Outside the box
Several years ago we were given a very nice Monopoly set by a friend. The kids love to play with the pieces of this set. Most particularly they like to play with the money from the set and scatter the remaining pieces liberally about the room. So I was surprised this morning when I discovered Link, Gleek, and Patches had set up Monopoly and appeared to be playing an actual game. Within a minute I figured out that while they were definitely playing a game, it wasn’t exactly Monopoly. Playing Monopoly doesn’t require a chess set and a stuffed Bowser. I watched for a few minutes and realized that they were playing a game that was much more akin to Mario Party than it was to Monopoly.
It pleases me that my children think outside the box and explore the full creative potential of game pieces. The games I most remember from my own childhood are not games that were played by the stated rules. Instead I fondly remember rows of toy monsters on a chessboard throwing Popsicle stick missiles at each other. Last monster standing wins. The games we made ourselves from pieces on hand were far more satisfying than games played according to rules created by others.
I still do this in my current life. Most of my publication plans are not standard. The business plan for Schlock Mercenary is not standard. Instead both are created from the pieces we had available to us. My parenting, housekeeping, and decorating styles reflect this as well. I collect pieces and recombine them in the ways that are most useful to me. I can imagine what it would be like to do things the way that others do them. I have a good imagination. I have no desire to live that way. 90% of what I do still fits into the box because the standard way of doing things is often useful, but there always seems to be a bit slopping over the edges of the box and into new territory.
Outside the box is wonderful, unless we’re talking about Monopoly pieces that have been lying all over the house for a week.