Tag: Board Games

You Guessed It!

 

Being good at trivia contests or general knowledge quizzes requires an excellent memory every bit as much as having learned widely. Without a memory capable of storing and retrieving vast amounts of information, a person cannot have learned well, though he or she may have studied widely. A strong capacity for memory is dependent partly on genetics and partly on the interest a person has in learning a thing. The lack of one factor or of both explains why some people can go through 16 or more years of schooling and not appear to have retained much knowledge beyond what would allow them to pass the next exam, while others can cite obscure facts from their reading years later, with or without having picked them up in a formal school setting.

 

The latter skill is often dismissed as nothing more than a parlor trick by jealous people who don’t possess the skill themselves. They are unwilling to give credit when credit is due by recognizing that some or all of the ability to recall bits of knowledge from a large store in memory may come from studious application of the individual to the hard task of learning, and that may be in addition to, or without benefit of, the gift of a genetically strong memory. These personal dynamics can be evident during a gathering of friends or family to play a game like Trivial Pursuit.

Trivial Pursuit
The board and pieces for Trivial Pursuit, the 1981 classic game. Photo by Pratyeka.

The flaw in a game like Trivial Pursuit, as popular as it has been since it made a splash in the board game market in 1981, is that in a contest between unevenly matched opponents, as is often the case in informal gatherings of friends and family, time and again there will be the same winners and the same losers. The winners may think there’s nothing wrong with that, but in a short time they will probably have trouble getting a game up, and then only with dispirited and half-interested opponents. And the losers go away either feeling stupid or defensively rationalizing that being able to dredge up trivia is merely a cheap parlor trick and doesn’t indicate true intelligence. That’s no fun!

There may be a kernel of truth to the opinions of all the players, and yet there should be a better way for everyone to shine and have fun. The habitual losers of a board game like Trivial Pursuit, or of home viewing play along sessions while watching the television quiz show Jeopardy!, are not necessarily stupid people, any more than the habitual winners are geniuses. A good game dynamic should welcome in a variety of personal strengths so that most players can be competitive. It appears former Jeopardy! champion Ken Jennings, along with game development partner Richard Garfield, the creator of Magic: The Gathering, have recognized the flaw at the heart of many trivia games and tried to overcome it in their new game called Half-Truth.

A scene from the 1975 film Monty Python and the Holy Grail, with Graham Chapman, John Cleese, Terry Gilliam, Eric Idle, Terry Jones, and Michael Palin.

Half-Truth calls on a player’s capacity for deductive reasoning and strategic thinking as well as the usual ability in trivia games of being able to tap into a personal well of knowledge. Expected release for the game is this year’s holiday season. Like all but a few trivia board games and pub trivia nights, using smartphones to look up answers will probably be against the rules. Leveling the playing field by incorporating more ways for more players to remain competitive rather than relying on the one and only way available in standard trivia games seems like a good plan for a game that will become popular and get played more than a few times and not soon forgotten on a closet shelf like many other trivia board games, and that will lead to sales of additional sets of question cards, the great recurring source of revenue for trivia game makers. In the old days, a player could cheat by memorizing the information on cards played over and over again; now they cheat by sneaking a peek at their smartphone, the handheld virtual encyclopedia.
— Techly

 

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The Name of the Game

 

Board games don’t require the high technology of video games, but they are enjoying a resurgence in popularity nonetheless, and in many respects they are opposite in nature to video game culture. Playing a board game is a social activity for two or more people, usually in the same room. While there are electronic ways to play board games remotely, such as chess via email, most people still play the games face to face. Board games can be violent in the players’ imaginations only, and game graphics are usually reserved. Like all games, however, they lean toward competitiveness over cooperation, with some board games promoting a winner-take-all outcome.

Monopoly has been such a game, popular since the 1930s when Parker Brothers introduced it. Or at least that was the story until the 1980s, when it became clear that the game was older, and that Parker Brothers had not been first with it. Elizabeth Magie patented the game in 1904 (renewing it in 1924), with two sets of rules, both meant as teaching tools to demonstrate the value of cooperation over unfettered capitalism. She called her game The Landlord’s Game, and under one set of rules, called “Prosperity”, land was taxed and the goal of the game was to make sure the player lowest in resources eventually doubled them, in which case every player won. The other set of rules, called “Monopolist”, contained the elements of the game as we know it today.


Ms. Magie did not mass market her game, with the result that homemade variants popped up over the years, mainly in the parlors of educators at Eastern colleges, who enjoyed the game more or less for its instructional value, as Ms. Magie had intended. She made no money from it. In 1932, Charles Darrow started marketing the game as his own after dropping the “Prosperity” set of rules and changing the name to Monopoly. It is unclear how much he knew about the game’s true origin. He sold the rights to Parker Brothers in 1935, and it was Parker Brothers that, after hearing rumors about Mr. Darrow not inventing the game, investigated and found Elizabeth Magie to sign a deal with her. Parker Brothers made and sold Ms. Magie’s The Landlord’s Game, with her original sets of rules, but it apparently didn’t sell well and soon faded into obscurity.

Landlords Game board based on 1924 patent
The Landlord’s Game board, based on Elizabeth Magie Phillip’s 1924 patent; image by Lucius Kwok.

Meanwhile, Parker Brothers continued promoting Charles Darrow as the inventor of the game Monopoly, and that game sold quite well. All games teach lessons, whether overtly as in Ms. Magie’s Landlord’s Game, or in a way most of us take for granted, as in Mr. Darrow’s Monopoly. We take for granted that people are competitive to a fault and that capitalism serves the seemingly inherent nature of people to take all they can, and if their riches come at the expense of others, then so be it. We take it for granted, but it is not entirely true. Human nature as represented in the lessons of the game Monopoly is an aberration. Why then has it become such an immensely popular board game? Why isn’t The Landlord’s Game, with its depiction of a more equitable world, just as popular?

Perhaps the thing about games is they are just that – games. They allow for a certain amount of role playing, of more or less behaving in a way a person would not behave in everyday life. Some games, video games in particular, take that release too far, or rather the players do. There are cooperative board games available, and they are becoming more popular, but they will most likely never equal in popularity their competitive cousins. There are other games, such as Anti-Monopoly, that try to redress the twisted lessons of Monopoly. The game Class Struggle goes even further. Will they ever become more popular than Monopoly, or even come close? Probably not. It’s good for players to stretch out in their games, however, and learn other lessons and other ways of being, and not end up with a one dimensional, selfish view of the world, a view that glorifies some others who probably shouldn’t be glorified, the ones who call themselves “winners”, though they take everything and leave nothing for anyone else, just like at the end of Monopoly.
― Techly

 

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