junior year

What was your favorite board game growing up?  I liked playing games like chess, checkers, Chinese checkers, Life, Chutes and Ladders so on and so forth.  But the thing I’m realizing from looking at what people tend to play online is that the games people play tend to reflect not only their age but also their culture and what games were popular when they were younger.  For example, I’ve really never focused much on the phenomenon of online backgammon.  Why?  I think it’s because when I was growing up I played other kinds of games and so my mind has been blind to advertisements for backgammon for my whole life.  Same with bridge and other games of cards—I’ve just never been interested so I’ve always assumed that nobody played them.  However, this is a ridiculously ethnocentric viewpoint—in other places of the world, in other age brackets, in other societies, backgammon must be just as popular as Texas Hold’em or Monopoly.  I think one thing that the Internet does a great job of making us realize is that the world is truly global.  You can see anything and everything online because if there’s a market for it, even if that market is spread over geographical locations from all over the world, it makes sense to put it online.  This goes for everything from gifts to games to literature and you can imagine how much innovation this creates, because now, no idea is too crazy—there are people from across the world who may identify with your unique hobby , even if it’s online backgammon.