If you are like me, you have 10 gazillion movies lying around your house. In my case, I literally own hundreds of movies that are sitting around, never watched or only watched once. That is not to say that I do not ever watch movies, but frankly “they” churn out movies faster than I can keep up. Consequently, certain movies tend to get overlooked and never watched as the blockbusters are released and become the “must-have / must-watch” movie of the week. Sadly, that leaves quite a few movies that might as well be coasters rather than anything useful.
In the odd occurrence that I have time to watch a movie and the movie choice is not evident, we have problems. Living in a house with my wife and 3 roommates, it is needless to say that we have different tastes. I tend to favor the action / adventure (I am also a sucker for the “classics” but I don’t want ppl to know. I would hate to lose the man-points). Crystal usually goes for the love / tragedy tear-jerker. She also loves the classic slapstick comedy, National Lampoons Christmas Vacation being her favorite movie of all time. Crystal and I both meet in the middle in that we are horror nuts. Needless to say the choice is very difficult due to the fact that I want to watch Lord of the Rings for the 100th time and that she wants to see Because I Said So or some Lifetime Special (that usually makes me want to stab out my eyes halfway through).
In order to keep the peace, Crystal and I devised a way to determine the movie we want to watch without having to deal w/ the debate of what to do. We leave the decision making process to a game which we call… The Game.. nice huh? Anyway, the rules are simple…
- The Game is all powerful. All decisions are final… there can be no exceptions! (if you violate this rule, you pretty much invalidate the game) On a side note, we have violated this rule before and replayed the game, only to get the same movie choice… the Game knows!
- You chose a set number of movie entries that everyone has. You can enter ANY movie and the rest of the group is subject to having to watch it.
- As just stated, everyone MUST watch the selected movie. This makes it fun to select choices that only makes ppl suffer
- Optional Rule: You much decide a new game for every instance of The Game. This rule is really fun and requires a bit of thought. Eventually, you run out of steam though, but I recommend it.
- Optional Rule: Taunting is allowed so long as the movie is not being played. The selector of the movie can determine whether you can trash talk throughout the viewing (some movies it works, some it does not.
Beyond those rules, you simply have to create / select a game that is able to randomly determine the final result. Currently we have played house miniature golf, all manner of card games, bingo, ring tosses, etc. We ended up enjoying the Game almost as much as the movie. The more creative The Game, the crazier it gets.
As it turns out, this turned out being a very fun way thing to do even though it is rather simple. Also, there is another aspect to the Game. Usually we have to pick about 5 movies each to enter. Depending upon the number of players, you end up w/ around 20 movies on the table, which makes a very broad selection. Usually, you end up watching movies that you would never watch in a million years, but enjoy it just the same.
Pretty cool!