Marcel Winatschek

Cheese Pizza and Mario Kart

The most honest answer to "what would you give a beautiful person" is never the obvious one. Sarah Brandner was running an Advent calendar campaign—she was a German model, Bastian Schweinsteiger’s girlfriend, that specific kind of celebrity who exists at the intersection of football and fashion—and the hypothetical was what you’d put in her calendar. Most suggestions were predictable. Luxury spa trips. Expensive chocolate. Things that signal aspiration without revealing anything about the person giving them.

My answer would have been a cheese pizza and Mario Kart. I mean that completely seriously. There’s more information in watching someone play a game—whether they trash-talk, whether they pick Peach or Bowser, whether they go quiet when they’re losing—than in any curated gift experience. Failing that, a grey original Game Boy loaded with Tetris, Super Mario Land, and Pokémon. The gift that says I want to kill an afternoon with you, not perform generosity at you.