Bring Back Playing Cards
Photo by FatimaAmd, CC BY-SA 4.0
One of the defining themes of the 2020s has been the disconnect that people of all ages feel from one another. Older adults are suffering through a loneliness epidemic, compounded by a slow return to social activities from the pandemic and inadequate home health care. Younger adults are stymied by a general malaise mainly caused by social media. Throughout the country, people are yearning for connections to one another, both shallow acquaintances and deep friendships.
The solutions offered for these problems are vast. One set of lawmakers and pundits has embraced a plan to. Others have focused on publicly-funded healthcare or a universal basic income as solutions to the malaise of the 21st century. The hope is that people who have their basic needs met will have more time to socialize and make connections outside of the home.
One potential solution is not as drastic as reshaping our economy or banning billion-dollar products. It may be as simple as dropping by the local corner store and picking up a set of basic playing cards.
Playing cards were a staple of American society for centuries. They were used frequently throughout the colonial period and were one of the items affected by the hated Stamp Act of 1765. As paper production became cheaper, cards made it into more and more hands throughout the country. Card games were a great leveler: cheap, easy to play, and pictorial so they appealed to the illiterate. Bridge clubs were so popular that their proceedings were profiled in local newspapers.
But the ubiquitous nature of playing cards decreased in the late 20th century. In Bowling Alone, Robert Putnam includes a section about playing cards as an indication of deep social connections. He notes that in 1940, 87% of all American households had a set of playing cards. The rate of regular card players plunged by more than half between the 1970s and the late 1990s. It was steadily replaced by radio and television, which kept the sources of entertainment for American families inside.
Playing cards offer a potential antidote to our current feelings of alienation and loneliness. Physical cards bring people together in the same location, often for an extended period of time. Unlike some board games and tabletop games, they are simple enough to facilitate extended conversation during play. Furthermore, playing cards are not siloed into one exclusionary subculture or another. One does not need to have read a blog or seen the other 15 movies in the series to play poker or bridge with a group of their friends.
More card games will not solve our social problems on their own. They may not be able to compete with the established dopamine sources of social media and streaming television. However, more card games in person might bring people together, stimulate new careers, and forge new bonds. These bonds have a chance of reducing the loneliness and depression that seems to have affected so many people in this new decade.
While I know it’s never gonna happen, I agree with your premise here. My grandparents had a running card game with friends weekly for decades and it was a great thing for all involved.
That having been said, I do think a lot of younger people fulfill this need for community through online gaming and Twitch. I agree it’s much less inclusive, but it does seem to provide much the same social role as cards used to.Report
But you have to account for the uptick in violent incidents due to your opponent getting gin after one draw when you had just been dealt a hand with half a dozen face cards and no melds.Report
I mean, sure, standard card games have declined in popularity in modern times. But, I have to ask, have you heard of this little thing called Magic the Gathering? And that’s just one example. Trust me, our modern era has no paucity of card games.Report
I don’t know the answer to this, but is the poker boom still going on? My hunch is that some of it was propelled by the opportunity to legally gamble, so I’d guess that sports betting has eaten away at it. But it was huge for at least a decade.Report
An interesting question. I don’t know if it is. I’d assume it is since it’s so congenial to the internet and to international enjoyment.Report
Magic: The Gathering is all well and good but let’s say you want to play a game… how much does it cost? Starter set gives you two decks and is… about $20. Not too bad, I guess. Let’s say you want to play at your local comic book shoppe. Oh, the guy in the corner just curbstomped you and your deck in three turns. Three turns? That’s BS.
Better buy some boosters! Okay. Oooh! Annointed Procession! Now I just have to build a token deck! Better buy some boosters!
You can get two decks of Bicycle playing cards and a (used) copy of _Bicycle Official Rules of Card Games: Over 250 Card Games_ for less than the price of the aforementioned Magic starter kit.Report
True, a good point. But card game are also, like a lot of the old pre-Bowling Alone activities, boring as spit if you have better alternatives which is, of course, why Bowling Alone happened in the first case.Report
Eh, I don’t think that a card game like Hearts or Spades would make for a particularly boring evening. The problem is getting 3 people who are fun to play with and sitting down with them for an evening.
That’s the hard part, these days.Report
Sure, but that’s the case with everything.Report
Yeah, but an awesome boardgame (I mean a *FRIGGIN* AWESOME one) is, in my experience, not going to be one that I will be able to sit down and play immediately with someone who, up to that point, was familiar with Monopoly and had heard of Risk but thought it sounded kind of complicated.
I’m confident that I could get them into one of those European Worker Placement games if I had a couple of hours but I couldn’t make them competent at it.
Hearts? Even if the only card game they knew was Uno, I could get them to competency (defined as not-necessarily-last-place) after an hour. Sure, they couldn’t play with sharks… but they could play with cousin Royce and Davey and Catfish and not come in last place.Report
Absolutely but, look, if you have a person you jive with then you could have fun playing group solitaire or pog or pick up sticks. You’d just have more fun playing some game intrinsically more enjoyable.
What, I feel, Bowling Alone tiptoes around is that we have reached a level of social freedom and entertainment abundance such that people are free to choose to do things they genuinely personally like instead of things that they say “ehh, it’s better than sitting in my room doing nothing”. LIkewise people now have a degree of personal freedom sufficient that they can choose to hang out with people they say “I genuinely like hanging out with this person” rather than people who they say “Ehh they’re better then solitude.” or “Ehh I’ll get peer pressured or punished by my community if I don’t endure this person.”
For most people this is a huge net win in utility and happiness but for a certain subset of awkward people this means that no one is being forced to hang out with/date/marry them and they’re sitting around alone and unhappy/angry.
Bringing about a greater use of mediocre but readily accessible card game isn’t the challenge. Getting people to interact with people they, given their druthers, wouldn’t prefer to bother interacting with outside of work is the challenge.Report
The entertainment abundance is awesome.
I just beat Diablo IV but I drank my morning caffeine while playing Lords of Waterdeep and I just now saw that the Stone Age boardgame is coming to Steam soon!
But it’s nicer to play with friends than alone.
But sometimes you can’t get 3 other people to play Stone Age.
You know how Chili’s and Applebee’s gets called something like “Least Objectionable Option”? Like, I want to go to Rasta Pasta, Maribou wants to go to Blue Star, Paul wants to go to Mimi’s Cafe, and the kiddos want to go to McDonald’s? Well, everybody isn’t opposed to Chili’s. It’s not great. But you know what? There’s something on the menu that you’ll like whether it be the chicken caesar salad, the fajitas, or the good old fashioned burger and fries.
Hearts is like Chili’s.
But, and here’s the point, Chili’s DOESN’T SUCK. It’s pretty good! It’s just not, you know, Rasta Pasta.Report
Spades or Rummy 500 and a cooler of beer are where it’s at.Report
I think what you’re maybe missing is games as not an end in and of themselves but a bit of grease for socializing.
I have two regular game groups — one is is made up of software developers (where I’m the oldest participant) and mostly involves playing medium-to-hard-complexity strategy games and the other is several couples around retirement age (where I’m the youngest participant) and mostly involves playing card games and dominoes. The first group would quickly become bored playing dominoes except maybe as a quick palate cleanser, and the evening is spent concentrating on what moves to make and kibbitzing or not-so-slyly trying to convince another player that that something you want him to do is also in his own best interest. The latter group includes several people who are not gamers and who hardly care whether they win or lose, and the conversation at the table rarely has anything to do with the cards in our hands or on the table. For this group, even something as simple as Ticket To Ride is more than some of them want to deal with. But a rummy variant like Phase 10 or 5 Crowns is perfect — a lot of luck, a bit of thought just when it’s your turn, a nice supplement to the conversation when topics temporarily run dry. These games are intergenerational, easy to step into or out of, perfect for a diversity of ages, interests, and strategic abilities.Report
That is a good point.Report
Euchre was the card game of choice in Michigan. There was a summer where me and my buddies played it for hours for a couple of months. It was heaven.
I don’t know that I could sit down and play without it being explained to me right now, though.
Cribbage is probably the *PERFECT* two-player game.Report
It sure is, and it can even be a 3 or 4 player game if need be.
My son picked up a few card games in the caddy yard when he was doing that. Now he lives in Wisconsin, where euchre is a minor religion.Report
I played it 3 player once. Hated it. You lose control of your crib.Report
Cribbage is probably the *PERFECT* two-player game.
My father played in the Navy, then taught me the game. He turned me over to my grandfather, who made me play cutthroat before I was nine. In that small Iowa town, cribbage was not a game that was ever taken casually, at least by the men.
Across the street from my grandparents lived a couple about the same age. I never heard them referred to by any names except “the Dutchman” and “the Dutchman’s wife.” As a 13-14 year old my grandmother would send me across the street for dinner because I could eat three helpings of everything and it made the Dutchman’s wife happy to cook for an appetite like that. If Grandpa knew I was going, he would send me early with instructions to “offer to play cribbage with the Dutchman for a penny a point. I’ll cover it if you lose.”Report
It’s an amazing game and I don’t play it anywhere near as much as I’d like to. I used to play it every Saturday with Dman when we went out to breakfast at Denny’s (before I got married).
They should have cribbage on Steam, now that I think about it…Report
They do.
Dang it. And it’s now his crib and I have A2456J.
I hate giving him A2.
Now it’s my crib. 2567JK.
I hate this game.Report
Over many years, I have found different games in different settings that succeed because it’s personal. Cribbage among the old men in Seymour, IA*. The up-and-coming VP playing Doom at my game demo**. My son playing one of the team first-person shooters, forcing the rest of his team to practice and learn tactics***. There’s a difference between personal and sociable.
* The Dutchman wasn’t very good at the personal parts of cribbage. Heck, he sorted his cards. Grandpa Cain would have thumped me if I ever sorted my hand. OTOH, the Dutchman had a cute granddaughter about my age who sometimes stayed with them at the same time I was at my grandparents’. Once after cribbage and dinner she and I were sitting on the porch talking. “This afternoon,” she said, “Grandpa told me, ‘Bill Cain’s grandson is coming over to play cribbage at 4:00. By then, you need to be over there on the porch swing reading something, wearing shorts. When I got there at 3:45 he said, ‘Not those shorts, the shorter ones.'”
** Demos to show management that high-speed data was a serious service. Roped the VP in to try Doom on the setup I’d put together where the players could talk at each other. Man, could she trash talk. I spent the afternoon (far enough away she didn’t hear me) using her as an example, explaining to the other VPs that cable modem service could handle the game and the trash talking once the developers figured out the audio capability was there.
*** He told me once about being at a party and the group he was in was talking about the video games they played when they were younger. He mentioned that he played under the name “Roscoe the Midget.” Someone behind him broke in with, “You were Roscoe the Midget? We hated going up against your team, you did all those weird things and they worked.”Report
Dang it. And it’s now his crib and I have A2456J… I hate giving him A2.
AJ seems the obvious discard to me.Report
Odds are that I’m going to flip a tenner or something in my run. I mean, the odds aren’t *GREAT*, but that’s a 30ish percent chance of something among those six cards, right?Report
The deuce and 6 are a strong possibility. Depends on how tight the game is.Report
Euchre is great when you have a critical mass that know how to play… it’s hard to start-up some newbies. We’ve tried a couple of times at dinner parties to some degree of success, but not resounding success.
Hearts is fun because it’s ‘easier’ and can accommodate more than 4… but not more than 6. It falls apart after six, and honestly is probably best with only 4.
Bridge is fun, but requires a sort of intentional commitment and know-how… but if you have the players lined up, it’s great.
As a general rule, I find that organic card games that just sort of happen by design work really well if you have a larger party… let’s say 8-16 folks. That way 4 can play and rotate in/out. Back to the top, Euchre is best for this because the games are quick… but you really want a 3-4 folks who already know how to play to get it going. If you have to explain it to get the game going, it doesn’t (usually) go as well.
But yes, cards as a social lubricant and foil for conversation… and even a foil for political conversation works really really well and we should definitely ‘bring it back’.Report
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