Come on in and find a seat. I've cleared most of the debris off the floor of my apartment so that I could find my copy of Monopoly I brought over to Logan's house last week. After stepping through my convenient closet portal straight to Logan's bedroom door, I was reminded that we were playing our favorite video games together!

Folks, I've played exactly one video game for the last fiveish years that has everything I could need for entertainment: botany, the undead, and keeping people off my lawn! After expanding my knowledge from Logan’s collection alone, it’s clear I’ve been behind on the times!

It’s showtime!

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It seems that my younger brother was specially built to convert food, water, and air…into noise, lots and lots of NOISE! He was also good at beating me at board games, which resulted in 9-year-old Robert usually overturning the board, causing the tokens, cards, and play money to become airborne and scatter around the room. I hated losing to a thumb-sucking, snot-nosed 7-year-old who called olives “obies” and marshmallows “Marshmessas.”

Our favorite game to fight over was Monopoly. Monopoly was developed in the 1930s during the Great Depression. It allowed out-of-work people to own entire city blocks within hours! These poor people then became millionaires…in play money. I chose a little token that resembled a steam engine and my brother picked up a little top hat, and we rolled the dice. Once a player landed on a property, they had the option to buy it. And if the other player landed there, they would have to pay rent to the owner. The object of Monopoly was to own as much property as possible and bankrupt the other players by charging extravagant rent. Then the property owner became a millionaire!—in play money.

There were other board games: Scrabble, Mouse Trap, checkers, and 52-Pickup. Logan and I played a version of 52-Pickup during the OK Boomer podcast. Logan lost.

Hah, Hah!

In the early 1960s there were no video games, just TV sets connected to roof antennas. It was one-way communication: from the TV transmitter to the set.

But kids did have a few interactive electric toys like my battery-powered tractor, which my brother and I used to lay a telephone cable between our two rooms via the heating duct. The week before the tractor pull, my father made the mistake of bringing home a couple of old telephone receivers from his store. I found some wire and a battery, tied the wire to the tractor, removed the heater vent, and sent the toy lumbering through the metal duct to my brother's room. The plan was for Roger to remove the tractor when it arrived at his vent. Then we would connect the phones.

But it took too long, so I yelled through the duct, “Roger, Roger, ROGER!”

“Yeah,” he said, smiling over my shoulder.

“NO, NO, NO, NOOOOOOOO GO BACKKKKK.”

We ran down the hall and…..

The tractor had lumbered past the vent and was headed toward my parents’ room.
I pulled the wire and…. It came loose.

Meanwhile the tractor hit the far duct wall leading to the furnace.
UMMMMMM-AAAAARRRP, UMMMMMM-AAAARP, UMMMMMM ARP.

It was trying to climb the wall.

Three hours later my father arrived home from work, “What’s that noise?”
Two hours after that we were watching TV in the half-basement.
UMMMMMMM-AAAAARPPP, UMMMM-AAAARP.
Several hours after that we were in bed:
UUUUUMmmmmm-aaaaaarrpp.
The next morning: umm, ummm, arrrrp, ummm, aar……
By lunchtime, the tractor was silent.

That was more than 60 years ago, and that toy might still be sitting in the duct.

The Furnace Duct Tractor Pull of 1962 was our favorite game!

Logan's got a collection of over 500 video games that he’s been collecting since he was 12 years old, and this week he invited me to take a few of 'em for a spin to see what’s “hip” and “cool” these days. We tried everything from card battles and brick-breaking roleplayers to a game about… building parking lots. Some were more fun than others, and let's just say Logan and I have very different ideas about what makes a good game.

But I wasn't about to let Logan have all the fun. I introduced him to one of my favorites, Plants vs. Zombies, where a little gardening goes a long way when the undead come knocking. Between exploding potatoes, questionable zombie digestion, and a Pharaoh who probably should've stayed in his tomb, we had ourselves quite the adventure.

Come along and watch us play! You might even discover a game worth trying yourself.

For most of my life, I video games were just television with a joystick attached. When I was growing up, my brother Roger and I made our own entertainment, usually with a little imagination and an impressive ability to turn ordinary household objects into trouble.

Then Logan showed me what I’d been missing out on from his library alone.

Apparently, you can build entire worlds, battle strangers halfway around the planet, and discover something new every time you play. There's even a game about running parking lots, which tells me somebody out there has a very different idea of a good Saturday afternoon than I do.

I'd always assumed screens were replacing imagination. Somewhere along the way, kids had traded making things up for having everything made for them.

But after spending an afternoon with Logan, I realized that the cardboard boxes have become digital worlds, the rules don't always stay the same, and there's still plenty of room to experiment and discover something unexpected.

I still don't understand why anybody would spend their afternoon building a virtual parking lot. But I suppose Roger and I did some pretty strange things to entertain ourselves, too.

WELL. I'LL BE DAMNED.