Dream Girl Blackjack

In the early days of the wild-west Internet there was very little designed to actually entertain users. There were chat rooms and Usenet, but the nascent web was just a gimmicky way for people to write crappy diaries about their crappy families and crappy companies to advertise their crappy products. Back then all of the MMORPGs were text-based and the closest you could get to an online frag-fest was to dial up your friend's modem in Rise of the Triad.

The greatest and most enthralling form of entertainment during those simpler times was self-made. All you had to do was find people on the Internet and screw with them.

To that end, my friends and I developed a game of one-upmanship we called Dream Girl Blackjack. Our rules for Dream Girl Blackjack were very simple. You assumed the identity of a stock dream girl we had made up as a series of bullet points designed to appeal to every man. In our case it was Heather and she had just turned 18 and was trying to break into the modeling business. Her interests included the exact interests of the guy we were talking to.

It might sound a little creepy, but there was a game in there. Once the guy started hitting on "Heather" we would begin laying out our "cards." The person who could lay out the most cards before the guy ran for the hills won the game. The cards we played were progressively creepier or more horrifying facts and anecdotes about "Heather" designed to repulse any rational person.

Our first few tries at the game we realized that it was very hard not to drop a card that was too horrible right at the beginning. We realized that saying, "I lost 86% of my face in a car fire" would drive people away immediately. During our next few games we realized that playing it slow could take too long and be even more aggravating. It turned out men were willing to put up with "I live with 35 cats" or "I had the worst diarrhea last night" if it might lead to a hot date with an 18 year old wannabe model.

Through repetition we learned that escalation was the trick to winning a hand of Dream Girl Blackjack. You had to start with the little hints of horror and work your way up to all-out apocalyptic vileness.

My friends are all well-heeled professionals these days, so I could not get them to participate in my little game. I think the hand I played with Heather a few nights ago was textbook Dream Girl Blackjack. I hope my one-sided version will still prove entertaining and maybe even educational.