Bored Games with Your Cell Phone

All great games have a great genesis story - and this one is the story of the soon to be legendary “Phone Game” - neatly compressed into three acts.

Act I
If necessity is the mother of invention, then boredom is its estranged father. That being said, women have shoes –lots of shoes. Based on personally having seen the closets of a few girls in my lifetime, it is apparent that most women have 20+ pairs of feet. Yizzost (her name has been changed to protect her identity) is one of these 40 legged creatures. So as I reclined in her chair, having been effectively dissuaded from wandering off like my male instincts originally dictated, I quickly grew disinterested in watching her try to organize a closet that she obviously lacked the ability to affect. In situations like these, much like everyone else, I’ve become accustomed to regaling myself by toggling obscure settings on my cellphone. With undefined goals, I began scrolling through the phone book of my cellphone when it become lucid to me that I have a lot of entries for people or organizations that I don’t particularly care for. And thus, I proceeded to go through each entry of my contact book and relay to Yizzost my feelings about the owner of the phone number.

Act II
No cute opening here…just picking up from where I left off at the end of Act I. Over a scenery of watching “The Real World” and observing Yizzost self-amuse between commercials by playing a game on my cell phone (how ironic), I decided to cut through the ennui with another round of my innovative new game, this time with someone else’s phone. With a deft scoop, in contrary to her will, I took possession of Yizzost’s cell phone and began scrolling through her phone book – this time asking her about each and every one of her contacts. Now, Yizzost has many more contacts stored in her cellular-mobile device than I, so the game stretched on longer this time much to my delight. I had the opportunity to question Yizzost concerning the relationships with her contacts and why she felt a particular way about a telephone number’s owner. I think we had reached the “T” entries when she finally exclaimed “I don’t like playing this game! This is the worse game ever!” But we did, after a round of negotiations, complete the game.

Act III
No game is complete without a scoring rubric – whether we’re talking 6 points for a touchdown, 3 points for a 23 foot 9 inch jump shot, or extreme pointage for rolling yahtzee in Yahtzee – there has to be a way of tracking game progress and ultimately determining a winner. Thus, scoring for the phone game is as follows:

+1 point for each contact entry for whom the phone’s owner has fond feelings towards.

+2 points are awarded for having the phone number of a cute guy or girl in the person’s contact list.

+2 points for finding your name, if you are the moderator, in the person’s phone.

-1 point for each contact entry for whom the phone owner has negative feelings towards.

0 points are awarded for feelings of indifference toward a particular entry.

-1 point for each occurrence of a duplicate contact entry for a single person. Many wireless devices nowadays have a phone tree structure which will allow you to record a cellular, home and work number for one individual within one contact entry. I believe this is the most efficient way of organizing one’s phone and thus a penalty should be incurred for not organizing one’s phone in this manner.

-2 points are deducted for having a phone entry in which the owner has no possible idea to whom the number belongs.

And so with this newest evolution to the phone game, the advent of the scoring system, I proceeded to play the phone game with Bwee (an obvious alias). At first pass, Bwee appeared to have the lengthiest contact list I’d encountered thus far in my amateur phone game career. But once we began going through her cohorts it became obvious that her contact list was artificially inflated with numerous carbon-copy entries, hence my decision to deduct points for inefficient phone tree structures. When the game was complete, Bwee concluded the contest with a rather disappointing score of 27. This “27″ is what I like to call the “Net Total Efficiency of One’s Contact List” or NTEoOCL.

As an aside, the most profound moment occurred midgame when Bwee rediscovered an old friend from college that had been tucked away in the darken digital recesses of her phone and decided to give him a ring. And that, ladies and gentlemen, boys and girls, is what the phone game is all about – reuniting players with the people they have forgotten.