{"product_id":"playing-oppression-isbn-9780262047913","title":"Playing Oppression","description":"\u003cb\u003eA striking analysis of popular board games’ roots in imperialist reasoning—and why the future of play depends on reckoning with it.\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eBoard 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 \u003ci\u003ePlaying Oppression, \u003c\/i\u003eMary 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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eThrough this lens, the commercialized version of \u003ci\u003eSnakes and Ladders\u003c\/i\u003e takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of \u003ci\u003eGyan Chaupar\u003c\/i\u003e (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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003eAn essential addition to any player’s bookshelf, \u003ci\u003ePlaying Oppression\u003c\/i\u003e deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.Acknowledgments vii\u003cbr\u003e1 Colonial Fantasies 1\u003cbr\u003e2 Establishing Mindsets: Politics and Ideology in Early Board Games 21\u003cbr\u003e3 World as Empire 39\u003cbr\u003e4 Trading Excuses 67\u003cbr\u003e5 Winners and Losers: Western Board Games in the Postwar Era 91\u003cbr\u003e6 Explorers and Exploiters 113\u003cbr\u003e7 Representations of the Other 125\u003cbr\u003e8 Urgency and Hope: A Countercolonial Revolution 145\u003cbr\u003eGlossary 169\u003cbr\u003eNotes 173\u003cbr\u003eBibliography 195\u003cbr\u003eLudography 209\u003cbr\u003eIndex 217“A rigorous exploration of colonialist themes and mechanics in historical and modern board games that contains fascinating new exemplars, unflinching discussions of modern favorites, and a hopeful sighting of a way to go beyond insidious colonialist tropes in innovative designs.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eTracy Fullerton, Director, USC Game Innovation Lab; Designer, \u003ci\u003eWalden, a game\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“Flanagan and Jakobsson amply demonstrate how and why the history of board games grew intertwined with the logics of colonialism; in ranging through examples from the curious to the well-known, they also provide an culturally-driven primer on both subjects.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eNaomi Clark, Associate Arts Professor, NYU Tisch School of the Arts; author of\u003ci\u003e A Game Design Vocabulary\u003cbr\u003e\u003c\/i\u003e\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e“\u003ci\u003ePlaying Oppression\u003c\/i\u003e illuminates how colonization came to be reproduce in miniature on countless dining room tables and provides vital and innovative strategies for disentangling modern board games from the myth of empire.”\u003cbr\u003e—\u003cb\u003eJonathan McIntosh, creator of the Pop Culture \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cb\u003eMary Flanagan, \u003c\/b\u003ean award-winning game designer and artist, is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Chair of Film and Media Studies, and director of the Tiltfactor game research lab at Dartmouth College. She is the author of seven books, including \u003ci\u003eCritical Play \u003c\/i\u003e(MIT Press).\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003e \u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eMikael Jakobsson \u003c\/b\u003eplays, creates, teaches, and researches games at the MIT Game Lab and with the artist collective Popsicleta, where his work focuses on the border between game design and game culture. He contributed to \u003ci\u003eDebugging Game History \u003c\/i\u003e(MIT Press).","brand":"The MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":46304791429349,"sku":"NP9780262047913","price":35.0,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/1842\/7735\/files\/9780262047913.jpg?v=1767734871","url":"https:\/\/k12savings.com\/es\/products\/playing-oppression-isbn-9780262047913","provider":"K12savings","version":"1.0","type":"link"}