Games

Now a days, if you ask any children, teenagers, and even young adults about what they prefer between videogames and board games, about ninety-two percent will answer videogames without hesitation. I definitively belong to the majority of teenagers who will prefer a videogame over a board game. But if you ask me what I really believe is best option for your children, Ill have no other choice but to answer board games. It seems that very quickly board games are becoming a thing of the past. More and more parents are choosing to purchase video games for their children instead of board games.

Even the board games industries are trying to add some technological features to their games, hoping that it can make clients more interested in the product. What most of the parents don’t know, is the damage they are doing to their kids by buying them videogames. The consequences for using videogames are many, and even though they have some benefits of their own, for example they can help you focus by working with the left side of the brain (in case you are right handed), or with the right side if you are left handed. But even though, they are not worth the damage.

And even if you think it is worth it, board games also provide you that benefit, without collateral damage. Another reason why you shouldn’t buy videogames to your children is because you are enforcing them to isolate from the rest of the society. Do you think staying home playing video games instead of exercising or spending healthy time with friends and family is good for your children? It is NOT good; it is only making them live in an inexistent world, where they look just the way they want. A world full of violence, an inappropriate stuff; because a fact is that 60% of middle school boys have at least one Mature-rated game.

And actually I believe most of the parents know that video games are not good, but they still prefer to use the easy way to keep they’re children silent and entertained at the same time. Don’t you think this is enough proof? Well now I? ll tell you why board games are the perfect alternative. They make your children THINK; do things the hard way by themselves. Maybe they are not going to be as quiet as they were with video games, but it is just because they are not isolating themselves anymore, the board game is going to force them to communicate with other people; make them more sociable.

Without mentioning that it is cheaper and easier to move to other places. So now think twice before you buy a new Wii, or a new Nintendo for your 9-year-old boy. Think of the long-term consequences, instead of what is easier for you. Is it worth to make a violent boy who learns from what he sees just because you were too lazy? It is not, remember parents are supposed to be the responsible adults who make the right decision to raise their children, not the ones that will buy their children anything just so they don’t bother you anymore.

“King of the Bingo game” by Ralph Ellison is about a man, in desperate need of money, cheating at a bingo game.  More importantly, the story revolves around a desperate man seeking sanity and solution in a world he cannot control.  This desperate and futile search for answers is what ultimately leads him to his demise.

The backdrop of the story is during World War II.  This time was particularly chaotic as the war is pulling on the economic resources of everyone.  It is more chaotic for the Bingo King as his wife is sick and he needs money for her care.  He cannot work in the factories, as he has no birth certificate.  The last chance he has is a Bingo game being held in a movie theater.  This is the place where his life will end.  This is the place where the contradictions of freedom and slavery, wealth and poverty, Sanity and madness will all meet.

A big factor of this story in the race of the main character.  He is a black man living from the south.  This is the 1940’s; hence slavery has been abolished for some time.  Yet, The Bingo King is still a slave to something else.  He has an inability to make money, yet is in desperate need of it.  He cannot work in the factories; hence he is “useless” to society.  There is a promise of money from a game; hence he places all his hopes into it.  The slavery in this story is slavery to capitalism.  There is this illusion that one can make it rich on one’s own merits.  Yet, as Bingo King himself say’s in reference to the Wheel, “This is God”.

This is the contradiction to the standard idea of equal rights and freedom that America is commonly personified.  The idea that all men are created equal and are free to pursue life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.  This is all dashed apart by the wheel, which flippantly controls the ebb and flow of life and fortune.

The Bingo King, upon realizing this, realizes that his only hope for sanity and fortune is through this wheel, which he now believes controls all things.  An idea like freedom or equality seems laughable in the face of this machine, which deals out fortune or loss on a whim.  Upon seeing this, the Bingo King realizes that only through the constant spinning of the wheel will his life have any meaning.  This is the failure of sanity, which leads him to his death.

In a way, the journey that the Bingo king undertakes is parallel to that of the Faustus in Christopher Marlowe’s classic play.  Faustus is a noble and proud man of science.  One notable characteristic about Faust is that he has a deep thirst for knowledge and understanding.  This is a noble and proud endeavor, not one that would be considered wrong or sick by any standards.  The problem comes with the methods that he uses to gain that knowledge.  In his thirst, he signs his soul over to the demon Mephistopheles so that he may be granted powers not meant for mortal man.  Over the course of the story, Faustus takes a journey that leads him into arrogance and madness.  The story comes to an end with a vision of Faustus being dragged kicking and screaming into hellfire.

There is a definite Faustian theme that prevails throughout “King of the Bingo Game”.  Like Faust, the Bingo King starts on this journey for a noble endeavor.  He wishes for the means to take care of his wife Laura.  His motives are pure and honorable, and he seeks no more than the money needed to take care of his sick wife.  As he reaches the bingo wheel, he sees the power that it holds over his own life.  He sees that life is simply a matter of fate, controlled by chance and whim of luck.  The Bingo King sees this “whim of luck” as God.  So by his reasoning, if he controls the wheel, he becomes God.  It is then that he becomes mad with a sense of false power.

We see this from his thoughts he has concerning the crowd in the theater.  As they heckle and jeer him from his resistance to leave the stage, the Bingo King becomes more and more inwardly hostile towards them:

They had been playing the bingo game day in and night out for years, trying to win rent money or hamburger change.  But not one of those wise guys had discovered this wonderful thing….

Now he faced the raging crowd with defiance… He was running the show, by God!  They had to react to him, for he was their luck.  This is me, he thought.  Let the bastards yell.

Ralph Ellison, King of the Bingo Game

He looks at the crowd and he sees them as fools.  He does this because he thinks that he has found the answer.  This is far from the truth, as he has simply gone mad.  Like Faust, he believes that he is in possession of all the answers.  This is far from the truth.  He sees the glamour of the Bingo wheel as the power over the universe.  Others see it as just an opportunity for fun and a little money.

These are the two separate worlds that the wheel inhabits.  There is the world of reality, where the wheel is just a game.  Then there is the world that the Bingo King sees from his point of view.  The world where he can become a god from winning this game and controlling this wheel.  This is a world he came to out of desperation and madness, struggling to get money and a job and not being able to find a place within the world of the story.

This brings up the theme of Alienation.  The Bingo King is living in a world that has no place for him.  He has no birth certificate.  Hence, he does not exist.  And seeing the fact that he does not exist, the world has no use for him anywhere.  He cannot gain work in a factory for this reason or gain work anywhere else.  To the world, he is obsolete.  For that reason, other people tend to ignore him.

Examples of this are the people in the theater who do not even acknowledge that he exists until the Bingo Game.  One woman is eating peanuts right in front of him.  He recalls his time in his hometown where he could simply ask someone for a few peanuts and they would gladly give it to him.  He realizes that the situation is different here.  This is the big city.  No one cares if he exists or not.  This is the big city.  If he asks the woman for peanuts in this theater, she’ll ignore him, or tell him to get his own bag.

This Alienation is not due to the color of his skin.  It is not because his descendents were of an “inferior race” or because of any preconceived stereotypes about his people.  This alienation comes simply from the world he is living in now.  Everyone is separate from each other.  Everyone in the theater is separate.  No one knows each other or has any real concern for each other.  Their only concern is themselves and their own lives.  All that is needed is to sate their own hungers or wants or needs.  There is never a concern for their fellow man or giving to others simply out of .  All is meant for one’s self.

The joke of the Jackpot, however, is how small the jackpot really is.  The Jackpot of 36.90, even for the forties, is a small amount.  The Bingo king really has no hope of saving his wife through this game, nor does he have any hope of getting out of the poverty that he is currently suffering.  Yet the game is giving him this false hope that it is possible.  This is once again going to the theme of desperation that is cast over him through his alienation.  Bingo King has become so desperate, that he thinks he sees fortune where there is none.

This is the overarching theme of the story.  That society alienates itself from others an as a result, the people of that society sees little hope.  In seeing little hope, they give their lives for a cause that may not seem entirely valiant.  Sadly, in the end, this is the fate of the Bingo King.

Bibliography

Marlowe, Christopher. The Tragic History of Doctor Faustus. Oxford, England:

Oxford University Press, 1998.

Ellison, Ralph. “King of the Bingo Game.” The Norton Anthology of Short Fiction.

By Richard Bausch. New York: Norton, W. W. & Company, Inc., 2005.

The essay is about the game of baseball. It covers basic rules and terms applied in baseball. Each paragraph of the paper describes a particular issue of a game such a field structure, the process of the game itself, the role of each team-player, and the general goal of the game.

The essay is structured in such a way that gives a comprehensive and consequent picture of what is baseball about.

This work is a definition essay on a team game baseball. Americans had played bat-and-ball games for decades when, in 1845, Alexander Cartwright of New York devised the rules that created modern baseball. Cartwright’s game quickly became popular with young clerks and urban craftsmen. By 1860, baseball had spread throughout the Northeast, and by 1870 to the rest of the nation. Now, baseball is a game made up of two teams of nine players each on a baseball field.

There are four bases – points which must be touched by a runner in order to score a run. Numbered counter-clockwise, first, second and third bases are cushions, sometimes informally referred to as bags, shaped as 15 in (38 cm) squares which are raised a short distance above the ground; together with home plate, the fourth “base”, they form a square with sides of 90 ft (27.4 m) called the diamond. Home base (plate) is a pentagonal rubber slab known as simply home. The playing field is divided into three main sections:

• The infield, containing the four bases, is for general defensive purposes bounded by the foul lines and within the grass line.
• The outfield is the grassed area beyond the infield grass line between the foul lines, and bounded by a wall or fence.
• Foul territory is the entire area outside the foul lines.

The game is played in nine innings in which each team gets one turn to bat and try to score runs while the other pitches and defends in the field. An inning is broken up into two halves in which the away team bats in the top (first) half, and the home team bats in the bottom (second) half.

In baseball, the defense always has the ball — a fact that differentiates it from most other team sports. The teams switch every time the defending team gets three players of the batting team out.

The winner is the team with the most runs after nine innings. If the home team is ahead after the top of the ninth, play does not continue into the bottom half. In the case of a tie, additional innings are played until one team comes out ahead at the end of an inning. If the home team takes the lead anytime during the bottom of the ninth or of any inning thereafter, play stops and the home team is declared the winner.

The basic contest is always between the pitcher for the fielding team, and a batter. The pitcher throws — pitches —the ball towards home plate, where the catcher for the fielding team waits (in a crouched stance) to receive it. Behind the catcher stands the home plate umpire.

The batter stands in one of the batter’s boxes and tries to hit the ball with a bat. The pitcher must keep one foot in contact with the top or front of the pitcher’s rubber — a 24″ x 6″ (~ 61 cm x 15 cm) plate located atop the pitcher’s mound — during the entire pitch, so he can only take one step backward and one forward in delivering the ball.

The catcher’s job is to receive any pitches that the batter does not hit and to ‘call’ the game by a series of hand movements that signal to the pitcher what pitch to throw and where. If the pitcher disagrees with the call, he will ‘shake off’ the catcher by shaking his head; he accepts the sign by nodding. Each team has a different set of signals, though the number 1 is almost universal as a fast ball.

The catcher’s role becomes more crucial depending on how the game is going, and how the pitcher responds to a given situation. Each pitch begins a new play, which might consist of nothing more than the pitch itself.

Each half-inning, the goal of the defending team is to get three members of the other team out. A player who is out must leave the field and wait for his next turn at bat. There are many ways to get batters and baserunners out; some of the most common are catching a batted ball in the air, tag outs, force outs, and strikeouts.

After the fielding team has put out three players from the opposing team, that half of the inning is over and the team in the field and the team at bat switch places; there is no upper limit to the number that may bat in rotation before three outs are recorded. Going through the entire order in an inning is referred to as “batting around”. It is indicative of a high scoring inning. A complete inning consists of each opposing side having a turn (three outs) on offense.

The goal of the team at bat is to score more runs than the opposition; a player may do so only by batting, then becoming a base runner, touching all the bases in order (via one or more plays), and finally touching home plate. To that end, the goal of each batter is to enable baserunners to score or to become a baserunner himself.

The batter attempts to hit the ball into fair territory — between the baselines — in such a way that the defending players cannot get them or the baserunners out. In general, the pitcher attempts to prevent this by pitching the ball in such a way that the batter cannot hit it cleanly or, ideally, at all.

A baserunner who successfully touches home plate after touching all previous bases in order scores a run. In an enclosed field, a fair ball hit over the fence on the fly is normally an automatic home run, which entitles the batter and all runners to touch all the bases and score. A home run hit with all bases occupied (‘bases loaded’) is called a grand slam.

References

1. “Baseball” Available from http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Baseball Accessed 25 April 2007.
2. “Baseball rulles” Available from www.ncaa.org/library/rules/2003/baseball_rules.pdf Accessed 25 April 2007.