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

Flanagan, Mary; Jakobsson, Mikael

  • 4.16 out of 5 stars
    19 ratings by Goodreads
 
9780262047913: Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games
Hardcover
ISBN 10: 0262047918 ISBN 13: 9780262047913
Publisher: The MIT Press, 2023

Synopsis

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.

"synopsis" may belong to another edition of this title.

About the Author

Mary Flanagan, an award-winning game designer and artist, is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Chair of Film and Media Studies, and director of the Tiltfactor game research lab at Dartmouth College. She is the author of seven books, including Critical Play (MIT Press).

Mikael Jakobsson plays, creates, teaches, and researches games at the MIT Game Lab and with the artist collective Popsicleta, where his work focuses on the border between game design and game culture. He contributed to Debugging Game History (MIT Press).

"About this title" may belong to another edition of this title.

Publisher
The MIT Press
Publication date
2023
Language
English
ISBN 10 
0262047918
ISBN 13 
9780262047913
Binding
Hardcover
Number of pages
240
Rating
  • 4.16 out of 5 stars
    19 ratings by Goodreads