Weirdness

If you know me you might guess that I'm a bit of a connoisseur of trivia and quiz games.  Yes, my favorite tv show is Jeopardy.  I'm such a nerd.

Anyway, playing a clumsily crafted trivia game about something you really care about is kind of odd.

First one: the other day some friends got me into a game that was basically trivial pursuit (not from that franchise) about Catholicism.  Of course I had fun with my friends, and enjoy being a know-it-all maybe a little too much, but the game had some maddening oddities due to the assumptions and ideologies of the editors, which I might call "80s triumphalism."  I'm not using the word the way you normally hear it, but in a sort of intra-Catholic way, to mean the triumphalism of the Eighties versus all of the preceding millennia of Catholicism, real Catholicism, where people knew what they were doing and did things right, didn't arrive until we came around, that is, the present day - the Eighties (the game was made in 1985).  This is the Catholic culture of my youth.  It was odd in the Eighties; it's even weirder to read such things from that period and mindset twenty years later.  I once read a biography of (of all people) Hilaire Belloc done by an "eighties triumphalist" who clearly tried very hard to be fair to Belloc but also was as emphatically eighties as slap bracelets, BetaMax, and Dino-Riders.  It involves a bizarre sort of cognitive dissonance: the combination of "start from scratch, because the past has nothing to teach us" with the necessity of paying homage to Catholic tradition from the Bible - Old and New Testaments - through the saints, martyrs, popes and Councils down to the present day.  Of which, of course the most important is the Second Vatican, which freed us from oppression by the past.  They got on my bad side to begin with by having a category called "Pre-Vatican II History," perpetrating the pretend Great Divide supposedly formed in the history of the Church by the Council, and made sure they stayed there with questions that made sure that such outdated things as Latin and spiritual bouquets and the like are pigeonholed securely in the "pre-Vatican II" category.  Earth to barbarians - I heard the pope on tv the other day and guess what language he was speaking?  Flagrant grammar errors in their Latin, too, but who would notice since nobody speaks it anymore anyway?

But that was just fine compared to "The Bible Game" Peter and I played for the express purpose of seeing just how silly it was going to be (and we knew it would be bad).  We had no idea.

Comments

[Lindsay]

Despite the "80s triumphalism," you still won.

[Thomas]

1.) I'm a child of the eighties.

2.) You can't say that I'm just bitter because I lost.

3.) I should give credit where it's due and point out that Peter thrashed me in "The Bible Game."

[PeterTerp]

Now, now, Thomas. We both got whupped by "Episcopalian David."
And the only reason that you lost was due to the Calvinist underpinnings of the game which rendered you vulnerable to the arbitrary and capricious "Wrath of God" no less than three times.

[Thomas]

Also, I apologize if I behaved boorishly. I was just trying to be competitive, the way I would for ping-pong or darts or plain old trivial pursuit. But I felt bad about it afterwards because I'm supposed to have that knowledge to serve, not to beat people in games.

[Thomas]

Whoops, that last comment was for Lindsay and Lacy and supposed to come right after my last one, but Peter and I seem to use the computer at the same time.

[Lindsay]

Who said anything about being boorish or bitter? I have another friend who actually gets scary when we play games. I only intended to point out that your post made it sound like you were finding an additional reason to dislike the game besides losing it, which is inaccurate because you didn't lose.

I'm not that much younger than you are; technically, I'm a "child of the 80s," too. I'm sure there are photos of me with My Little Ponies to prove it.

Oh, and just so you don't feel alone, one of my life's ambitions is to be on Jeopardy! I saw it taped live once. That was easily one of the best nights of my life.

[Tommy]

What a coincidence? I was recently thinking about how there is a lot of room for question and answer fun within Catholicism. Then too, I was thinking about what would make for appropriate categories. But I realized that the scope of the subject can be overwhelming. Just stop and think of how much you don't know...but I'd like to hear the questions and answers even if I couldn't manage a high success rate. One category I would put in my version of the game would be Valid / Licit, where scenarios are given in the text of the question, and the contestant has to indicate both, neither, licit but invalid, or illicit yet valid. Could, unfortunately, prove useful when traveling, or as Satan makes his final push. Also, the game would take a long time to pass the review for Imprimatur.