Assuming everything goes according to plan, Winterim 2023 will see me and a score of kids playing, dissecting, and creating our own board games. It’s going to be good--at least, I hope it will--and I’ve been prepping for it for a few months already. I’ve purchased a lot of games on the school’s dime: Too Many Bones, Wingspan, Carcassonne, The Big Book of Madness, Azul, Mysterium, Marvel United, and a handful more. Part of the class is to talk about the history of board games. There’s a pretty great video by the Shut Up & Sit Down guys (one of the preeminent board game reviewers on YouTube) that takes about an hour to watch and gives a good overview. However, I wanted to have something a bit more substantial. I often want some sort of book read before the Winterim starts (for my dinosaur Winterim, for example, I had them read Raptor Red; for the fantasy Winterim, I had them read Elantris), so I set out to see if there was an accessible and worthwhile look at the history of board games. I found It’s All A Game: The History of Board Games from Monopoly to Settlers of Catan by Tristan Donovan. And what do you know? My local library had a copy. I picked it up at the beginning of the summer, picking at it as the mercury climbed. Donovan has an easy and approachable style that weaves through the key points and puts in context a lot of pieces (pun, as always, intended) that I hadn’t thought of before. Additionally, he includes a lot of the connective tissues of how one game inspires another, responds to it, or fails to catch the imagination of the masses yet opens up pathways to future inventions. It’s really fascinating, and I enjoyed my time in the book overall. A couple of points really stood out to me. The first one comes from my own sensitivity towards public perception of video games. I’ve been a gamer all my life, and while I’ve had a healthy love of board games, most of my adult life’s entertainment has been in the digital realm. There’s a pretty obvious reason for this: You don’t have to coordinate time, schedules, or energy levels with other humans to get to play (most) video games. I can plop myself down on the couch and away I go. My wife enjoys board games, too, but a lot of her downtime is spent at the sewing machine. So while board games have always been in our home and we’ve waxed and waned on different titles, video games have held a place of primacy since the beginning. Because of that sensitivity, there’s always a raising of hackles when the idea of “video games are bad for you” starts cropping up. A recent study indicates that one’s well-being is not necessarily negatively affected by video game playing, with a caveat that compulsive or addictive playing makes for a noteworthy exception. While it’s important that we continue to do research into this new medium, I have to admit that the stigma around video games, particularly their influence in increasing violence in participants, has always left me a bit uncertain. I do believe that what you absorb through media can affect you--it’s why I think there needs to be more diversity in the genders, races, and situations that are depicted on all of our screens everywhere. Positive representation really does make a difference. And yet, there are loads of examples in Donovan’s book that explain how board games have led to real violence. He talks about how the crossword puzzle was invented back in 1913 (originally called Word-Cross, but, due to a negligent error, turned into Cross-Word). A decade later, finishing the crossword puzzles had become so addictive to some that it strained relationships. Some took their puzzle-solving way too seriously. In 1923 one Chicago woman filed for divorce because her husband stopped going to work so he could focus on his crosswords. The following year a man shot his wife because she refused to help him with a particularly vexing crossword. (139) From Monopoly’s original intention (a critique and condemnation of the rapacious greed of landlords) to the Japanese game go and how it’s influenced AI development and neural networks, It’s All A Game provides wonderful stories, fascinating anecdotes, and worthwhile glimpses into the histories that have created so much of the world that we live in. And that’s the other thing that I really took from this book: Each game on my shelf has a story behind it. And while most of what I play right now isn’t in the book, each one could have been added in without any real detriment to the overall thesis. Every game I have had some motivation in making it (probably profit for a lot of them, though I know for certain that isn’t the case for all of them), and every game that I have tried to make likewise came from a place of desire. Though I’ve only three or four games in different stages of development, each one came from a desire at a certain time in my life. (Example: During 2020’s Harry Potter Winterim, before the world ended, I wanted to try to make a game based on Quidditch that utilized the idea of height--not a 2D game, but one with a vertical ability, too.) The last thing that stood out to me was the eerie explanations of the roots to the game Pandemic. The book, written in 2017, has a couple of chilling paragraphs as Donovan looks at the global response to SARS in 2003. He writes, The world watched on [at China’s response to the virus], wondering if this was the start of a terrifying global pandemic similar to the 1918 influenza outbreak that claimed the lives of at least fifty million people. […] The SARS outbreak infected several thousand people and killed more than seven hundred, but the rapid global response saved the world from an epidemic that could have been much, much worse. (225) Yeah. It’s kind of creepy to read that.
So, yeah. This book is great. I really enjoyed it and I look forward to assigning it to my students. I will have to tell them that they aren’t required to read the chapter entitled “Sex in a Box” that talks about how Twister came to be and what games it inspired. While it doesn’t go into anything shockingly explicit, it’s not really the direction that I want to take the class. (Obviously, students will likely still read that chapter, but it won’t be assigned.) You could give it a whirl. Kind of like board games, it’s a lot of fun. |
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