Playing Oppression The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games

Playing Oppression The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games

A striking analysis of popular board games' roots in imperialist reasoning-and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource manag...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Author: Flanagan, Mary (auth)
Other Authors: Jakobsson, Mikael (auth)
Format: Electronic Book Chapter
Language:English
Published: Cambridge The MIT Press 2023
Series:The MIT Press
Subjects:
Board games
National liberation & independence, post-colonialism
Social & cultural anthropology, ethnography
board game history
colonialism
critical analysis
cultural studies
Eurogames
game design
game studies
interaction criticism
post-colonialism
Online Access:DOAB: download the publication
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Summary:A striking analysis of popular board games' roots in imperialist reasoning-and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism.Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire's distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century "trading games" that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games' most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination.An essential addition to any player's bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.
Physical Description:1 electronic resource (240 p.)
ISBN:mitpress/11779.001.0001
9780262373715
9780262047913
DOI:10.7551/mitpress/11779.001.0001
Access:Open Access

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