M(ansion) A(partment) S(hack) H(ouse)

A twist on the classic fortune-telling list game.

The original MASH is played by making lists of various aspects/milestones of ones life (marriage, job, home, kids, etc.) in separate categories, picking a number at random then using that number to cross off potential ‘candidates’ one by one until each section has only one option left.  The method we used to decide how many jumps to take until a candidate was crossed off included me drawing a spiral until Sarah said, ‘Stop’ and counting the number of rings.

Original constant: spiral in UR shows 5 marks starting from center to detonate a cross-off every 5 moves. 

In our (truncated) controlled, original version of the game Sarah can look forward to marrying Stephen Hawking, living in a mansion in Ireland and be employed as a CEO. Not too shabby a life, Sarah!

Next we decided to take out the constraints of having all the corresponding potential categories in the same list. We randomized them in a word cloud, used the spiral method to find a number and cross off at random until only 4 remained. This added the possibility that a player could have multiple jobs but nowhere to live (and all the variants therein).

In this version Sarah can look forward to having no job or income but traveling the country living in apartments in California and Kansas with our fellow classmate, Josh Poston.

I very much enjoyed the ‘risk’ involved in the world cloud set up of the game. In the original, making some of the categorical choices unappealing left some risk but the stakes are higher when all these ‘goals’ are not necessarily guaranteed. We ran into a problem when in the second version, which was at times it was difficult to be unbiased when ‘randomly’ crossing off choices. An amendment which included still putting the contenders in a list, but one long continuous and arbitrary one adds the element of organization with the suspense of the intended outcome.

All in all: we are the future.