Thanks Disgrasian, for help with my post title.
So yesterday I was sitting with Daniel while he was playing some games on his computer, you know, the standard ones like solitaire, minesweeper, hearts, etc. When I saw that he had “MahJong Destiny” (or something with a similarly ridiculous name), I suggested that we play, thinking of games at Grandma’s and clinking tiles and the satisfaction of “peng,” “chi,” and drawing a flower from the “wall.”
I learned, soon enough, that what they were calling “MahJong” was in fact something called MahJong solitaire, an inanely simple game of matching tiles to “uncover” layers of tiles underneath. As a bonus, you could pick a tiger formation, a flower formation, or even a dragon formation to match tiles from! Wowie!
This hurt my soul a little bit. Real, classic, Chinese MahJong is a fast-paced and complex game that requires skill and strategy, but almost every “classic” MahJong game you find online is this stupid matching game. Yeah, it’s clearly “really hard.” Release the birds? Fuck that!
How obnoxious is it that they’ve done this? The only reason I can see that they would appropriate MahJong for this purpose is that the tiles seem exotic in their colorfulness and Chinese characters. Why not just play with random pictures, or shapes?
The 1981 creator of the game Brodie Lockard (who I can only assume is not Chinese) claims that it’s based on an ancient Chinese game called “The Turtle.” Why not call it the motherfucking turtle, then? I feel like a real idiot knowing that I’ve said I like playing MahJong when half the people I said that to probably thought I meant this stupid game. So, Dell, and the rest of the internet: play your stupid matching game if you want, but don’t call it something it’s not. That’s an expression and a perpetuation of cultural ignorance and appropriation.
Here is one version of the many real ways to play MahJong, supplemented by Wikipedia. Brodie, I hope this blows your mind.
