Guest post: Dealing with the stigma...

Apparently my buddy Rami takes this blog much more seriously than me.  Here's another well-thought-out contribution: 

Rami here again. So this has been puzzling me for a long time: I unfortunately do not have the privilege of having a large group of personal friends who enjoy boardgaming. While trying to convert some, I noticed that there is often a huge stigma associated with boardgames. Either people think they are childish, are too difficult, or can in no way be fun. I try to get past this. Show them small little games at first, where skill could come a little later, and make them really simplistic and fun. With some this has worked, but others refused even this treatment.

When I ask people why they don’t want to play, I often get bland and uninformative answers. They rarely have a reason, or if they do have one, they rarely want to tell it to me. The weirdest thing is they will refuse a game and then go sit around and do nothing (it’s not that we alienate them, there’s a bunch of people not playing games around) – so it seems like they’d rather do nothing than try a boardgame. This just boggles my mind! How horribly do you have to see this game so that doing nothing at all looks good in comparison?

So I have this one friend that always refused to play any game. At one point I somehow managed to convince him to play one game of Coloretto – and he loved it! However, when a few days later I recommended another game, the stigma still stuck. He is now willing to play Coloretto if I bring out the game, but anything else gets an automatic 'No' without any consideration. So even though I showed him that these games are simple and fun, the stigma still persists.

What is it about games or maybe about us as players that make these games so… repulsive to other people? Why do these fears continue to exist even as boardgames are becoming more of a mainstream activity? How the hell do I get more of my friends to embrace boardgames?!?!

Rami is an occasional writer for DeathofMonopoly. If his commentary dazes, confuses, excites, intrigues, or congests you, then feel free to tell him about it by emailing him at rfinkelshtein@gmail.com