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Official development blog for the PARANOIA roleplaying game. No description is available at your security clearance. The Computer is your friend.

Tuesday, December 02, 2008

Costikyan on Candy Land 

Many years ago, for some forgotten game magazine, Greg Costikyan, original co-designer of PARANOIA, reviewed the primordial children's boardgame Candy Land. Now, on his blog Play This Thing, Greg has been drawn back, moth-like, to the bright flame of Candy Land. His trenchant sociopolitical/ludographic analysis -- I really shouldn't say "rant" -- treats Candy Land in terms many of us had never previously contemplated nor even imagined possible, and, indeed, perhaps were not meant to know:
To begin with, let us view Candy Land as a mathematical entity. It is very nearly a Markov chain, a stochastic process in which, given the current state, future states are independent of past states. (It would be a pure Markov chain if the deck were shuffled after each play; instead, it is a crippled Markov chain coupled to a push-pop stack.) As such, it is a metaphorical representation of the fundamental ideology of the United States; the past is no constraint on the future, and each individual should strive resolutely for personal advance despite whatever the past may hold. [...]

The characters represented in the game, through whose desmesnes the players pass, are all representations of sickly, in many cases objectively repulsive, sweets: Princess Frostine, the Gingerbread People, Mr. Mint, Gloppy the Chocolate (formerly Molasses) Monster. There's a clear message to the American child here, one our business establishment is at pains to transmit through all forms of media -- most importantly, of course, through the thundering waterfall of commercial blandishment none of us is permitted to escape, whatever media we peruse. That message is, of course: CONSUME. Consume candy. Consume everything.

There's much more, and I admire Greg's insights throughout his ran-- uh, piece. But this latter excerpt -- about Candy Land as propaganda for consumerism -- seems obvious, like observing Monopoly promotes capitalism and Life teaches social conformity. Candy Land is perhaps more interestingly considered as many children's earliest introduction to the very idea of a game, the agreement to accept arbitrary restrictions on play. I wonder what damage that has done?

Perhaps the main damage is commercial. Candy Land is the gateway drug to Life, Sorry, Monopoly and the rest of the Parker Bros./Milton Bradley pantheon. Most of these "classic" games (excepting Clue, Mastermind, and maybe Stratego -- oh, and Scrabble, of course) are dull designs. As such, they have conditioned generations of Americans to think of boardgames as trivial and boring. But I wouldn't necessarily fault Candy Land for that. As Greg observes, the game's purely random play suits its target audience perfectly.

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Posted by: Allen Varney / 1:03 AM

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