Why Board Games, Why Now?
On the sociology of board games
Board games are pretty hip right now – playing them, collecting them, inventing them. A friend tells me that “working on developing a board game” is the new “I have a novel in a drawer” of a certain urban demographic. No longer relegated to cottages and church basements, board games have found new homes and reimaged cultural capital with the emergence of board game cafés. Since the opening of the board game café Snakes & Lattes in 2010, Toronto has seen a boom in the creation of board game cafés and pubs, including Castle Board Game Cafe, Roll Play Café, Café Princess, and Chit-Chat-Play. Other cities have also seen this trend, with cafés like Ottawa’s Monopolatte, Kitchener’s The Adventurers Guild, Winnipeg’s Across the Board, and Edmonton’s Table Top Café.
There is something keenly nostalgic about playing board games. For some players, board games colonized their imaginations long before they were introduced to video games. Board games, especially strategy games like The Settlers of Catan and Monopoly, are reminders of childhood afternoons marked by endless stretches of time to scheme and strategize with friends or siblings over a plate of Oreos. When I visited Snakes & Lattes, game curator Steve Tassie explained that many of the most popular games are children’s games played by adults. Jenga, Connect Four, and Battleship are constant favourites, he explained while gesturing towards a table of 20-something women who were, at that moment, transfixed in a game of Candy Land.
Like books, board games are also portals to other worlds. In the sequel to Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, In Through the Looking-Glass, Alice plays an animated pawn in a life-size chess game. The most famous cross-platform book/movie/board game is Jumanji. The magic of board games is likewise found in those giant human-sized chessboards and other games you can find at resorts and some especially over-the-top weddings.
One reason we love board games is their tactility. Tassie suggests that the board game and video game relationship is akin to the e-book and book relationship – video games are hugely popular but board games have their enduring appeal. Manipulating little soldier figurines, or tumbling the dice and then decimating your opponent’s field of wheat, is especially satisfying in manual form. While many board games like Snakes & Lattes’ most popular game, Cards Against Humanity, are designed for adult players, board gaming also connects players to the imaginative play of their childhoods. Nostalgia helps fuel the enchantment.
Retro-gamification
Do board game cafés signal a turn away from what many perceive as the solo, anti-social, basement dwelling pastime of video gaming? Gaming expert Jennifer Whitson disagrees with this characterization of video gamers.
“As with comic books,” she says, “there are many moral panics around the role of gaming in our lives. Gaming has always been social. It was only in the ’80s and ’90s where solo play was facilitated by our home computers and consoles. The social play and spectatorship of the public arcades moved into our living rooms. We could then play with machines rather than people.” In fact, Whitson continues, “In the ’90s, LAN parties (bringing your PC to a location and linking it up with your friend’s) were popular. And Internet cafés are extremely popular, especially outside of Europe and North America. Solo play is the exception, not the norm, for video gaming.” Rather than a challenge, then, perhaps board games are just another iteration of an ancient, universal pastime of game playing.
There is perhaps even something transgressive in the idle and unproductive time spent playing games. In her book The Virtual Self, Nora Young, technology expert and CBC radio host, documents how our entire lives have been co-opted by “gamification.” Health is repackaged as a game through the use of Fitbits. Work productivity, bike routes, and spending patterns are obsessively tracked through various digital platforms and cell phone apps. The cumulative effect in this production of quantified selves is the total, minute, and obsessive adoption of the neoliberal logic of personal responsibility. Board games reintroduce games into our lives outside of this totalizing, neoliberal imperative. In fact, playing Last Night on Earth: The Zombie Game for hours midday (as I did as research for this article) might be understood as a challenge to the logic of 24-hour productivity and accountability enacted through apps and gamification.
The Seat of Happiness
Board games are produced and circulated within a broader political economy. The majority of board games are produced by one company, Hasbro, which owns Milton Bradley and Parker Brothers as subsidiaries and produces games as iconic as Sorry!, Trivial Pursuit, and Cranium. When I teach the concept of ideology in my sociology classes, I sometimes have students analyze a board game or game show. What, I ask, are the common social values being endorsed or challenged in this game? Some games are obvious: The Game of Life clearly endorses dominant capitalist social norms.
Board game historians note that the oldest American board game, The Mansion of Happiness, published in Massachusetts in 1832, had quite explicit pedagogic aims. The instructions, written as a poem, read:
At this amusement each will find
A moral to improve the mind:
It gives to those their proper due,
Who various paths of vice pursue,
And show (which vice destruction brings)
That GOOD from every Virtue springs,
Be virtuous then and forward press,
To gain the seat of Happiness
Players advanced by landing on squares marked with virtues, while vices sent them back.
Snakes & Lattes boasts more than 2,000 games of various genres: light strategy, advanced strategy, party games, children’s games, trivia games, and word games. It would be impossible to suggest these games present any clear, uniform ideologies. Tassie argues that the best game is always the game that’s best for the group: fun trumps sophistication, gimmicks, or marketing. However, board game connoisseurs, those who produce value claims about various games, allow us to see some broad patterns in the social values celebrated in board games.
As with video games, militarism, colonialism, and macho masculinity are major themes in the board game universe. According to boardgamegeek.com, in 2014 the top games included Love Letter, Pandemic, The Settlers of Catan, King of Tokyo, and Robinson Crusoe: Adventure on the Cursed Island – all games that celebrate narratives of colonial exploration and macho heroism. The description for Love Letter reads: “All of the eligible young men (and many of the not-so-young) seek to woo the princess of Tempest. Unfortunately, she has locked herself in the palace, and you must rely on others to take your romantic letters to her. Will yours reach her first?”
The gender bias in board games has not gone unnoticed. In 2012, Hasbro faced criticism by a six-year-old Irish girl for having too few female characters in its popular game Guess Who? Her letter launched a social media campaign that focused attention on the gender and racial ideas produced through board games. In 2004, two Canadian women produced a women’s history board game called Eve’s Quest to address this bias. Part trivia, part Cranium-style activities, Eve’s Quest defines cultural capital as knowledge about Mother Goose, Mother Teresa, and Madonna.
Of course, there is always the less ideologically fraught Jenga.
Unplugged Cafés
Board game cafés offer a revitalized sense of how to play in quasi-public spaces. Many people have bemoaned the decline of the café as social space, blaming both chain ownership of cafés (ahem, Starbucks) and laptop labourers. With their clear purpose, board game cafés re-establish the café as a public, social space. Snakes & Lattes has adopted a clear no Wi-Fi policy for this reason. Of course, board game cafés are not public spaces, they are private spaces, and players pay for their drinks, snacks, and the right to play. Snakes & Lattes has a $5/gamer flat rate, while other board game cafés charge by the hour.
However, in a society that Robert Putnam describes as marked by a condition of “bowling alone,” perhaps idle togetherness, even in the context of some ideologically fraught games, offers a social salve for the woes of urban alienation.
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2 Comments
While I enjoyed this article on the whole, I get the feeling that the author doesn’t have much experience with the subject matter (board games) especially when reading the last two paragraphs of the “Seat of Happiness” section. I’m all for criticism, and I agree that there could be issues with gender issues, but there isn’t any real research to prove that it’s just as bad as it is in video games.
For example, here are the top 10 selling video games for 2014 ([url=http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Media/Slideshow/2014/12/11/10-Best-Selling-Video-Games-2014]http://www.thefiscaltimes.com/Media/Slideshow/2014/12/11/10-Best-Selling-Video-Games-2014[/url])
1) Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare
2) Destiny
3) Grand Theft Auto V
4) Madden 15
5) MineCraft
6) Watch Dogs
7) Call of Duty: Ghosts
8) Super Smash Bros.
9) Titanfall
10) NBA 2K15
Now, that list surely skews towards the masculine with only a couple of exceptions (Minecraft and Smash Bros). Finding board game sales is more difficult, but I looked at the top selling board games on Amazon, which should give us a good barometer of what they are over all. I’ve removed children’s games and traditional games (Monopoly, Live, etc…) and tried to only include only designer games that are part of this boom. The games are as follows ([url=http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Toys-Games-Board/zgbs/toys-and-games/166225011]http://www.amazon.com/Best-Sellers-Toys-Games-Board/zgbs/toys-and-games/166225011[/url]):
1) Ticket to Ride
2) Settlers of Catan
3) Pandemic
4) Dominion
5) Love Letter
6) The Resistance
7) 7 Wonders
8) Qwirkle
9) King of Tokyo
10) Ticket to Ride Europe *11) Imperial Assault
Note that I’ve not included expansions and may have skipped over some games (none of which could be considered to have gender issues such as Sequence) to get to this number. I only included 11 in the event that you wouldn’t want to include TTR: Europe since it’s essentially the same game as our #1, even though it’s stand-alone.
Looking at that list, I personally would say that none of these games have any gender bias. I’m sure arguments could be made, but I think they would be thin. Colonization isn’t inherently masculine (Settlers of Catan), but if you thought so, that really only makes for one game having any kind of perceived gender bias. I know the author uses Love Letter as an example, but that game is gender biased in the same sense that every fairy tale and almost every Disney movie is. Also, the theme to that game is thin and doesn’t make the game. Theme is important and should be discussed, but I don’t see the same big issues that I see in video games. After all, some of the most celebrated games are about farming.
All of this isn’t to say that gender bias isn’t present – it is. Things generally seen as “geek culture” are usually dominated by men. There are fewer female board game reviewers or creative content creators. There are fewer female board game designers. Those are legitimate issues that should be addressed and talked about, but I generally disagree that the theme of games is overly biased. There are examples of male aimed games, of course, but they aren’t dominate like they are in video games.
Sorry for ranting. That’s all I have to say about that.
From Jesse in United States on Jan 15th, 2015 at 3:38pm
the author apparently made no effort to actually learn about why the board game industry has exploded in recent years. Looks like she read a few descriptions of games and made a broad generalization of the popular games out now. Sit down and actually play the top ten games from 2014 and this article would be completely different. Games are more complex and incite more critical thinking, problem solving and better player interaction than ever before. Combine that with great themes and that is the reason board gaming has exploded. Can’t wait for my son to start playing some of these newer games and see it help with his social interaction, reasoning, problem solving and imagination. This article got it completely wrong.
From Scott in Michigan on Jan 15th, 2015 at 9:58pm