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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 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.
Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching 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.
- GenresNonfictionSociologyGames
240 pages, Hardcover
Published February 28, 2023
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
April 14, 2024
Interesting book investigating the co-constituting nature of play and culture, especially the cultural discourse of the context board games emerge in, which reflect and reinforce one another
This is exemplified during Britain's colonisation of India, in which the spiritual play practices of the Indian people were themselves colonised. This was seen in the game sold as snakes and ladders that was created via the colonial appropriation of gyān caupar, a game popular among Jain nuns and regarded as an edifying religious pursuit, thereafter stripped of its cultural history and then sold back in India as a commercial product
Board games such as the "Bricks of the Empire" through questions and answers rehearse and reinforce White power and White supremacy, as well as the corresponding inferiority of colonised and Indigenous people, who are caricatures and stereotyped. This results in the enculturation of White and British superiority at the expense of colonised people and thus shapes the lens through which privileged White people have consumed the world, both literally in terms of colonialism and figuratively in terms of the tourist gaze
Also found interesting the use of absurdist humour and unwillingness to take a game "seriously" by some players of these games - appropriating the colonial theme into a joke about what White Western men see when they think of colonies, and how that mindset is so said it becomes laughable as a method of accommodation in order to play the game
The book ends by touching upon some contemporary games that interrogate and challenge the hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality and nation that are created and maintained by dominant groups to support their right to rule, as well as a hopeful call for new games that bring unusual power dynamics and inventive interactions
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in board games and ideology
This is exemplified during Britain's colonisation of India, in which the spiritual play practices of the Indian people were themselves colonised. This was seen in the game sold as snakes and ladders that was created via the colonial appropriation of gyān caupar, a game popular among Jain nuns and regarded as an edifying religious pursuit, thereafter stripped of its cultural history and then sold back in India as a commercial product
Board games such as the "Bricks of the Empire" through questions and answers rehearse and reinforce White power and White supremacy, as well as the corresponding inferiority of colonised and Indigenous people, who are caricatures and stereotyped. This results in the enculturation of White and British superiority at the expense of colonised people and thus shapes the lens through which privileged White people have consumed the world, both literally in terms of colonialism and figuratively in terms of the tourist gaze
Also found interesting the use of absurdist humour and unwillingness to take a game "seriously" by some players of these games - appropriating the colonial theme into a joke about what White Western men see when they think of colonies, and how that mindset is so said it becomes laughable as a method of accommodation in order to play the game
The book ends by touching upon some contemporary games that interrogate and challenge the hegemonic ideologies concerning race, class, gender, sexuality and nation that are created and maintained by dominant groups to support their right to rule, as well as a hopeful call for new games that bring unusual power dynamics and inventive interactions
Highly recommended for anyone with an interest in board games and ideology
June 1, 2023
Really enjoyed this! This took a stronger historical perspective than I (and I anticipate many other readers) expected, focusing more on “pre-modern” and non-eurogames. I think this is ultimately to this study’s benefit. Being able to see how games in colonialist nations performed enculturation and set the groundwork for today’s games was enlightening. I was specifically blown away by the similarities between Jeu des échanges and modern eurogame mechanisms.
If there’s a critique I want to levy, it would be a deeper dive on the cultural values represented by modern games, especially eurogames. I think some of what I want is out of the scope of this book, but those bits of chapters discussing those connections between cultural values and the explicit values that games create were by far my favorite portions.
If there’s a critique I want to levy, it would be a deeper dive on the cultural values represented by modern games, especially eurogames. I think some of what I want is out of the scope of this book, but those bits of chapters discussing those connections between cultural values and the explicit values that games create were by far my favorite portions.
Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews