Why Families Need Board Games, Part III: Isolation, Assimilation, and Resonance

In this article, I continue a bit on the necessity of personal contact in board games, but from a different, somewhat inverse angle: isolation. I'm sure that all people have faced and felt isolation at one point in their lives -- that unmistakable feeling of an invisible barrier having been erected, making the outside world fade away behind a translucent haze with voices muffled and hearts hidden. Sometimes, our ever-increasing fascination with the hyper-reality of computers and audiovisual technology has the odd side-effect of separating us from others, but isolation starts from within us. It isn't the "world" that isolates us as much as it is we who isolate ourselves, and it all starts with a preoccupying thought:

"Do I belong?"

That sense of wanting to belong is integral to humanity. It's a thought that occurs to anyone who moves to a new city, attends a new church, gets a new job, or even runs with a new group of acquaintances. As one struggles to assimilate, one has to fight the feelings of being an outsider. These are diametrically-opposed forces: assimilation and isolation. These are forces that people should recognize, and people should also recognize the factors that affect each force. I believe that the desire to assimilate to God-given as we are commanded to love our God and love our neighbor; in many ways, to assimilate to our neighbor is natural. However, in the face of absorbing technology without balance, isolation is more commonplace, but there are so many more factors to consider, specifically divergent ideologies. Differences of faith (or lack of it) are easy to identify and tend to, regrettably, cloister us, but even in groups of like beliefs there are differences that threaten to divide.

To combat isolation (and to borrow from Star Trek technobabble), we must achieve resonance when two or more parties resonate at the same frequency. When we begin to understand each other's faults, yet reach a mindset in which those faults don't matter, we adapt and accept each other. We start to establish common ground. Common ground doesn't have means we compromise our beliefs or acquiesce; it means that, despite the gulf that divides, ties of friendship and love can bind us.

Have you ever asked a new acquaintance family from whom you sense something negative? Maybe, they were friendly at first but then they started to act strangely... Distant, perhaps. We isolate ourselves, but we must resonate at all costs. It doesn't have to be hard to resonate; if people don't have common faith, common ideologies, or even common ways of driving or ironing clothes, they can at least sit at a table and play board games.