DAY THREE: I SPY

I Spy is an amazing game. It just goes on forever, and ever, and ever and ever. The wife and I needed a way to entertain her mother’s foster child, and since nothing else was handy, we resorted to I Spy. I had never really spent any time thinking about this game before, but now that I have I must admit that I am thoroughly impressed. It is not just that it can go on forever – which it can, or at least seemingly so. What impressed me about I Spy is what it teaches. Yeah, yeah… it helps develop vocabulary and stuff, but really it teaches subtlety, gets kids to understand the relationship between obvious and obscure things, shows the value of searching for less evident options. Saying “I Spy with my little eye something that starts with C.” just as a car passes is simply bad strategy, and it would take a particularly dim child not to figure this out.

Even more, there is the simple fun of that classic phrase, “I spy with my little eye something that starts with [insert letter here].” The game just lends itself to performance, to play. It begs for a grandiose voice, for melodramatic annunciation, only to be followed by some ordinary thing: a road, some grass, a sign. Each person working to outperform the others, while finding a less and less likely solution: perhaps a bald man drinking tea beneath a purple awning.

The unfortunate thing is that I Spy must remain I Spy. I have found today that I Don’t Spy does not work very well. My sense is that it should be a vastly superior game, a remarkable variant of 20 Questions perhaps, without the annoyingly vague questions. Just one hint and your understanding of the person supplying the hint. What thing that I cannot see that starts with [insert letter here] would this person be likely to be thinking of. Pick-A-Number with far more imagination. But, alas, I gave it a go, but it did not catch on. So, if anyone out there can develop a more successful version of I Don’t Spy, please post the rules here and I will see what I can do to promote it.