Youthful White Collar Crime
By Christopher Sloce
QuailBellMagazine.com
QuailBellMagazine.com
I was born into capitalism, whether I liked it or not, and thus, into marketing and fads, first recognizing this when Pokemon cards became huge. Only anecdotes can portray the true madness. People were taking cards to school and getting busted for them as if they were bricks of cocaine. There were books pricing the cards: I owned a copy of one of these books and grew convinced I’d never know firsthand what a student loan was. Two older boys ripped me off for a holographic rare card in the Knoxville mall's WB store just because I preferred the cuter ones; I wept into my future step-dad’s ear.
That isn’t to say I only appreciated the cards' monetary value. I enjoyed the games and was beginning to get into role playing games, which always have a complicated mathematical system behind the simplest actions, a fact I totally ignored. I had always drawn things, so all of my drawings began emulating what I loved. I put two and two together. By creating my own RPGs and card games, I would enjoy myself and become filthy rich, at least until 7th grade, when I realized girls existed and that doodling anime characters in my notebook and writing numbers besides their head wasn’t doing too much for me in that department.
My greatest success came in 4th grade with a game called Food Fight. The inspiration came from a thank you card my friend Dalton and I made in 3rd grade thanking a local Pizza Hut for hosting our class. We drew various foods and statted them up. How does one decide what’s more powerful, French fries or pizza? Leave it to a 4th grader to figure it out. How do you create a balanced game as a 4th grader? Because you know which foods are stronger than others. (Vegetables didn’t fare well.)
The game went under after it devolved into a fistfight behind a tire swing where my friend Dalton choked somebody with a gold necklace. I ended up losing recess for three days. We probably told them it was just business. Even grade-school teachers are soft on white-collar crime.
That isn’t to say I only appreciated the cards' monetary value. I enjoyed the games and was beginning to get into role playing games, which always have a complicated mathematical system behind the simplest actions, a fact I totally ignored. I had always drawn things, so all of my drawings began emulating what I loved. I put two and two together. By creating my own RPGs and card games, I would enjoy myself and become filthy rich, at least until 7th grade, when I realized girls existed and that doodling anime characters in my notebook and writing numbers besides their head wasn’t doing too much for me in that department.
My greatest success came in 4th grade with a game called Food Fight. The inspiration came from a thank you card my friend Dalton and I made in 3rd grade thanking a local Pizza Hut for hosting our class. We drew various foods and statted them up. How does one decide what’s more powerful, French fries or pizza? Leave it to a 4th grader to figure it out. How do you create a balanced game as a 4th grader? Because you know which foods are stronger than others. (Vegetables didn’t fare well.)
The game went under after it devolved into a fistfight behind a tire swing where my friend Dalton choked somebody with a gold necklace. I ended up losing recess for three days. We probably told them it was just business. Even grade-school teachers are soft on white-collar crime.
#Reflection #Memories #DIYCollectibleCards #Childhood #Games #Pokemon