Before the days of Electronic Talking Battleship, and before the fabled era of Crossfire and Domino Rally and those gluttonous, snap-jawed Hippos that I grew up with (but still around the same time that all of those pesky Mice that needed to be Trapped in the most circuitous fashion ever)… there was Mr. Know-It-All. His head was a lightbulb.
When I came across this 1967 Mr. Know-It-All board game on the mega-cheap, I was entranced. Not only do I usually feel like I was born in the wrong planet decade, but these older games have a certain resonance with me, even though I have no childhood experience with them at all. Call it a love of design evolution, a desire for simplicity, or call it reincarnation, but either way, these things come home with me. I’m enchanted by the idea of ‘used to’; how kids used to play, how doors used to be left unlocked, how life used to be a heck of a lot simpler.
The game consists of a set of multiple-choice question cards, all of which have SAT and IQ test-style questions on them. Below these questions are a set of three answers, each one positioned by a hole in the card itself. Once the player figures out their answer, they align their question card on a special cardboard grid that’s covered with a whole bunch of colors. Whichever ‘answer hole’ matches up with a green spot on the grid is the correct answer, and presumably, said player gets gloating rights, fame, and fortune. The set that I acquired is missing the instruction manual, so for all I know, the winner might officially get a swift groin-punch for becoming the dreaded and much-maligned ‘Know-It-All’… never a title that a sensible, social human being would covet.
So, the game mechanics are charming, but how do the questions measure up, 40 years later? While the game box states that it’s designed for ‘ages 7 thru 15′, I’d have a hard time finding an ‘average’ 7-year old who’d be able to complete a complex arithmetic sequence, understand fulcrums, estimate spatial relations and solve riddles about familial relations. This leads me to believe that either we’ve become a whole lot stupider, or just a whole lot lazier. Mr. Know-It-All has become Mr. Know-It-All-If-It-Relates-To-Hannah-Montana (Or High-School-Musical). And yes, you can find quiz games relating to those two subjects in today’s toy aisles, but nothing even close to the original brain-squeeze of Mr. Know-It-All.
Is this because thinking isn’t really regarded as ‘fun’ anymore? As someone who grew up with copies of GAMES Magazine lying around the house, I embraced the sport of thinking far more easily than I grasped superbasket or sportsball games. Of course, this was well before I realized that I’d make more money running around hitting things than by thinking about them – a decision that still haunts me today. Still, I can’t help but think that if my Freshman Year bullies had grown up with a copy of Mr. Know-It-All in the house, I’d have had a few less pieces of fruit ever-so-athletically hurled at my head.
The game itself was prepared by Robert M. Goldenson, a ‘known psychologist’, and ‘T.V. Personality’, back from the days when they still used dots in the word ‘TV’ like it was an abbreviation or something. He later went on to write a million dictionaries about sex, so he was clearly diversifying his output to all ends of the psychological spectrum. Goldenson is quoted as saying that, “Play is the way the child learns
what no one can teach him”, and as a teacher, I should have known to disguise my lessons as games. It’s all so clear now.
Here’s my call to see a resurgence of ’smart’ games like Mr. Know-It-All. And not just ones that are marketed to ‘gifted’ kids via catalogue and specialty shop – I want to see them right alongside those Harry Potter DVD trivia games. If your kid can recite every spell that Hermione ever cast, surely they can figure out a set of tangrams. Seriously.
(And the answers are all B, for those of you keeping track.)
