Are you ready for your Mystery Date
Don’t be late…
An old friend of mine from grade school just shot me a Facebook message, with a “Do you remember when we used to play this?” link to an old TV ad for the board game “Mystery Date.” Boy, howdy, do I remember. It’s set off a whole line of reminiscences and thoughts and internal rantings about pop culture and early childhood gender indoctrination.
Here’s how Mystery Date worked: Players collected cards representing parts of different outfits, appropriate for different kinds of dates: bowling, skiing, the beach, a formal dance. (“Folk dancing,” “lesbian bar-hopping,” “atheist convention,” and “sex party” were, alas, not among the options.) Once you’d gathered an outfit, you spun a doorknob to a little plastic door… and hoped that the man who appeared at your door was dressed for the same date you were. One of the men on the dial was a “dud,” marked by his scruffy, unkempt appearance. Sort of like the 0 in roulette. (According to Wikipedia, there was also a version with a construction worker as one of the “duds” — gee, that’s not classist at all — and I’ve heard of a version where the “dud” was a nerd in Poindexter glasses, but I never saw that one.)
The game, if you hadn’t already guessed, was marketed to girls. Age 6 to 14.
So.
If you’re a girl, and you’re interested in dating and romance, pretty much what you can do is (a) go shopping, and (b) hope. You can’t, you know, actually do anything to ensure that you get to go on the date you want. Like communicate with the guy you’re going out with, to make sure you’re on the same page. Or — okay, this is a wild idea, but hear me out, it’s so crazy it just might work — ask a guy out yourself, for the activity you’d like to do. No, no, that’s ridiculous. All you can do is hope that the right man shows up at your door, who wants to do the same stuff you do. And in the meantime, shop for clothes.
Like, duh. This game has been analyzed to death by feminist critics — it’s pretty low-hanging fruit — and I don’t know that I have a lot to add to the obviousness mix. But seeing the TV ad is sparking some memories of how that indoctrination played out in my own little brain.
But I also remember years of dealing with dating and romance by spinning the wheel and hoping the right person showed up. I remember years of waiting to be asked. I remember years of saying “Yes” to people I wasn’t really all that interested in, for fear that nobody else would ever ask. And I remember how ridiculously long it took me to figure out that I could do the asking myself.
Even after I came out as a dyke, this was hard. I remember going to a lesbian sex club once — okay, fine, more than once — and being struck by how few of the women there were actually having sex, and how many were just standing around watching, obviously wanting to get into the action but not knowing how to even get started. I remember realizing that most of the other women at the club were having the same anxious passivity I was, and that if I wanted to actually get laid, I’d have to be the one to do the asking. And I remember how hard it was to screw up the courage to ask a woman to have sex… at a freaking sex club.
You wanna know the interesting thing, though? The thing I hadn’t remembered until now? The thing I’d totally forgotten until my friend reminded me of it?
The friend who pinged me to say, “Hey, remember when we used to play ‘Mystery Date'”? He was a guy. Still is, as far as I can tell.
I have no idea what made my childhood self ask one of my male friends if he wanted to play “Mystery Date.” But maybe we were already a little ahead of the indoctrination game. Not far enough ahead to dump the game in the back of the game closet where it belonged and just play “Clue” or “Hang On Harvey” instead… but far enough that it didn’t occur to me that boys wouldn’t want to play, too.
I’m as straight as quality control in a ruler factory, but I was like you, I preferred the “dud” in the picture. The other “dates” turned me off completely. If I had been able to articulate my feelings, they would have gone something like this: Skiing? Oh, he’d only like me if I liked outdoor sports. Pass. Dancing? God, what expectations would he have of me being his arm candy throughout the relationship. Pass. Bowling? Ew, I don’t want to date my dad. Pass. The beach bum? Uh, OK, but I was a self-conscious, chubby little girl and Mister Legs and Beach Blanket made me a trifle, oh, uncomfortable. But the dud, with his casual attitude and open smile, eh, no, he wasn’t perfect, but he wouldn’t expect me to be either; he was at my door to see ME, not to go do something where he happened to need a girl accessory; if he didn’t pay attention to his clothes, well, there are other, more important, things in this world to pay attention to, you know, and not all of them require sartorial elegance. 🙂
A few years back, a friend created a bisexual kink version as part of an art project that looked at changing sexual mores. As I recall, the gender of the date didn’t matter (except as an opportunity for mirth) and the dates included BDSM, naughty student, underwear, office worker, furry convention, drag ball and 50s retro. There was no “dud”, because everyone was someone’s kink.
Don’t recall ever having played Mystery Date myself, but I definitely remember the advertising jingle: o/~ Open the door for your / Mystery Date o/~
Seems to me it should be possible to build a decent game off of the basic concept, if you surgically excise all the patriarchal bullshit. Mystery Date II: The Feminist Edition? Hmmm…
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The available dates provided by the game: Male and female, at minimum. Maybe intersex/trans/etc as well—I’m not sure how well ‘exotic’ genders can be portrayed within the context of the game graphics & text, and it’s not clear to me that a fucked-up portrayal of ‘exotic’ genders would be an improvement over not portraying them at all. Apart from that, it’s unclear how strongly the game should transgress ‘standard’ gender-concepts.
In the original game, all the available dates were of course purely hetero. The new version, MD2, should provide gay and bi as well. I have no idea what other gender-preference options exist outside of the “big three”, but assuming any such exist, the game could include them, too. Again, it’s a matter of how strongly the game should transgress the ‘standard’ gender roles & etc.
In MD1, the dates had a semi-decent range of interests, collectively speaking, but each of the dates had exactly 1 (one) interest. The dates in MD2 should have a wider collective range of interests, and many (most? all?) of the dates should have more than one interest. Depending on how fancy we want to get, we could give each interest a numerical rating; a date with a rating of 5 in “skiing” would be someone who really, really likes to ski, while a rating of -5 in “skiing” would indicate that sking is a serious turn-off for that date.
Available actions for players: Shopping is not a bad thing for players to do. What is bad is when shopping is the only thing players can do. In MD2, players should be a much wider range of available moves, including nightclubs, gyms, self-improvement courses (yoga, etc), bookstore visits, etc etc etc. For those players who do elect to go shopping, there should be a wider range of things to buy, over and above just clothes.
Object of the game: I’m thinking MD2 should be about building a mutually-satisfying relationship. Not sure how to implement that goal in game-mechanics; it shouldn’t be too hard to work up some rules for how to make the date satisfied, but what about game-rules for how satisfied the player is? Have to think about this.
Game equipment (i.e., does it have a board, pawns, dice, etc?): In MD1, each date was fully represented by 1 (one) picture. That’s not gonna fly for MD2. How about making MD2 a card game? Cards for gender, for gender-preference, for interests. Put one card of each kind together (with the possibility of there being more than one interest-card!), and you’ve got yourself a shiny new date. This may offer a way for the game to handle the player’s degree of satisfaction; deal an appropriate set of cards to the player, and they can role-play being whatever sort of person their cards describe. Hmmmm… that way, a date could be another player, not just a game-mechanical object for the players to interact with. Seems like a beneficial feature to me.
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All the above is just off the top of my head. It’s clearly not a finished, playable game-concept yet; does anybody think it would be worth investing some effort/attention to flesh it out?
I played a vaguely similar game when I was a kid. It was a Barbie computer game (I think on the Commodore 64, so it was pretty basic.) It started with Ken calling Barbie and proposing a certain activity – going to the prom, going on a picnic, etc. Barbie then has to go get a dress, get her hair done, and maybe some other stuff I can’t remember, so the player picks out styles and colors and has to get Barbie back home in time for Ken to pick her up. If she’s late, you’ve lost. But even if you get her home on time, the game’s not necessarily over, because there’s a good chance Ken will call again, and say “Barbie, plans have changed” and propose a different activity, which starts the whole process again.
This has a slightly different but equally toxic message about female passivity and physical presentation. Fortunately, while I was young enough to not know what the word “prom” meant (and to find the game at all entertaining), I was old enough and sensible enough to realize that Ken was being a jerk.
One of the things that I love about the Internet Age is that you don’t have to play “Mystery Date” quite so much. You can get a lot of potential deal-breakers out of the way using OKCupid or the other personals sites. If someone’s craving a lean, muscular athlete, they can say that up front, and I won’t bother sending them a message. It really does save a lot of time and bullshit.
I do love the gender and sex propaganda of the past, even if it does creep me the hell out sometimes. If you have a strong stomach, here’s an oldie from the 1950s: Cindy Goes to a Party, in which a young tomboy is taught by her fairy godmother how to femme up and be a lady. Good luck making it through the whole nine minutes and twenty seconds. In tribute to Reasonfest, it was filmed in Lawrence, Kansas.
Speaking of indoctrination, for some reason I was reminded of an old 1950’s board game that I played as a kid (in the 80’s) called Park and Shop, where the object of the game is to move your car from your home to the nearest Park & Shop parking lot, then move your pedestrian marker (a little plastic man) around to all of the stores on your shopping list, and then back to your car to drive home.
I remember being amused by the old-timey store names, like the men’s clothing store was called the Haberdasher. I see on the game board that there were several “Oil & Coal” and “Hay Grain Feed” stores, which seem a bit out of place for suburbia, and all sorts of other stores. Here’s a good blog post about the game.
Interesting that it was the man doing all the shopping, but I’m guessing it’s because it was easier to get girls to play the game with male tokens than for boys to want to play “as a girl”. Anyway, yay for consumerism!
cubist @ #3: I’m intrigued by the idea of re-writing the game! Might be tricky to keep it simple enough, though. I’m jumping off your ideas and am going to take a stab.
I think “mutually satisfying relationship” might be too large a goal. Maybe just “enjoyable date”?
First — you get to pick your date. Maybe you have to pick them out of a limited set — that’s how it works in life, you don’t get to date absolutely anyone you want, and after all your dates get to have preferences too. But you could draw, say, five cards from a large deck, and pick the one of the five that you like best.
Dates are of all genders. I agree that it might be difficult to depict trans people without being exploitative or exoticizing. Maybe have some dates who are of indeterminate gender? Or with a gender presentation that doesn’t match the gender of their name? And for the poly crowd, maybe some of the “dates” could be couples.
Dates have multiple interests printed on their cards, from a pool of overlapping interests. Say there are twenty total interests in the game, and each date has three. Some of the dates’ interests should be unexpected and break out of stereotypes: a punk rocker with an interest in folk dancing, a business executive with an interest in Burning Man. And of course, some dates can have the same interest as each other: the punk rocker and the business executive can both be interested in Burning Man.
Each interest has three items you need to collect to engage in it. (Or maybe each interest has four or five items connected with it, but you only need to collect three to win.) They don’t have to be clothing items, although some of them can be. Some of them don’t even have to be physical items. For “atheist conference,” for instance, you could need to collect a Surly Amy necklace, a nerdy T-shirt, and a loss of religious faith. Some of the interests could share items: you could need a nerdy T-shirt for both “atheist conference” and “science museum.”
And maybe there should be some sort of wild cards. If you have the “irrational sexual chemistry” card, for instance, it can stand in for any item… since if you have that, it’s going to make pretty much any activity you do more fun. And maybe there should be an opposite: if you land on the “You two are perfect on paper but you just can’t stand each other” space on the board, you have to ditch your date and replace them.
The first player to collect three items connected to one of their date’s interests is the winner.
Okay. I’m spending way too much time on this.
[…] In the conversation here in this blog about the “Mystery Date” game and how it served to enforce rigid gender roles and female passivity, one commenter, cubist, has proposed that we create a feminist version of the game. […]
Have “traits.” Like 5 or 6, each with advantages and disadvantages that alter gameplay. The Polyamorous trait gets to roll a die and choose an extra date (and reroll) on a 5 or a 6. Have a “stigma” meter that subtracts from your score, unless you get enough of a certain kind of point to be named, unless you collect enough of a certain kind of point, where it no longer affects your score. Polyamorous trait has a stigma score penalty?
Lack-of-God bless BoardGameGeek: it appears to be the 2005 edition of the game.
Beyond that, much of what you say about not being able to ask out the person you want also applies to us terminally-shy guys.