Frightening Trend Continues to Grow

Wednesday, Jan. 14, 2009
LUDINGTON, MI

Yet another instance of, as the title indicates, a disturbing new trend has been driven home to me: my friends are all becoming huge fans of the card game Munchkin.

"But, Big Bearded Word Machine," you might say, if in fact anyone actually read this blog, "don't you think it's nice that your friends all have a common interest. A game, no less, that they can all gather together and enjoy?"

You'd think so. But you'd be, well, at least a little wrong. I do like having a game to play with my friends. This is true. As one of our previous articles indicates, the staff of the Nullset, myself especially, are huge nerds. We all engage in actual, real, table-top roleplaying. The kind that involves DM shields, polyhedral dice, character sheets, and a repressed acting ability that would get you thrown out of the lower class of dinner theater. If the clientele and staff and management were all deranged hoboes.

Munchkin is a satire of all that. As in, the gags and principles assume at least a passing familiarity with things like "+2 mastercrafted greatsword" and "saving throw". It then makes snarky in-jokes on these tropes, creating things like the "Duck of Many Things" and the "Sneaky Bastard Sword."

You'd think the only people who would laugh at this sort of stuff would wear black t-shirts covered in snarky messages or "Doctor Who" references, have enough grease in their hair to shift a sumo wrestler through a Barbie doll's front door, and smell like a boil in a wooly mammoth's armpit. Covered in old bacon grease.

But you'd be wrong. I have multiple friends who do not have anything to do with the "geeky arts" such as role-playing, who love Munchkin. Male and female. The females especially, tend toward being conventionally, objectively attractive, which begs the question of how on earth they ended up spending any time around the sort of people who seek out Munchkin because it parodies role-playing and they figure it'll be good for a laugh. Boredom, one supposes, or possibly the law of averages.

In fact, out of the people I have taught this game to, only about seven to nine of them would qualify as true, proper geeks (though, mercifully, they all wash regularly and do other things besides pretend to be elven wizards in other people's parents' basements.)

Which brings me to what's probably the most frightening thing I've noticed: the sheer horrifying speed at which this game's popularity has rapidly mushroomed beyond my own social circle, members of which have introduced the game to and taken over the brains of perfectly normal people whom I've never met. A close friend of mine (a huge geek) and his wife (not a geek at all) were introduced to this game by me. So was The Mad Piano Man. These three people all work at the same summer camp, and they report numbers upward of thirty new fans just in the course of one summer. New fans. Not people who played at home. Not geeks who just happened to miss out on Munchkin. Decent people, who presumably shop at mall-stores like Hollister, listen to Top 40 music (like I'd know what that entails) and don't choose their movies based on how many ninjas, zombies, pirates, Vikings, or giant robots are involved.

In addition, my own personal efforts have infected the brains of at least that same number of people. The true score is probably in the low forties. Why, just last night (he said, affecting the manner of a rural character in a 1940s film) I taught this game to four new people. They loved it.

I'm not disturbed that people can get past the typical prejudice against terms like "experience levels" or "dwarf warrior". It allows me to relate to more people on at least a surface level, and I need all the help I can get with that. It's the fact that Munchkin is a horrible game. It makes you:

- Suspect everyone around you,
- Refuse to help your friends in the face of certain death unless they pay you adequately,
- Strive to destroy them for petty infractions,
- Engage in epic-level grudge-holding,

and eventually your merry little band self-destructs in an orgy of mutually assured destruction as you all break out every scorched-earth tactic in the book in order to prevent your friends/new mortal enemies from winning. This last group of new players I taught was doing this halfway through their very first game. For fun.

As Mad Piano and I like to say, the motto of Munchkin is this: "There Can Be Only One, And It's Me!"

Help me. I am slowly destroying the moral fiber of everyone I know, and they are asking me to come back so they can do it again. Regularly.