Everybody Wants to Get Into the Act : Games: The TV act, that is. Even the Milton Bradley company has the bug. It’s selling Channel Surfing, a board game to play while watching the tube.

There is seemingly no end to the ways they can make money off you as you sit there, watching the tube.

The traditional selling of soap and soda via familiar ads was long ago joined by shopping channels peddling lingerie, baseball cards and costume jewelry direct into the home. You can also buy prophetic predictions and sex talk from a telephone number on the screen--eliminating any need to venture out to the Oracle at Delphi.

Even Milton Bradley--the Twister people, the Game of Life guys, the corporation that makes Scrabble, Operation, Chutes and Ladders, Candy Land--things you can do instead of just sitting there, watching TV--has decided: If you can’t beat ‘em, join ‘em.

Now in stores: Channel Surfing, a game that you play while watching TV.

“It is kind of funny, I suppose, but one of the complaints or concerns around here is that the reason people aren’t playing and buying more games is because they are sitting in front of the television set,” said Mark Morris, Milton Bradley’s public relations manager and the creator of the game. “America’s favorite pastime is channel surfing, so if they’re too busy flipping around their 50 channels to play our games, why not make that flipping and those 50 channels a part of one of our games?”

Channel Surfing, which sells for $15, is just an old-fashioned scavenger hunt, except rather than running from house to house in the neighborhood searching for clothespins or an old campaign button, you flip from channel to channel with a remote control.

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The rules are simple. Divide into teams--as small or as large as you like. Deal out 12 cards from the Channel Surfing deck, each emblazoned with an item or concept your team must find on TV. Set the timer. May the fastest zapper win.

“It all started with the term channel surfing , which had become a part of the language, a fun phrase that everyone understood,” Morris said. “And I was home, flipping around, trying to think of a way to capture the fun of that term, because I have always been a surfer, trying to watch several sporting events at one time. And the one really strong element of this game is that it’s fresh every single time. If you have 30 to 50 channels, you can never know what’s on all of them at any given second, it’s always different, so you can play over and over.”

But doesn’t a company that has been dedicated to providing entertainment by taking people away from their television sets for something more challenging, see the irony in or feel guilty about encouraging “game lovers” to watch even more TV?

“But if they’re watching anyway, this is not nearly as mindless as just sitting there like a blob,” Morris said. “You are very actively trying to achieve something, watching television in a much more observant way, looking everywhere, in the background and on the sides, even as you flip fast through the channels. And we encourage people to be as clever as they can. If the card says, ‘Something hot,’ that can be anything from ‘water boiling on a stove’ to ‘a stolen car in a police pursuit’ to ‘the shirtless guy in the Diet Coke commercial.’ ”