Nothing Super about It

That may have been the worst Super Bowl I’ve ever seen. The Seahawks were playing Super Bowl football and the Broncos were playing pre-season football. At one point I was wondering if it’d be the first shut-out in NFL history but the Broncos finally got a touchdown and the game resumed being uninteresting.

The game was nothing compared to how awful the ads were this year. I saw Sprint’s framily ad at least 5 times, AT&T Run DMC ad at least 6 times, the natural gas ad at least 4 times, the John Galecki car ad at least twice, and the Radio Shack ad at least 3 times. I think the ads were less sexist but I think that’s because they kept airing inoffensive ones over and over again.

I was underwhelmed by the half time show. Bruno Mars is a good performer but I dislike half of his hits. Treasure would be lovely but I knew it spawned a few hundred bad names for little girls the second I heard it. Just the Way You Are was popular while I was going through a bad break-up. The Lazy Song is just stupid. The Red Hot Chili Peppers were a blink and you miss it performance. I did like Mars’s bandstand look but overall it was just meh for me.

I was at a Super Bowl party with a bunch of geeks so you’d think that would make all this better but it was just the opposite. We were playing a party game before kick-off and once the game started about half the party wanted to keep playing. They went off in their corner and didn’t come back or talk to anyone who was watching the game until the half-time show.

I can understand wanting to reach a conclusion but by the second quarter it started to feel like a card out of the Cards Against Humanity 4^th expansion: “A bunch of [people] playing a card game instead of interacting like normal humans.”

Every Super Bowl party has people who go talk in the kitchen but you can join in the conversation if the game gets slow or the ads continue to repeat. If you play a game, you can’t interact with anyone who isn’t playing. It shut out everyone else at the party and shut down a big social aspect. The gaming group milled around talking for a while after half time but it wasn’t even halfway through the third quarter before they were playing again.

I was disappointed. I’d gone to the party expecting to hang out with my friends and have a good time and talk to people. Instead most of them were playing a game in the other room ignoring everyone else. It also felt kind of rude to our host who was one of the people watching the game. I don’t think two socially isolated groups were what he had in mind when he planned on having a Super Bowl party.

Board Games weren’t the point of this party and the dynamic of most parties + board games I’ve been to had people rejoining the group and socializing once the game was done. For some reason, that never happened here. It was the strangest dynamic I’ve ever seen at a Super Bowl party.

Music: Locked Out of Heaven by Bruno Mars (I said I disliked half of his hits, not all. This one is pretty catchy.)