{"product_id":"playing-oppression-the-legacy-of-conquest-and-empire-in-colonialist-board-games-9780262047913","title":"Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games","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 \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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. \u003cp\u003e\u003c\/p\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.\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cbr\u003e\u003cb\u003eAbout the Author\u003c\/b\u003e\u003cbr\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).\u003cbr\u003e","brand":"MIT Press","offers":[{"title":"Default Title","offer_id":50930118721810,"sku":"9780262047913","price":38.99,"currency_code":"USD","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0831\/4771\/8930\/files\/img_2d76d3bc-552d-4a26-8d80-c6fde7098558.jpg?v=1739063265","url":"https:\/\/surprise-castle.myshopify.com\/products\/playing-oppression-the-legacy-of-conquest-and-empire-in-colonialist-board-games-9780262047913","provider":"Surprise Castle","version":"1.0","type":"link"}