­al­ly unable to move their char­ac­ters prop­er­ly, so I have to do it for them. This means I am play­ing the game against myself. A game I don’t like. A game whose two-play­er ver­sion is log­i­cal­ly indis­tin­guish­able from a coin toss yet which has the poten­tial to endure until the heat death of the uni­verse. Even if I win, I lose. I lost as soon as I took the box down from the shelf.

And yet I will play today and I know I will play again tomor­row. It’s like a tor­ment from a Greek myth. Aaargh!

My heart goes out to thor­ough­go­ing deter­min­ists who nec­es­sar­i­ly regard all of life as a com­pli­cat­ed ver­sion of Chutes and Lad­ders. If that’s you, I sug­gest you arrange to be fat­ed not to think about it.