Reluctant Board Gamer

While Sarah wrote about her resistance to video games, I have to admit that, before some of our readings and the great talk by Professor Dubin, I was snobbish about not all board games, but certain kinds. I have some friends who are extremely into board games (one of them attended a big board game convention called Gen Con in Indianapolis last year). These friends have introduced me to some great games, which I love, including Liebrary (like Balderdash, but you try to trick your friends by writing the best fake opening lines of actual books) and Dixit (a French game with beautiful, fantastical pictures, which you write captions/titles for) and Ticket to Ride (a game where you build train routes between cities in Europe or the U.S., depending on the version you are playing) and Pandemic (there’s a pandemic starting in Beijing! Hurry! Stop it!). These are fun and re-playable and work well with lots of different people (my friends, my parents, etc.).

For me, I like games that are quick to learn and don’t take hours to play. Perhaps that has changed as I have aged; as a kid, my sisters and I used to play marathon games of Payday (one round through the board is a month, and we would decide to play several years in one sitting), for example, and not have a problem with it. On the other hand, maybe it is just my natural impatience with complicated tasks (the reason why I never learned to play bridge, despite several attempts by my mom and uncles to teach me). Whatever the reason, I have trouble getting on “board” (sorry) when my friends want to play more extended/complicated games like Livingstone (which I also didn’t like since you have to play the part of a British/Scottish imperialist/missionary robbing Africa of its precious resources – politically/morally icky, even though it’s “just a game”), Power Grid (I know Professor Dubin said it was good and so did my friend who went to Gen Con, but building a power grid in Germany? I’m sorry, but to me, even the cover looks boring! Check it out!), Arkham Horror, or any other game where I have to learn the rules for a whole entire world in order to play and every game lasts for hours and hours.

Although I personally don’t know if I will ever totally get into games like these, I started to understand the interest in them more after reading the Buckingham article (Buckingham, David. "Game Literacy in Theory and Practice." Journal of Educational Multimedia and Hypermedia 16: 3 (2007)) and hearing Professor Dubin’s talk. I guess I hadn’t thought much before about the social world created in playing these games and the richness of the narratives that are central to so many games. As an English teacher, you’d think I would be drawn to the games with multiple characters and complicated narratives; I was struck by Buckingham’s observation that in games there is the added component of being able to manipulate the characters and, in some cases, change the narrative, making us not just observers in this world (as we are when we read a novel) but also actors in the world. In addition, I think I was also discounting the social aspect of game playing; as Buckingham reminded me, “Literacy practices [of all kinds] are embedded in social contexts and social relationships; they involve forms of social action that have social purposes and consequences. . . individuals do not create meanings in isolation, but through their involvement in social networks, or interpretive communities, which promote and value particular forms of literacy.” In game-playing (whether online or in person), this social element – this community learning together – is so much more transparent than the social network required for me to understand The Great Gatsby when I read it. I could see where the transparent dependence on a group in game-playing to learn and understand and progress could be a really positive developmental experience for students and adults. Also – since, as Buckingham says, “literacy is not merely critical but also creative” – I love the idea of exploring what you could learn by creating a game yourself – some of the skills would be similar to those required to write a story, but it draws on so many other skills as well (the spatial set-up of the board itself, the rules, the logic, etc.).

In other words, I think I need to give Power Grid a try. I can’t promise I’m going to start hanging out with my friends at Chicagoland Games (also known as the Dice Dojo) where, according to a Chicago Tribune article, “they don’t close until the game is over,” but I do have a newfound appreciation for the relevance and richness of game-playing.