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Letter of Complaint: Cards Against Humanity
"Cards Against Humanity" is a pun, of sorts, on "crimes against humanity" — which isn't really funny. Only if yous got a half-dozen people to vote on it, they'd probably say it was. Individual taste becomes awful in groups, and nothing demonstrates this phenomenon better than Cards Against Humanity, a political party game for horrible people. That's not even my opinion; it says so right on the box: "A political party game for horrible people." The website elaborates: "Dissimilar most of the party games yous've played earlier, Cards Confronting Humanity is every bit despicable and bad-mannered as you and your friends."
It's a seductive pitch, inviting the reader to bring together a conspiracy at once self-deprecating and proud. Who doesn't recollect of themselves and their friends as secret degenerates? No one — and therein lies the problem. Like America'due south well-nigh successful brands, Cards Confronting Humanity positions itself against the masses, when in fact it is mass sense of taste distilled. It is the product of a culture in which transgressing social norms has become an agreed-on social norm.
Cards Against Humanity plays in the same way as Apples to Apples, a game for five-yr-olds, and it promises the same idiotic freedom that small children enjoy. The whole architecture of the game is designed to provide the thrill of transgression with none of the responsibleness — to let players experience horrible, if you will, without feeling bad. There are ii sets of cards: black cards with questions or backup-the-bare statements, and white cards with noun phrases that fill those blanks and answer those questions. At the start of each round, 1 histrion, chosen the "card czar," deals a black card from the deck. The other players choose white cards from their hands to reply it. The card czar then chooses the funniest answer and awards a signal to the person who played it.
For case, the blackness carte "Instead of coal, Santa now gives the bad children [blank]" might pair with the white card "a saucepan of fish heads." Or, "While the U.s. raced the Soviets to the moon, the Mexican government funneled millions of pesos into research on [blank]" and "black people." Or "What'due south there a ton of in heaven?" "AIDS." For a sense of the game's replay value, scramble these combinations so that Santa gives children AIDS and heaven is filled with fish heads.
These randomly generated jokes are outrageous — and in the case of cards like "the profoundly handicapped" or "this yr's mass shooting," even taboo. Just they are also rubber. Because the premise of the game is that you lot play the cards you're dealt, players become points for creating shocking combinations but don't have to take responsibility for them. The genius of Cards Against Humanity, as a political party game, is that it encourages intimacy by assuasive players to violate norms together without worrying about offending one another.
That may exist considering Cards Confronting Humanity isn't actually transgressive at all. Information technology is a game of naughty giggling for people who call back the phrase "black people" is inherently funny. That demographic includes nervous parents, people who describe themselves as "politically incorrect," the pathologically sarcastic, accidental racists — in a word, everybody. Cards Confronting Humanity recasts popular prejudices and gross-out humor as acts of rebellion for small-scale groups, imparting the thrill of conspiracy to values most people hold in common. (At least among the straight, the able-bodied and especially the white. The game implicitly assumes that no one playing volition actually have AIDS or be profoundly handicapped, and then that its gags remain only theoretically offensive.)
This premise is perfect for a lodge in which real, enforced taboos still exist only are outnumbered by the expanding category of utterly safe rebellions for which we congratulate ourselves daily. We pretend to be scandalized by the phrase "coat-hanger ballgame," but in the stop it is a punch line in a political party game. One time you meet through this hypocrisy, it becomes incommunicable to relish Cards Against Humanity again. The frisson evaporates, and the game becomes more like church: a profoundly alienating activity where the suspicion that everyone is faking information technology vies with the fear that everyone is more than into it than you.
The worry that objecting to Cards Against Humanity might brand you a jerk deepens with the knowledge that the people who made information technology are incontrovertibly good — or at least similar to deed that way while simultaneously extending the brand. They have donated hundreds of thousands of dollars to charity. They bought an isle in Lake St. George in Maine, named it Hawaii two and gave away 250,000 licenses to utilize it recreationally. Although boxed versions now retail for $25 to $40, the game began as a free download that people could print at abode. Cards Against Humanity proves that something crass and saddening tin emerge from a sense of decency and fun.
Since I start encountered the game five years ago, it has go a mainstay in the households of young urban professionals. Because information technology is an icebreaker, the people trying to get me to play it are invariably friends of friends — the class of person that commands the nearly deference in social situations. This puts the Cards Confronting Humanity objector in a hard position. Because what'south even more than awful than bloodless popular rebellion? Refusing to play a party game. The same qualities that brand Cards Against Humanity boring and unfunny also make it a reliable oversupply-pleaser. People love it. It gets them laughing and talking over each other, which is something every party needs. But a monster would sit down on the couch and flip through back issues of Granta while anybody else selects a card czar, an office the game awards to "the person who nearly recently pooped."
Merely typing that makes me angry. But other people seem to love it. The ones who have played before cannot conceal their anticipation every bit the host digs out the cards. They bite their lips, waiting gleefully to break the shackles of convention by albeit that they accept pooped.
The awful matter is that information technology works. The reliability of Cards Against Humanity as an activity most people will enjoy only makes it more depressing to those of us immune to its charms. Information technology is, in the end, a party game for horrible people. Just who else is there to political party with?
Source: https://www.nytimes.com/2016/10/07/magazine/letter-of-complaint-cards-against-humanity.html
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