Doctors Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth
In March of this year, National Geographic published a groundbreaking, honest and introspective editorial in which they acknowledged that for decades their coverage had been racist and that they had repeatedly reported with a view that the world was divided into the colonisers and the colonised. In adopting this attitude, they argued that they not only glossed over the sins of the past, but that they were also complicit in dragging them into the present. In addition to owning their mistakes and the damage caused, the editorial has since encouraged many others in the cultural sector to re-evaluate their attitudes towards both race and colonialism. How, we ask, might tabletop games stand up to a similar critique?
In a recent study published in the Open Library of Humanities, a group of Norwegian researchers investigated the extent to which colonialism is represented in three popular modern board games that put players in the role of colonists: Puerto Rico, Struggle of Empires and Archipelago. Arguing that the failure of these games’ mechanics to give attention to the consequences of player decisions invites the re-enactment of colonial actions, they go on to observe that “the risk that many players are exposed to when playing the three games analysed in this study implies a value-free perception of the gaming activity”.