The Love of Minds
Back on a board game kick… and copping my own poor imitation of Yehuda style. (Yehudesque?)
What makes these games we play so special? What makes us, the folks who play these games, special such that these are the games we love to play?
It’s easy to overlook or forget, but I think the real defining feature of our beloved board games is that they are exercises in competitive thinking. Now I know, of course, that there’s so much else that comes into play with board games - now more than ever, as there are so many games to choose from that there are actual sub-genres and categories. But let’s strip those all away and see what’s left.
- Yes, games are social, but we can be social in lots of ways. We can get together to watch a sporting event, or have a nice dinner, or go out to a movie, or make crafts together. Gaming has a social element but it is hardly unique to gaming.
- Yes, games invoke our creativity and imagination, but we can be creative and imaginative in lots of ways. Role-playing games draw much more heavily on this element, as we create a setting and tell stories in that setting. But we can also paint, write, make music, dance, tell stories, make stained glass windows, as an active expression of our creative spirit, and we can read and watch television and movies and theater as a patron of creativity.
- Yes, games let us play with luck, but we can play with luck in lots of ways. We can go to the casino or play poker with our friends, buy lottery tickets, or play “pure-luck” party games of the Left-Right-Center variety where there are no choices to be made at all. The truth is, most gamers like games that have just a little bit of luck going on, for the sake of the randomness that gives a good game lots of replay value, but we don’t want a game where luck is too much of an influence in who wins or not.
- Yes, games allow us to be witty and clever and use “social skills” at times, but we can be witty and clever in lots of ways. Games that are based around bluffing, or lots of word play, or making jokes, or convincing a group to vote for your good idea, or bidding, or pattern recognition – these things are at best minor elements in our board games, hints of flavor that best not overwhelm the whole recipe. They engage different parts of our brains, but they are not “the core”.
To restate my premise from above, I think “the core” is about competitive thinking. There’s an implied social contract that happens when we gather with our friends, sit down at the table, and pull out a game. That contract says that we’re about to have a friendly competition, and while that competition may engage a wide number of skills and talents, the premise at the heart of it all is that this is a contest to see who can be the best thinker, in the setting of the chosen game. Over the course of the game, we’re going to see some luck, and we’re going to see some feints and bluffs, but ultimately we’re going to acknowledge the winner as the person who, for this moment at least, devised the best plan for victory and executed it. He or she was the best thinker at the table.
Ask yourself what other venues exist for competitive thinking. QED.
Now, games model reality in one way or another; either in the mechanics or the abstraction of theme, or both. When we hail a winner in the game we just played, it’s implicit that we’re hailing the winner as having some thinking skills that somehow matter in the real world that this game is an abstraction of. Well, this was certainly more true in the old grognard days where we were simulating real war strategies and tactics with maps and miniatures. Sometime with all these new-fangled Euro-games its hard to tell exactly what real-world thinking skills are being tested! Still, not to fear – in the age of Sudoko we are are coming around to regarding a sharp mind as a good thing for its own sake, so us gamers are ahead of the curve, even when we’re just pounding the stuffing out of each other in a game of Carcassonne. Seriously, so much of what we do is situational and risk analysis; we construct mental models and hypothetical scenarios; we experiment with tactics and strategies in a safe environment – all good real-world skills!
When you consider the ramifications of board gaming being mainly a contest of brains, it becomes easy to understand why our beloved hobby has a limited following, and always will. To put it bluntly, a great many people do not enjoy thinking, even when they are forced to, and certainly not as a leisure activity. American society puts very little value in celebrating brain-power if you’re not en route to a multi-million dollar IPO with your tech startup. We also very much believe that leisure activity, even more so, should be a big ‘ol flatline as far as neural activity is concerned. Unplug your cortex and drool on yourself while American Idol plays. So there you have it – it’s an uphill climb to convince most people that sitting around a table-full of wood and cardboard and holding a thinking contest qualifies as a good time.
(Which brings up the age-old question of how much to fight it – how much to evangelize and try to find those lucky few who really would enjoy board games if they only knew about them – our low profile is an ongoing challenge – or whether it’s better to just rally around the true believers you already know and get as many good games in as you can before time’s inevitable dance pulls your group apart. Well, that’s an age-old question I’m going to defer on for the time being….)
My advice and response to this observation: don’t worry about it! I once saw author Salman Rushdie speak, and he had an interesting commentary along the lines that the number of people who read actual literature has always been a ridiculously low percentage of the whole population – despite the fact that literacy itself is always improving and that vast amounts of real literature are readily available for free from your local library. So, other people don’t enjoy the fruits of civilization? That’s too bad for them. I feel the same about board games. I’m not going to go around trying to convince anyone that they should want to engage in contests of competitive thinking for fun. But compared to whatever it is they are likely doing instead with their free time? … well, it’s their life, and their loss.