Game Night in the After Times (Jackbox Games)
Anastasia Salter, Contributor
I recently rearranged my gaming library and made room in the closet for all my party games: Unstable Unicorns, Exploding Kittens, Apples to Apples, and many more are all growing dusty for the foreseeable future. The worst are the classroom sets: countless versions of Munchkin and Fluxx, or iterations of similar mechanics across narrative board games, purchases specifically for teaching and loaned out to students across years of courses. Those games were my favorite part of teaching game design—an opportunity to bring students into shared play, and often introduce them to a new hobby, encouraging them to borrow from my collection and think about how they might see digital game design differently after a night of physical play.
Game nights have been a fixture of my life, from Magic: The Gathering nights (and a bonus summer camp) in middle school to a truly terrible D&D campaign group in high school on to the conference game nights and scattered gatherings of the before-times. All of those sessions had things that are forbidden now: giant bowls of shared junk food. Close gathering and elbow bumping at a crowded table. Touching and arguing over cards and pieces, without a hand sanitizer in sight.
In that before, board games offered some respite to me as an academic who writes about electronic literature and digital narratives: there’s usually not the same pressure to publish every insight, though inevitably some game nights wormed their way into my scholarly agenda; and more importantly, there were no screens.
But now, life is screens.
The space vacated by party games on my shelves has been taken over by two-player games, suitable for playing without anyone else entering the house. Patchwork, 7 Wonders Duel, Lost Cities, Robin of Locksley – there’s an impressive range of games for 2, frequently offering scaled down versions of the familiar, recalling but not recapturing the game nights of before times. Our large table is mostly unused, the extra chairs banished to the garage to wait for – I’m not sure what. A vaccine, a downspiral in cases, the mythical “return to normal.”
Game night is back on my calendar, in an unrecognizable, after-times, form. I now have a growing collection of Jackbox Games, a series I didn’t own or play prior to March.
Jackbox Games are descendants of You Don’t Know Jack. In high school, I remember going over to a friend’s house to play one of the original iterations of You Don’t Know Jack. I did terribly, but in my defense, said friend was also a champion of our school trivia team and would eventually make an appearance as a Jeopardy contestant. Looking at release dates and screenshots for a hint of familiarity, I suspect it was You Don't Know Jack Louder! Faster! Funnier! (2000), an offline game we played on a single keyboard. I lost track of the franchise after that, except, occasionally, when I’d mention the original series as an exemplar of the type of gamification I tried to steer my students away from in making games for a purpose.
‘Think beyond trivia when you design’, I’d say repeatedly, looking at question card after question card. But now I have a new appreciation. Jackbox Games are trivia – and trivial. They are the perfect games for an endless era of Zoom. From “Trivia Murder Party” to “Quiplash,” these games include rather than exclude. Their animation style recalls Flash, friendly and vibrant (even when murder is involved.) Eliminated players are given countless opportunities for revenge. And perhaps most importantly, they distract without demanding.
Jackbox Party Pack 6
Playing Jackbox Games on Zoom doesn’t feel like sharing a keyboard in front of a 17” CRT monitor. There’s an elegance to the screen-splitting that builds on our existing habits: we all still stare at our phones, but in order to engage. The Zoom call and cameras are live but with a play screen on the middle, the new Tabletop TV screen for a distant game night. I would have thought this would be the moment I’d rediscover my love of MMOs, or lose hours to a virtual world ala Skyrim, but those pursuits can’t seem to stop the doomscrolling. Perhaps what I need most is what JackBox specializes in – a full takeover of all available screens, yet still conversational, drowning out even our own tendency to rehash the day’s fears with constant questions and cheerful music.
Check out some of the other articles in our “Gaming in the Pandemic” series, like Edmond Chang’s essay on tabletop gaming and community, “Playing Games, Practicing Utopia,” and Roger Whitson’s essay on lost time and everyone’s favorite card game, Slay the Spire.
