Playing Oppression
The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games
- English
- ePUB (mobile friendly)
- Available on iOS & Android
Playing Oppression
The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games
About this book
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.
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Information
Table of contents
- Cover
- Title Page
- Copyright Page
- Contents
- Acknowledgments
- 1 Colonial Fantasies
- 2 Establishing Mindsets: Politics and Ideology in Early Board Games
- 3 World as Empire
- 4 Trading Excuses
- 5 Winners and Losers: Western Board Games in the Postwar Era
- 6 Explorers and Exploiters
- 7 Representations of the Other
- 8 Urgency and Hope: A Countercolonial Revolution
- Glossary
- Notes
- Bibliography
- Ludography
- Index