Crap, I shouldn't have caught that...

I love to bowl. Of course, as everyone knows, the lanes at the HUB here are crooked beyond belief and are about as short as a Bonzai tree, so a few weeks ago, I went bowling elsewhere.  My friend asked me if I was good at bowling and I said, “Yeah, fairly!” and he replied, “I suck. I usually bowl about a hundred.” Rather affronted, I replied that my average was around eighty and that I considered that to be an excellent score. This of course elicited a peal of chuckles, but luckily, when I got to the lanes, I was pleased to find that I had inexplicably become some sort of sporadic bowling savant. The first time I got a strike, something curious came over my body… a sort of incontrollable movement.  It seemed that my response to getting a strike in bowling was to punch the air. I had never done anything like that in my entire life. Yes, I certainly squeal giddily or do some sort of hideous dance, but never had my body felt so triumphant that it actually controlled my movement decision. I began to think: do I become someone completely different when I play games?

            I was an avid soccer player until college (where I realized that since I hadn’t been playing since I was a fetus, I had no chance of getting on a team), and had may experiences on my high school team similar to my bowling experience. Sadly, one of my soccer experiences was not at all insignificant. In an important soccer game, I was playing sweeper. An adversary shot at the top left corner of the goal, and, wanting to be the hero, I dove towards it in order to head it out of the way. Naturally, my body decided that instead of jumping, I would outstretch my hands. I caught the ball. In the penalty box. With a tied score.  Certainly normal me would have realized that this wasn’t at all a logical course of action. So could it be, then, that in physical sports, my body goes haywire?

            So, in board games, do I also change?  Usually I have a problem with putting myself into the character’s shoes. When I play Candyland, I simply can’t picture myself as a small, gingerbread-esque child, traipsing around lollipops and avoiding the definite child molester Lord Licorice. When I play Magic, I don’t see myself as a planeswalker roaming my lands and somehow acquiring vicious creatures. For some reasons though, as a soccer player, a volleyball player, or apparently a bowler, my mind goes blank and concentrates on only the game; I become completely engrossed. It seems then, that in most games in which the point is to role play, I fail miserably. I’m sure that this is for the best, seeing as I’m positive that I wouldn’t want my body to spasm during a game of Jenga or Mouse Trap. Disaster galore.