But it also sheds light on the motivation of the anti vax movement. The original polio vaccine program was dangerous... just less dangerous than the disease. As it was irradiated a tipping point was reached and the old vaccine protocol was stopped. The stories during that tipping point are the source of much antivax disinformation.
> The original polio vaccine program was dangerous... just less dangerous than the disease.
A great deal less: "Oral polio vaccines cause about three cases of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis per million doses given.[2] This compares with 5,000 cases per million who are paralysed following a polio infection."
I think "three in a million" is well below what most people would consider "safe" in most circumstances.
The numbers make it clear what the correct decision is, but I think you’re wrong about what people consider “safe”. People don’t think and feel about safety rationally. There is a qualitative difference between something bad happening to you and something bad happening to you because of something you did.
> There is a qualitative difference between something bad happening to you and something bad happening to you because of something you did.
Especially if you were pressured into doing it, and told it was safe to do only to find it caused something bad for your child is going to cause an immense amount of upset.
I don't agree with the anti-vaxxers, but it seems like some people feel like they're being told what to do without their concerns being taken seriously, and so they just say no. In a lot of other situations, not going along with the group decision just because it's the group decision is praised, but in this situation it's demonized.
The biggest publicized bad outcome of vaccines was determined to be rubbish, and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated; but vaccinating is not without risks and side effects, and it's reasonable to consider the risks vs the risk of the disease. Also, it's worth noting that long term vaccinne effect studies are usually about 1 year, which doesn't seem super long term, if you're concerned about tail risks. Many of the vaccines be delayed, too at increased risk of the disease of course, but with perhaps easier to manage side effects.
I wish people would take the cases of people like Richard Rose seriously and as a warning sign for when you flaunt the virus. Because the coronavirus is not political and does not care about how you feel about masks; it'll try to kill you nonetheless.
Unfortunately people will likely just shrug and go 'never gonna happen to me' until it does.
>> and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated
That sort of thing is part of the problem. A change made to appease such people is seen, by them, as confirmation of their beliefs. We are taught to "respect" the opinions of others but we cannot allow that respect to legitimize dangerous beliefs or behaviors. Doing so creates controversy where there shouldn't be, which in turn perpetuates the incorrect beliefs. There is something to be said for not giving ground, for calling out the idiots as idiots.
> Lightning is one of the leading causes of weather-related fatalities. But the odds of being struck by lightning in a given year are only around 1 in 500,000.
You're also a few orders of magnitude more likely to die from choking on food, yet eating is generally considered safe. At odds these low, I don't think it generally matters whether you did something to precipitate it or not. Whether or not [social] media is hyping and fear mongering a scenario seems to be the foremost factor (see in particular: fear of terrorism.) In the case of fear-of-vaccines, it seems to have much more to do with Oprah than anything else.
Such numbers, absent context, are meaningless. To say I have a 1:1,000,000,000 chance of being eaten by a shark is ridiculous if I never go near an ocean. And that number conversely means nothing to someone floating in the water looking at a shark. Go for an ocean swim every morning? Your shark-attack risk is several orders of magnitude greater than average.
I think your chance of being killed by lightning while golfing in summer, in florida, with a pacemaker installed, using metal clubs, during a rainstorm ... then it gets a little more dangerous than weather-death statistics would suggest.
You do eat though, right? You may not surf with sharks but I wager you eat every day. Do you slice hotdogs into tiny pieces or do you chomp into them like a normal person, apathetic to the small risk of choking?
You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational.
Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
We've already established their irrationality. They're more afraid of a 3-in-a-million chance of something versus a 5000-in-a-million chance of the same thing via a passive path. The question is why. I do agree that social media can amplify the effect, but so can two people who share the same fear sitting in the same room. How did those two people get that fear in the first place?
Even disregarding what we can call "safe", a 3-in-a-million chance vs a 5,000-in-a-million chance is a significant gap.
I think I read somewhere that of the fairly wide-reaching trail of the Salk vaccine, 11 people died, and those were all traced back to a contaminated/not-correctly-processed batch from a lab in California, and that didn't temper the public's enthusiasm for the trials one bit.
I don't think they're trying to persuade; I think they're complaining. I'd call politicians or slave traffickers vile as well, despite that I don't expect them to be at all discouraged by it.
Covid is likely going to end up killing more americans in the first couple years than polio did in the decade of its peak (granted - a different demographic that means total years of life lost is likely less). There's also the general environment of in the early and kid 20th century, the idea that there are widespread deadly infectious diseases with no known treatment or prevention was just common. We're far less willing to accept a reality like that now after decades of success taming infectious disease. It's thanks to the advances made to fight the prior pandemics we faced that COVID seems not so bad/winnable. The conversation would be different if we didnt have an inkling of hope on the horizon, but we already have two drugs that seem to have limited efficacy, we see how well social distancing works, and are likely to have a vaccine within a few years. The fear and all is as much a function of where society is as what the disease is.
I agree it's important not to underestimate Covid.
It's occurred to me that one of the things that makes it so insidious and effective is that it is easy to confuse with more benign common illnesses like flu or cold. If it had the obvious crippling effect of polio or the more grotesque symptoms of Ebola or the kind of disease Camus describes in the plague, I suspect people would be less cavalier about it, which could have changed behavior and limited its spread here in America.
Regarding Candy Land, I always loved the board art. Especially the original one pictured in the article and the version I played in 70/80's. If I wander by Candy Land in a store, I'll always pause to check out the art. I didn't like the later versions I saw. Too busy and saccharine.
I understand that gradually the thinking is moving to it being more of a whole body issue than just a lung issue - and the NICE guidelines have just been updated I to refer to the longer term impacts - though so far they don't seem the same as polio, or as common. https://www.news-medical.net/amp/news/20200712/First-extensi...
My wife had covid, and now nearly 4 months later is still ill. 3 people recently on her online group have been able to get EKGs (not ecg) and all have shown scarring of the heart. What this means for them remains to be seen, as does if this is at all common - this could be chance or we could see more people with longer term issues coming out of this. Gut feel, I'd guess that we might see as many serious long term effects as we see deaths - but there is a long way to go before we can prove or disprove that - I really hope I am wrong.
> Gut feel, I'd guess that we might see as many serious long term effects as we see deaths - but there is a long way to go before we can prove or disprove that - I really hope I am wrong.
I hope you are wrong, too. But this is another one of the insidious aspects of this disease that I've read about myself.
I'm sorry to hear your wife is still ill. I wish her a full recovery.
Polio crippled a ton of people that survived it. FDR, as well as one of my great-grandfathers, was in a wheelchair because of it.
(I know some people have speculated that covid may have a lasting impact too, but nothing I've read suggests it's anything like what polio was. Post-polio syndrome effected somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-50% of polio survivors in the old data, 80+% in more modern data.)
on the topic of COVID aftereffects, we just don't know.
maybe it becomes a condition that promotes encephalitis more easily, as an hypothetical example for illustrative purposes only, making people catatonic for decades. that particular epidemic turned 5 million people into those in-stasis zombies, and just put into wards for the rest of the century as no permanent solution was ever found. the actual epidemic occurred during WWI and was paled in relevance by the 1918 influenza. But without that influenza it would have been the bigger issue on its own.
The problem with fear of the unknown is the set of the unknown is infinite. Maybe you are patient zero of a brand new super-influenza that's going to wipe out 90% of humanity. Is that hypothetical less likely to occur than some 'unforeseen consequences of covid' scenario? There are hundreds of viruses known to cause disease in humans and probably many times more that infect humans without currently causing disease. The potential for "we don't know, but what if..." scenarios is boundless.
the difference between you and I is that I am willing to entertain boundless theories in a highly iterative process of hypothesis, if there is some observation to support the hypothesis. the supporting work for any cognitive issue would be the known neural degenerative aspect of a COVID infection as well as the blood oxygen transportation deficiencies of a COVID infection.
Its just enough to say "look over there" to focus efforts on repeatable studies for eventual peer review, because people might not be looking over there yet. Its just enough to not be surprised if a brain that isn't getting the same amount of oxygen and also part of an infected nervous system suddenly stops working in the expected way.
> the difference between you and I is that I am willing to entertain boundless theories in a highly iterative process of hypothesis, if there is some observation to support the hypothesis.
It's known to science that influenza mutates every year, and history has shown that it can cause pandemics. Are those not observations that also support this same style of boundless fearmonger hypothesizing? I think the reason you're preoccupied with speculative fear of covid but not influenza has more to do with media coverage than anything else. In the case of covid you're being encouraged to fear the unknown, while in the case of influenza the unknown, while just as unknown, is not currently in vogue.
I'm not sure what your argument is at all beyond trying to assume someone doesn't believe the influenza virus can be deadly too.
Influenza can mutate to become even deadlier. That's why we have vaccines and take action to track the disease so that we can keep it under relative control. We approach it with great care because it's deadly.
So why are you afraid of doing the same thing for the coronavirus? It has a lot more unknowns and things we simply do not know about and without a way to treat it, the best approach is one with extreme caution. It's already killed far more people than your average influenza season in less than half the year. It seems like you're attempting to downplay how dangerous this virus is and trying to compare it to the flu.
The comparison between covid and polio fatality rates was made upthread by another user. I responded by pointing out a deficiency in that comparison, namely that polio had serious lasting adverse health effects on 1/4th to 8/10ths of survivors.
In response to that, I received a comment suggesting that covid may yet prove to have similar lasting effects. That fear mongering is what I am now responding to. There is no evidence to suggest that scenario is more likely to unfold with covid than any other illness.
> There is no evidence to suggest that scenario is more likely to unfold with covid than any other illness.
And this is precisely the problem which you seem to have missed. There's no evidence to support that with the novel coronavirus because we don't know how it functions nor have there been people recovered long enough to determine what the long term effects actually are. Post-polio syndrome took 15-30 years after infection for the effects to actually be observed, so obviously there can't be any evidence because it's not even been a year since the coronavirus pandemic started. What we have noticed is that there is evidence of damage to the lungs and nervous system even in people that have recovered from the coronavirus with more we simply don't know.
The problem is that you're looking at things which we were only able to determine long after infection and then comparing it to a new virus which we simply cannot have that data yet. It's naive to assume that because there's no data that means it's obviously safe from any long term effects because I imagine people likely made that same assumption about Polio as well because these things tend to have a very long tail.
> There's no evidence to support that with the novel coronavirus because we don't know how it functions nor have there been people recovered long enough to determine what the long term effects actually are.
And my point is that the same can be said of the new flavors of influenza. The variations of influenza which are circulating this year haven't been studied for years because they, like covid-19, are new. They make new vaccines for influenza twice a year because influenza is constantly mutating. We don't know what the long-term effects for any new mutation of influenza are. I don't think that should be taken as a license to fearmonger.
Dismissing everything as fearmongering is a coping mechanism, in this case I would call it denial.
I think a highly iterative process of understanding the effects of COVID are an interesting thing to learn and it might also help people and lead to a breakthrough if others are inspired to entertain the hypothesis.
The simple fact of the matter is there is currently no rational reason to believe covid will have long-term effects comparable to polio. That the possibility can't be ruled out is meaningless because you can't rule out that same possibility for any other virus either.
permanently lower oxygen saturation and neural degeneration unrelated to the blood oxygen across a broad population of unknown size is crippling comparable to polio.
your entire argument is based on either not noticing that, not being aware of that, or desperate to talk about why visually crippled people was a bigger problem even though zero resources need to be spent on that today.
> permanently lower oxygen saturation and neural degeneration unrelated to the blood oxygen across a broad population of unknown size is crippling comparable to polio.
Comparable to polio? Put some real numbers to it, otherwise you're just pulling shit out of your ass. Post-polio syndrome effected 25-80% of survivors. The handful of anecdotes of people having trouble after surviving covid-19 are a far cry from that.
I found it interesting when I learned that people were volunteering their children head over foot to trial the vaccine. That really hit home how scary this must have been, especially since it was people's kids, not themselves, being inoculated. Sure, Salk had trialed it on his own children before going public, but still, how much fear would need to loom over us for millions of people to volunteer their own children for a vaccine trial?
I never thought I'd see another situation where the public would be so willing to volunteer for medical experiments, but we're pretty close now.
> honestly makes the coronavirus look like child’s play.
What's interesting is that the polio virus was "child's play", literally. Part of why I think so much fear loomed over it was how devastating it could be to children and how often children would come down with it. Right now child cases of covid19 are pretty low, and it's affecting mainly adults.
I'm not sure if there's a name for this type of game, but it's purely luck based (pick a card, move to that spot), and.. I kind of hate it. Unfortunately my 5 year old doesn't.
I found a variation that makes it tolerable though: pick two cards each turn, then choose one. Adds the tiniest about of strategy, and makes it not 100% luck.
Hopefully useful to anyone else whose kid was gifted this game.
Mark Rosewater, head designer for Magic: The Gathering, argues that specifically because of that total lack of agency, Candy Land doesn't even meet the definition of a game.
since there might be no particular thing that all things that we call games have in common with each other.
It's also interesting that in Rosewater's sense, many casino games and other gambling games aren't games because you also can't meaningfully affect their outcome. (I don't think it's at all unreasonable to say that these aren't fun in the same way or for the same reason as games that give you agency...)
> many casino games and other gambling games aren't games because you also can't meaningfully affect their outcome
I've never really thought about it, but it is definitely why I hate slot machines, in particular.
The only exception to that is the first time I was in Vegas with my wife, when I was there for a conference and she tagged along to gamble. On our last (5th?) day there, she was incredulous that I hadn't gambled at all and finally I jokingly said "ok fine, here, I'll throw away a quarter if it'll make you happy!" and put it in the nearest slot machine. I won $50.
At least with Candyland you can stack the deck to not drag out too long. Cootie had me looking at youtube videos on how to set dice to end the agony quicker...
I think the term is a zero player game, where the initial configuration of the game determines the outcome. The card game War is another one. They’re good for teaching the mechanics of game playing without requiring the cognitive burden of strategic choice.
I was having a similar argument with some relatives about the game Sorry! the other night. Yes, you get to pick which piece you want to move after drawing a card, but 90% of the game's outcome is determined entirely by chance
Sorry has enough decisions for children to discover that it’s not just luck, though. You certainly can play to lose if you want to, for example. Discovering that there is strategy within what seems mostly luck is actually useful for learners.
Not too long ago some friends of mine asked me to babysit their kids (3 & 5 years old) by playing Candyland for a few minutes. The kids impromptu made up various rules about skipping turns, going in reverse, teleporting, yadda yadda, based on the board artwork around the Candyland track. It was basically playing Calvinball[1] with the Candyland board as a backdrop.
I suspect that most children, after playing it once and realizing it contains 0% game, just go ahead and say to themselves, "no problem here," and fueled by the fabulous aesthetics, fantasize their own personal Candyland game in their own heads.
It’s good for teaching very young kids how games run. Turn-taking, rule-following. Not knowing what the next card will be holds their interest long enough to get them used to those things, at least.
Also: setbacks. I think it’s essential for young players who still have to learn what a game is that they have zero influence on drawing cards that move them backwards, as the disappointments will, over time, be equally shared between all players.
It’s funny because in recent years I’ve heard it pointed out many times how brain dead Candyland is, but oh my god I loved playing it with my cousins growing up.
Tangentially — during the pandemic we’ve started doing family games before bedtime with our 4 and 6 year olds, and memory games have been a huge hit. It’s fun to see the kids go on a hot streak and kick our butts a fair amount of the time.
One minute you're cruising to a win and the next minute you pull the "Plumpy" card and you're back near the start of the board while everyone laughs their ass off.
It seems to be a very uniquely American game - being from the UK, I've never seen a copy in person.
From what I can tell, I'm not missing much - I think my kids would hate it, since they're happily playing Ticket to Ride and Splendor already.
It does make me wonder if there are equivalent "ubiquitous" games in other countries, that are essentially unknown outside of that country - can't think of one for the UK, although I suppose you could find regions where Merrills was universally known and played.
If your kids are playing games like Ticket to Ride then I suspect they’re significantly older than the target audience for Candy Land. Candy Land is intended for kids 3+.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 122 ms ] threadA great deal less: "Oral polio vaccines cause about three cases of vaccine-associated paralytic poliomyelitis per million doses given.[2] This compares with 5,000 cases per million who are paralysed following a polio infection."
I think "three in a million" is well below what most people would consider "safe" in most circumstances.
Especially if you were pressured into doing it, and told it was safe to do only to find it caused something bad for your child is going to cause an immense amount of upset.
I don't agree with the anti-vaxxers, but it seems like some people feel like they're being told what to do without their concerns being taken seriously, and so they just say no. In a lot of other situations, not going along with the group decision just because it's the group decision is praised, but in this situation it's demonized.
The biggest publicized bad outcome of vaccines was determined to be rubbish, and the claimed harmful ingredents weren't harmful in that form and were illiminated; but vaccinating is not without risks and side effects, and it's reasonable to consider the risks vs the risk of the disease. Also, it's worth noting that long term vaccinne effect studies are usually about 1 year, which doesn't seem super long term, if you're concerned about tail risks. Many of the vaccines be delayed, too at increased risk of the disease of course, but with perhaps easier to manage side effects.
It's very much a framing of I could have a small chance of something bad happen vs my community will greatly benefit if we work together.
Unfortunately people will likely just shrug and go 'never gonna happen to me' until it does.
That sort of thing is part of the problem. A change made to appease such people is seen, by them, as confirmation of their beliefs. We are taught to "respect" the opinions of others but we cannot allow that respect to legitimize dangerous beliefs or behaviors. Doing so creates controversy where there shouldn't be, which in turn perpetuates the incorrect beliefs. There is something to be said for not giving ground, for calling out the idiots as idiots.
https://www.cdc.gov/disasters/lightning/victimdata.html
You're also a few orders of magnitude more likely to die from choking on food, yet eating is generally considered safe. At odds these low, I don't think it generally matters whether you did something to precipitate it or not. Whether or not [social] media is hyping and fear mongering a scenario seems to be the foremost factor (see in particular: fear of terrorism.) In the case of fear-of-vaccines, it seems to have much more to do with Oprah than anything else.
I think your chance of being killed by lightning while golfing in summer, in florida, with a pacemaker installed, using metal clubs, during a rainstorm ... then it gets a little more dangerous than weather-death statistics would suggest.
You can split hairs if you like, but I think if you're honest about it you'll find that many activities in your daily routine have greater than three in a million odds of killing you. That really is my point, that the average human tolerance for danger is much higher than a few in a million. People who fear things with odds that low are being irrational.
Shark attacks is actually a great example of media induced hysteria. Even if you swim in the ocean every day and therefore have orders of magnitude more risk, that elevated level of risk is still small. Fear of sharks was largely induced by the sensational horror movie Jaws and is occasionally reinforced by profit-motivated newspapers signal-boosting rare attacks; it's not a rational reaction to the actual level of risk involved. 20% of Australians supporting senseless shark culls seems very comparable to the antivaxxerism. The other 80% have a more appropriate attitude towards risk.
I think I read somewhere that of the fairly wide-reaching trail of the Salk vaccine, 11 people died, and those were all traced back to a contaminated/not-correctly-processed batch from a lab in California, and that didn't temper the public's enthusiasm for the trials one bit.
It's occurred to me that one of the things that makes it so insidious and effective is that it is easy to confuse with more benign common illnesses like flu or cold. If it had the obvious crippling effect of polio or the more grotesque symptoms of Ebola or the kind of disease Camus describes in the plague, I suspect people would be less cavalier about it, which could have changed behavior and limited its spread here in America.
Regarding Candy Land, I always loved the board art. Especially the original one pictured in the article and the version I played in 70/80's. If I wander by Candy Land in a store, I'll always pause to check out the art. I didn't like the later versions I saw. Too busy and saccharine.
My wife had covid, and now nearly 4 months later is still ill. 3 people recently on her online group have been able to get EKGs (not ecg) and all have shown scarring of the heart. What this means for them remains to be seen, as does if this is at all common - this could be chance or we could see more people with longer term issues coming out of this. Gut feel, I'd guess that we might see as many serious long term effects as we see deaths - but there is a long way to go before we can prove or disprove that - I really hope I am wrong.
I hope you are wrong, too. But this is another one of the insidious aspects of this disease that I've read about myself.
I'm sorry to hear your wife is still ill. I wish her a full recovery.
(I know some people have speculated that covid may have a lasting impact too, but nothing I've read suggests it's anything like what polio was. Post-polio syndrome effected somewhere in the neighborhood of 25-50% of polio survivors in the old data, 80+% in more modern data.)
maybe it becomes a condition that promotes encephalitis more easily, as an hypothetical example for illustrative purposes only, making people catatonic for decades. that particular epidemic turned 5 million people into those in-stasis zombies, and just put into wards for the rest of the century as no permanent solution was ever found. the actual epidemic occurred during WWI and was paled in relevance by the 1918 influenza. But without that influenza it would have been the bigger issue on its own.
Its just enough to say "look over there" to focus efforts on repeatable studies for eventual peer review, because people might not be looking over there yet. Its just enough to not be surprised if a brain that isn't getting the same amount of oxygen and also part of an infected nervous system suddenly stops working in the expected way.
It's known to science that influenza mutates every year, and history has shown that it can cause pandemics. Are those not observations that also support this same style of boundless fearmonger hypothesizing? I think the reason you're preoccupied with speculative fear of covid but not influenza has more to do with media coverage than anything else. In the case of covid you're being encouraged to fear the unknown, while in the case of influenza the unknown, while just as unknown, is not currently in vogue.
Influenza can mutate to become even deadlier. That's why we have vaccines and take action to track the disease so that we can keep it under relative control. We approach it with great care because it's deadly.
So why are you afraid of doing the same thing for the coronavirus? It has a lot more unknowns and things we simply do not know about and without a way to treat it, the best approach is one with extreme caution. It's already killed far more people than your average influenza season in less than half the year. It seems like you're attempting to downplay how dangerous this virus is and trying to compare it to the flu.
In response to that, I received a comment suggesting that covid may yet prove to have similar lasting effects. That fear mongering is what I am now responding to. There is no evidence to suggest that scenario is more likely to unfold with covid than any other illness.
And this is precisely the problem which you seem to have missed. There's no evidence to support that with the novel coronavirus because we don't know how it functions nor have there been people recovered long enough to determine what the long term effects actually are. Post-polio syndrome took 15-30 years after infection for the effects to actually be observed, so obviously there can't be any evidence because it's not even been a year since the coronavirus pandemic started. What we have noticed is that there is evidence of damage to the lungs and nervous system even in people that have recovered from the coronavirus with more we simply don't know.
The problem is that you're looking at things which we were only able to determine long after infection and then comparing it to a new virus which we simply cannot have that data yet. It's naive to assume that because there's no data that means it's obviously safe from any long term effects because I imagine people likely made that same assumption about Polio as well because these things tend to have a very long tail.
And my point is that the same can be said of the new flavors of influenza. The variations of influenza which are circulating this year haven't been studied for years because they, like covid-19, are new. They make new vaccines for influenza twice a year because influenza is constantly mutating. We don't know what the long-term effects for any new mutation of influenza are. I don't think that should be taken as a license to fearmonger.
I think a highly iterative process of understanding the effects of COVID are an interesting thing to learn and it might also help people and lead to a breakthrough if others are inspired to entertain the hypothesis.
your entire argument is based on either not noticing that, not being aware of that, or desperate to talk about why visually crippled people was a bigger problem even though zero resources need to be spent on that today.
Comparable to polio? Put some real numbers to it, otherwise you're just pulling shit out of your ass. Post-polio syndrome effected 25-80% of survivors. The handful of anecdotes of people having trouble after surviving covid-19 are a far cry from that.
Fear of the unknown is a problem in itself, but that has vanishingly little to do with concerns about SARS2.
I never thought I'd see another situation where the public would be so willing to volunteer for medical experiments, but we're pretty close now.
> honestly makes the coronavirus look like child’s play.
What's interesting is that the polio virus was "child's play", literally. Part of why I think so much fear loomed over it was how devastating it could be to children and how often children would come down with it. Right now child cases of covid19 are pretty low, and it's affecting mainly adults.
https://books.google.ch/books?id=jdBEAgAAQBAJ&pg=PA122&lpg=P...
I found a variation that makes it tolerable though: pick two cards each turn, then choose one. Adds the tiniest about of strategy, and makes it not 100% luck.
Hopefully useful to anyone else whose kid was gifted this game.
https://magic.wizards.com/en/articles/archive/making-magic/w...
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Family_resemblance
since there might be no particular thing that all things that we call games have in common with each other.
It's also interesting that in Rosewater's sense, many casino games and other gambling games aren't games because you also can't meaningfully affect their outcome. (I don't think it's at all unreasonable to say that these aren't fun in the same way or for the same reason as games that give you agency...)
I've never really thought about it, but it is definitely why I hate slot machines, in particular.
The only exception to that is the first time I was in Vegas with my wife, when I was there for a conference and she tagged along to gamble. On our last (5th?) day there, she was incredulous that I hadn't gambled at all and finally I jokingly said "ok fine, here, I'll throw away a quarter if it'll make you happy!" and put it in the nearest slot machine. I won $50.
I played it growing up with a friend's family. It's awesome. It's a race game similar to Sorry!, but with some key differences:
- You play in teams, which adds a whole new dynamic.
- You maintain a hand of cards (people play differently, usually 5-7).
- You cannot jump your own piece (and you must fit your pieces into your "base" perfectly).
As a result, there are multiple layers of strategy, and the team dynamic makes the entire game more social and fun.
I suspect that most children, after playing it once and realizing it contains 0% game, just go ahead and say to themselves, "no problem here," and fueled by the fabulous aesthetics, fantasize their own personal Candyland game in their own heads.
[1]https://calvinandhobbes.fandom.com/wiki/Calvinball
Chutes and ladders. My three year old asking why he had to fall down the chute again since he already did. New rule: chutes are one time only.
My son then ran into a problem: remembering which chutes have been exhausted. I let him put stickers on them.
Next time we play he will run into a new problem: all the stickers.
Tangentially — during the pandemic we’ve started doing family games before bedtime with our 4 and 6 year olds, and memory games have been a huge hit. It’s fun to see the kids go on a hot streak and kick our butts a fair amount of the time.
One minute you're cruising to a win and the next minute you pull the "Plumpy" card and you're back near the start of the board while everyone laughs their ass off.
Such is life sometimes
From what I can tell, I'm not missing much - I think my kids would hate it, since they're happily playing Ticket to Ride and Splendor already.
It does make me wonder if there are equivalent "ubiquitous" games in other countries, that are essentially unknown outside of that country - can't think of one for the UK, although I suppose you could find regions where Merrills was universally known and played.
Or maybe, you know, it's about candy.