Boomers and millennials should wipe the floor with us in gameplay season – and we will never match gen Z’s fine motor skills. But still, we are winners
Generation Z ask a lot about what life was like in the olden days, and a lot of their questions are stupid. Did we have printers before the internet? How did we arrange to meet our friends before mobiles? We say, “Wow, that’s a stupid question”, and they say, “Imagine being so dumb that you have 15 defunct Instagram accounts because you don’t know how to manage your passwords, even though they’re all the same.” A lot of the evidence is in their corner, to be honest. Not saying they are more intelligent, but that generation does seem to have an intelligence better adapted to the world around it.
Then it gets to gameplay season: parlour games, word games, European board games, quiz formats and everything charades-adjacent. Never, if they were not all under one roof, would multiple generations see each other’s concentration-face up close. I was playing Codenames with my brother the other day and realised I haven’t seen him thinking since about 1994. Ruminating, maybe; considering, pondering, calculating but not thinking, until he was trying to guess a plausible connecting word between monkey and skyscraper.
Zoe Williams is a Guardian columnist
