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Learning geopolitics with board games
Last week, I reported on how working professionals in the city prefer to spend their leisure time playing board games or table-top games. For reasons ranging from
Last week, I reported on how working professionals in the city prefer to spend their leisure time playing board games or table-top games. For reasons ranging from relieving stress, social interaction, role-playing to de-addiction from social media (digital detox), an increasing number of people, especially millennials, unwind by pushing plastic pieces around a board to connect with others offline. Board gamers said they enjoyed modern designer board games which involved elements of skill, rationality, conflict, cooperation, strategy and luck.
While reporting, I discovered interesting tales of board game ideologies. It also gave me a chance to brush up on my knowledge of history and international politics. Most board games can be classified, in a crude form as ‘Eurogames’ or German-style board games, and American-style board games, typically by the potential of conflict or lack of violence in them.
From my conversations, I learnt that most ‘Eurogames’ tend to focus on economics and acquisition of resources and avoid conflict, while American style games were heavy on violence. The reason was that the designers, in post Second World War Germany, were averse to designing games that glorified violence, I was told.
“Several contemporary board games were designed in the 1960s and 1970s, and at the time, Germany was trying to come out of the era of conflict. So the games that appeared at the time emphasised the virtues of resource collection, economics, trading and auctions and were averse to themes of conflict,” Joydeep Nandi, a city-based gamer, said.
On the other hand, American games developed at the time tend to feature more violence. It was a stark reminder to me how politics and ideology can influence a space like recreational games.
“Many popular games that came out at the time focused on aspects of building infrastructure in a city—railroads, settlements, factories, parks, farms. Similar to how in ‘Snakes and Ladders’, ladders represented virtues and snakes represented vices, the games released in Germany and Europe at the time represented certain normative ideas of the time,” Vallari, a gamer, said.
I noticed that ‘fortune’ and social inclusion were also major design elements in Eurogames and players took limited risks. Could it be that after the adventurism of the war, the designers, through games, wanted people to take fewer risks and promote social cohesion?
A gamer ventured to answer this question.
“In Eurogames, players are not eliminated till the last round. It is not like Monopoly: you go bankrupt and are eliminated midway. They promote play till the end. I do not know how they are linked to the war and whether it was a conscious decision by German board game designers to change the country’s image post the war,” he said.
The biggest takeaway of this assignment was that it changed the way I thought about board games. I had assumed, somewhat naively, that only children indulge in them. But then, here I was, sitting around a table with fellow 30-somethings, pushing pieces on a board, and mounting an attack to capture lost territory of a fictional island and trading spices. What fun!
