March 25, 2019 • 48 mins
Board games have only grown in variety and complexity in recent decades, but just how far back in time do these curious physical simulations go? In this episode of Invention, Robert Lamb and Joe McCormick consider the meeples of ancient history.
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Episode Transcript
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Speaker 1 (00:08):
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick. All right, today's episode, we're gonna be
talking about board games. So the most obvious place to
start here is, Joe, what about you? What are what
is your favorite board game? Or what are what board
games are you most nostalgic for? Well, uh, to have
a very conventional answer. I have a lot of fun
(00:30):
memories of playing Monopoly as a child, but I was
just thinking about how the board games I got most
excited about as a kid really had no staying power whatsoever.
They weren't games that people would still be talking about
or still playing really much twenty years later. I was
very interested in games that had a lot of complicated
(00:51):
physical apparatus, like I remember seeing the commercials for mouse Trap.
I think the game was that had all these traps
that would fall down on years, and I was really
into that, though I don't know if I ever actually
played it. It was a lot to set up in
mouse Trap, but more recent versions of mouse Trap, by
the Way, have simplified the set up a lot easier
to play. The game itself is still pretty basic, but
(01:13):
at least it's not this just box of junk that
has to be assembled. Well. Another example I remember being
super excited about but never actually playing, was I took
a class when I took I was in a class
when I was in elementary school's computer class, and it
was one of those cases where they tried to make
it cool by gamifying the class. So if you did
good things in the class, you get points and you
(01:34):
could spend those on prizes like it's Chucky cheese or something,
you know, get a switchblade comb but that I never
got enough points to get this one prize, but I
always I did, and every time we went into the
room and it was a it was a board game
called the Omega Virus, and I just had, like with
my wildest fantasies were about how cool this game was
(01:56):
because it seemed like it involved a talking robot on
the board, and I think the premise was like you're
on a space station and an evil computer virus takes
it over and you like go to spaces with your
little figuring. You have to press the robot and it
talks at you. It's like, you know, infection spreads and stuff. Um,
I can't be sure because I haven't played it. But
(02:16):
I'm almost positive this game must be terrible, like not
very fun, not very replayable. But I just sucked in
by that that fluff component, just this like the machine
that comes with it that you interact with. And I'm
sure I would have been suckered in the same way
by those horrible looking board games that have like VHS
tapes that would accompany them. As has been documented on
(02:39):
everything is terrible, like that Star Trek board game that
has h the guy who keeps saying experience beach. Yeah,
so you mentioned the fluff. We should go ahead and
h and describe this for everyone who may not be
familiar when when we when we talk about board games
and just gaming in general. Uh, generally there is a
distinct between fluff and mechanics, and I would add that
(03:02):
there is an additional um part of this trifecta, that
being materials. So, for instance, the pure mechanics of a
game are just the rules of the game, how things move,
how points are acquired, and how a winner or winners
is determined. So like if someone's play testing a game
that they've developed, it may have very little or even
(03:25):
no fluff. It could just be a system of numbers,
the kind of game that would would just totally not
appeal to someone like me, Like I like, I like
a hefty, hefty dose of good fluff, fluff being the story,
the character is the setting, Like, oh, I'm moving pieces
around on the board. What are they? Oh? They it's
(03:45):
a king and a queen and an army and some
guy's riding horses. Okay, now you're talking fluff. An example
of a game I think with no fluff is like go.
It is just tiles with rules or not. You know,
pieces on a board with rules, and there's no imagery.
There's no story there. You know that all that's gone.
Maybe you could apply things like that to it, and
(04:06):
maybe people have in some cases for all I know.
But the Bear game itself is the draw is just
the mechanics. Then you've got all these other games I
think of, like candy Land and the Game of Life,
where really what's attractive about the game is like the
illustrations on the board and the idea of what your character,
the story of what your characters are doing as you
you know, spin a wheel or roll dice and advance
(04:27):
along spaces. Yeah. So so the fluff and candy Land
is really good but also the material. You know, it
has a has a neat looking board. Also, it wasn't
Life the one that had the pophumatic bubble. That being
a bit maybe I'm thinking of another game I think
you are. I think Life has a spinning wheel like
the Wheel of Fortune, because you know it's Life so well,
there was some other game. I'm sure listeners will will
will clue us in here have the paphumatic bubble. You know.
(04:49):
I had this material aspect of the game where you're like,
that looks so fun. I just want to press that
thing all day and play this game, even though it
might suck. Um. Like one example from my childhood, I
remember being a super board with Monopoly. I hate Monopoly passion,
but I do remember loving Fireball Island like that was.
(05:10):
That was this game. For anyone who hasn't played it
or or seen that it's been it's actually been reissued.
There was like a Kickstarter for it. It's this game
with tremendous material and fluff features. It is a it's
like a three D topographic island, and there is a
monster head um temple at the top of a volcano
in the center that shoots out marbles at certain times
(05:32):
in the game to knock your player back down the mountain,
and so it's just you know, it had a great
ad campaign, but it was clearly the game itself is
not that complicated and probably not that good. I haven't
played it since I was a kid, but but clearly
it was leaning very heavily on material and fluff. But
this makes board games an interesting thing to discuss in
(05:52):
the context of invention, because board games are not the only,
not the only thing we use that has appeal on
both the material or not the both the mechanical side
and the fluff side. I mean lots of inventions. Uh,
the success of them depends on both. Some things become
very popular because they are inherently very useful in in
(06:13):
their most basic functional sense, and other things become popular
just because there's something esthetically cool about them. Oh yeah, um.
Like Like, another game that instantly comes to my mind
is Space Hulk, which was a game that that I
saw advertisements for as a kid, and I wanted just
because the the the Warhammer forty thou fluff too. It
(06:33):
was so good, you know, it's like these space soldiers
and armor fighting xenomorph like aliens, the tyranned gene Steelers,
and so I was instantly in I was instantly sold
by the fluff, the the figurines looked great, So I
was sold by the material, and later when I actually
got to play it, it's a fine game as well.
So all three of these things can line up, and
(06:54):
when they do, you often have a game that stands
the test of time. But the curious thing about time
in board games is you can look at something like Monopoly,
or you can look at a game like Space Hulk,
and if you strip them down, there's nothing about this
game that could not exist thirty years ago, a hundred
years ago, a thousand years ago, because you're ultimately just
(07:18):
moving pieces around, like the fluff can change, you know,
it's just like what is space? So it's it's people
in monsters and people have been battling monsters in human
myth uh for in a since time out of mind. Uh.
There's nothing about about most of these games when you
strip them down, that can't exist in another age. But
they but they didn't. There's this there's still this evolution
(07:41):
of of the mechanics of games, the way we play
games and the sort of games we play. Yes, that
is really interesting. The way that you know, it can
seem like, how how did it take thousands of years
for this game to be invented? But then again, almost
all board games are you could probably say, derivative of
forms of other board games that previously existed. I mean,
(08:02):
there are a few basic types. There's like the type
where you try to reach a space on a board
before everyone else does, or the type where you try
to accumulate the most of a certain type of token
or you know, money, type of currency. Uh, And then
there's the kind where you have armies that battle each
other until the other one is eliminated. So while we
(08:23):
keep coming up with new games that have never existed before,
almost all the games we come up with are in
some way that they've got ancestors in terms of their
basic format and play style. Absolutely, so you could take
various modern games take them back in time, and not
only would would would even ancient people recognize it as
a game, they would probably they might even be able
(08:45):
to say, oh, well, that's that's that's kind of like
this game that we play. It's kind of like a
it's a racing game, or it's a fighting game, etcetera.
Of course, board games are not something that is found
in nature. They are a product of human civilization, so
they had to be invented at some point. And that's
what we're going to be looking at today. What is
a board game, what does it mean, how is it invented?
(09:06):
And what role does it play for us? Now, before
we explore the the invention and the role of board
games in human culture, we usually like to ask the
question about an invention, what came before it? Right? That
helps you understand what it actually is. And so I
was trying to think what came before the board game.
It's not like, you know, there was a there was
a pre board game board game that we know about,
(09:28):
so it wasn't quite like that. But one thing we
can be very sure of is that before we had
board games, what do you do with a board game?
You play it. So before we had board games, we
had play That's right. If you look at a at
a board game or you know, in this whole episode,
you can also think a little outside of just board
game and think of games that maybe don't actually involve
a board or a play surface. What are they but
(09:50):
kind of a simulation of something in reality with lower
stakes usually uh, And that's something that can exist even
without some sort of phy the coal apparatus or materials. Right,
and certainly that's something we see animals do as well. Right, Well,
I mean we certainly don't see animals play board games.
We do see them play, yeah, yeah, we we see them,
let say, play fighting where it's like they're fighting, but
(10:12):
they're not really fighting. The stakes are not the same, right,
And this is a really interesting psychological and biological question.
It's interesting to me. But also there's a whole field
of study around the study of play. What is play? Exactly?
What is a game? It's one of those things, you know,
it's in the pornography category. We know when we see it.
But it's hard to set out a comprehensive definition of
(10:35):
what exactly play is, or what exactly a game is.
In fact, the philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein used the example of
a game as his prime illustration of how not all
useful categories can be bounded by a fixed set of
universal characteristics. You know, this is one of his philosophical principles,
like some concepts and categories instead operate on this principle
(10:58):
that he called family resemblances. Quote A complicated network of similarities,
overlapping and criss crossing. And to give a better example
of this, I want to quote from a section of
his book Philosophical Investigations that explains this thinking with with
a few abridgments. So Wittgenstein writes, quote, consider, for example,
(11:18):
the proceedings that we call games, I mean board games,
card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What
is common to them all? For if you look at them,
you will not see something that is common to all,
but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at
that Look, for example, at board games with their multifarious relationships.
(11:39):
Now pass to card games. Here you find many correspondences
with the first group, but many common features drop out
and others appear when we pass next to ball games.
Much that is common is retained, but much is lost.
Are they all amusing? Compare chess with knots and crosses,
or is there always winning and losing or competition between players?
(12:01):
Think of patients. In ball games, there is winning and losing,
But when a child throws his ball at the wall
and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at
the parts played by skill and luck at the difference
between skill and chess and skill and tennis. I think
now of games like ring a ring of roses. I
think that's like ring around the rosie. Uh, here is
(12:22):
the element of amusement. But how many other characteristic features
have disappeared? And we can go through many many other
groups of games in the same way, can see how
similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this
examination is we see a complicated network of similarities, overlapping
and criss crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
(12:45):
And I've always thought that's a really interesting observation that
we have these categories. Game is one of them. I
guess play would be another one where we can identify
it when we see it. We point out a thing
and say that's a game or that is play, but
can't put together a comprehensive definition that includes everything that
is a game or everything that is play. Right. Yeah, Yeah,
(13:08):
I love I love what he's said here because it
it makes me think, for instance, of something like like bowling,
like bowling is is this uh this activity that you know?
Certainly one can make an argument for game. One can
make a strong argument for sport. And I think there
are elements of the two, like bowling. To me, it
feels like an activity where the world of sport and
(13:30):
game converge and perhaps cause a little bit of category confusion.
Wait do I detect from this? Are you staking out
of position that sports are not games? I'm I'm I'm
saying that the distinction kind of falls into what he's
talking about here. You know, like you look at the
baseball game, you look at a game of monopoly or cards,
and yeah, there are some things that line up about them,
(13:51):
and yet there is a distinctive difference between the two. Yeah,
it can be really difficult because so if Witgenstein is right,
we're faced with a problem trying to say, organize a
scientific study of the idea of play or of games,
because we want to understand what play is and what
role it plays, what games are, and what purpose they serve.
But we have trouble creating like an airtight definition. There
(14:14):
always seem to be some examples of things that just
don't quite fit the definition you come up with. But
we would still look at those things and call them
games or play. And yet for the purposes of research,
it's important to have clear definition. So a lot of
what these researchers do is just try to come up
with the definition, and they can end up feeling kind of, uh,
(14:35):
I don't know what the word is, kind of kind
of multifarious and plotting as far as definitions go, like,
they've got a lot of clauses in them, But I
want to read one I came across that I feel
like is a pretty good biological definition of play. Might
not get everything, but it's one of the best I've read.
And it was set up by a University of Tennessee
researcher named Gordon Burghardt in the American Journal of Play
(14:58):
in two thousand ten. And this is this is his
definition quote. Play is repeated behavior that is incompletely functional
in the context or at the age in which it
is performed, and is initiated voluntarily when the animal or
person is in a relaxed or low stress setting. So
(15:19):
that that that might be kind of hard to wrap
your brain around, but I want to break out it's
got like five parts there, because already I'm thinking this
applies to everything from hunting to well, no, that's the part, okay,
So so first thing is that the behavior is not functional,
It doesn't contribute to current survival. So hunting wouldn't count
unless you're doing it recreation. I feel like a lot.
(15:41):
I mean, there are a lot of people who do
it recreation. There are a lot of people who certainly
need to hunt to some degree or certainly consume the
the food that they obtain through hunting. But anyway, I continue. Okay,
So you might in that case class recreational hunting in
fact as a form of play. Maybe it is, but
(16:01):
so it's at least in the animals who need to
hunt to survive. Hunting is not play because hunting is functional.
So play is not functional. Number Two, it's done for
its own sake. It's this is what we would call fun.
It's intrinsically motivating. Right. You don't have to do it
for some other reason. It is itself attractive to you
as an activity. Right. You're not expecting to obtain food
(16:25):
by it. You're not expecting to obtain a mate by it. Uh,
you were doing it just for the love of the game, right.
It pulls you in on its own power. Three, The
behavior is different from normal survival behaviors in at least
one respect. So something that is exactly the same as
things you do for survival, even if you're not currently
doing it for survival. That's probably not play right. Play
(16:47):
tends to, in Burghart's words, quote, it is incomplete generally
through inhibited or dropped final elements. Think about the way
like play fighting can like have the first parts of
a fight there, but don't actually go in for the
kill or anything. So gladiator competition play in some cases, well,
that might be something up for debate. Yeah, But Burghart
(17:10):
also points out exaggerated awkward or precocious movements um or
behavior patterns with a modified form sequencing or targeting um
so like attack behaviors against a thing that would not
be normally a target of attack. I think about the way,
like a dog will play with a ball like it
(17:31):
is a piece of prey that I don't think the
dog actually thinks that the ball has meat in it.
It's playing with the ball, right, But it does the
same things to the ball roadly that it would do
to say, a rat that was in the house. Okay,
that's the third thing. Fourth thing, behavior is repeated. You
know you can do it more than once. Uh. And
then fifth it happens when stress is low. And this
(17:53):
doesn't have to mean that there is no stress, but
it just means it's not something that happens while you're
currently like be chase to buy a predator. And given
this kind of definition, again, I think we can probably
find ways that it might not perfectly fit what our
intuitive ideas of play are. But I think that's a
really good place to start, um and and that sort
of helps us think about what the roles of play
(18:15):
and games might be for biological organisms like us. All right,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
but we'll be right back, and we're back. One of
the things, of course, we mentioned earlier, is that we
know play predates things like board games because play is
(18:36):
present in non human animals. I mean, it's there, and
they're actually debates over how many animals it's present in, like,
for example, it's extremely common among mammals. It seems almost
universal among mammals. Like people have generally seen the way
dogs will chase and wrestle each other, the way kittens
stalk and pounce on each other and engage in various
forms of play. Fighting, cats are I think, sometimes even
(18:58):
more playful than people give them credit for. Oh yeah,
especially in the indoor variety that are cut off from
their natural world, and of course, you know, partially insane
because of what we've done to them. They're kind of
in a permanent state of kitten hood. For instance, my
cat um stalks and attacks my feet pretty much every day,
but does not seem to be doing it with intent
(19:19):
to um maim and consume my feet. No, I mean,
I would guess that's probably play. It is done intrinsically
for the fun of doing it right for her. It's not.
I don't find it tremendously fun myself, but she loves it.
She can't get enough of it. Well, why can't your
feet take a joke? It's more the claws and the
teeth than the joke. I'm all hot for the joke.
(19:40):
Uh So, yeah, we we know this is there in
these Uh. I guess we consider them since their predatory mammals.
We you know, we think about them as having like
more complex brains. But it's also there in say mice
like I was reading an article by the researchers Leel
and Dugatkin and Serena Rodriguez for a Berkeley publication, and
they were pointing out the research has found that mice
(20:01):
usually start playing about fifteen days after they're born. UH,
and that play activities peak around nineteen to twenty five days,
and this seems to coincide with neurosciences revealed coincide with
development of synapses in the cerebellum and those those synapses
are necessary for muscle control in life. So there seems
to be something going on where like young mice are
(20:23):
playing around the same time, their brains are developing the
stuff that they need for for running around and surviving
with with muscle control. And also, mice tend to show
greater brain development when they're raised in environments with wheels
and other play structures than in environments without them. Give
my something to play with and their brains do better.
(20:43):
So this is the basic idea that of play as
a rehearsal for something, play is practice for skills one
will need as an adult, yes, or play being necessary
for just normal brain development. Um. And both of those
are strong theories about why play exists in the animal world.
That will come back to that in some caveats in
just a minute. UH. An interesting question I came across
(21:06):
is is their play among non mammals. We know it's
pretty much universal among mammals but there are all these
debatable reports of play among various birds and reptiles. Um,
it does seem, for example, that ravens play. They do
stuff that's hard not to look at and say that's play.
Like juvenile ravens are attracted to novel objects almost in
the way, uh, you know, like like a dog would
(21:29):
be with toys, and they seem to play around with them.
One really interesting thing I came across was in the
zoologist Vladimir Denett's published a paper in Animal Behavior and
Cognition describing the play behaviors of crocodilians playful crocodiles, which
apparently was not news to people who worked regularly with
(21:50):
these animals. But you might be wondering, well, how the
heck does a crocodile play, or an alligator? You know,
what does that look like? They're all kinds of ways. Uh.
Sometimes they chase after inflata balls, they surf in waves,
they snap at flowing water, They give each other piggyback rides,
they blow bubbles. These are all things that seem to
meet these biological and ethological definitions of play. That's that's crazy,
(22:13):
because I would certainly have thought, okay, the raven might play,
it is an intelligent creature, but reptiles reptile Yeah, yeah,
I would have been there with you. But but apparently
this is just common knowledge to people who are hands
on with crocodilians a lot even fish. There there is
debate about this about whether this really counts is play.
But for example, they sometimes jump when there's no need to,
(22:36):
when stress levels are low. Why there's nothing chasing them.
They're not getting anything from it. We've talked about fish
jumping on stuff to blow your mind before. Uh, and
so there there are some ideas that maybe they're playing.
Maybe this is a form of play. Now, once you
get down to invertebrates, it really does get much trickier
to find things that could reasonably be classed as play, except,
(22:57):
of course, in the case of you know what, cephalopods right, Oh,
of course, yeah, I was. I was. I was thinking
about insects and I was thinking, oh, well, well, Dr
Seth Brundle told us that there there are no insect
politics and he didn't say anything about play. But it
kind of stands to reason that insects would not play.
But then, of course, I forget about about the the
invertebrate superstars of the cephalopod world. Yeah, which are you know,
(23:20):
the true aliens on Earth? Like octopuses are clearly one
of the most playful animals on this planet, though their
play might seem very strange to us. They seem to
enjoy puzzles and new toys and challenges, and sometimes they
like pull on people in what seemed to be strange
examples of social play. There are also even reports of
play like behaviors among insects like ants and wasps, but
(23:43):
these reports this is very controversial. I guess a lot
of this is getting into an individual organisms tendencies towards neophilia. Uh,
the the you know, the likelihood that they're gonna seek
out novel experiences or items if there's if they are
you know, a curious cree sure that benefits has a
survival benefit in trying things out, such as we talked
(24:04):
about raccoons on stuff to blow your mind before. Oh yeah,
of course raccoons being mammals, do seem to be somewhat playful.
But also we talked about the idea that like raccoons
who have stronger, stronger neophilia instincts, the ones that seek
out novel objects and approach them rather than avoid them.
They tend to do better and say urban environments, which
that makes sense. You approach some novel objects in an
(24:26):
urban environment, you will often get some fries out of
it or something. Um. But anyway, so I want to
come back and kind of rope in just a basic
overview of the ideas about why play exists in animals,
what biological purpose does it serve? Of course, this is
something we don't fully know the answer to right this
is this is an unsolved question, but there are some
(24:47):
some strong hypotheses with with some evidence behind them. So
one we already mentioned is that play is training for
crucial survival or reproductive skills. And in the words of
the English psychologist Peter case Myth, this would mean quote,
play primarily affords juveniles practice towards the exercise of later skills.
(25:07):
And you can already probably imagine tons of reasons for
thinking this is the case, Like think about, um, how
much of the play we see in other animals and
in humans frankly resembles forms of survival and reproduction behavior.
Play very often looks like fighting, hunting, escaping, feeding, or
mating actions that you know mimic. These activities in an
(25:30):
exaggerated or incomplete form make up a huge portion of
play behaviors, but there are also there's some evidence against
this too. There's studies in many animals, including some types
of mice and merecats, that have found that animals who
play at a skill like hunting or fighting do not
later show advantages at this skill compared to individuals that
(25:50):
play at the skill less. So maybe sometimes this isn't
the case. Uh. There's also the question of why forms
of play sometimes continue into adulthood after survival skills are mastered,
or why some play behaviors, especially in humans, do not
mimic physical survival behaviors. A classic example of this would
(26:10):
be the board game Yes. A couple of alternate theories
that came across because they were mentioned by dugatt Ken
and Rodriguez. One is that play is essentially for like
social species, it's for learning the rules. This is from
the University of Colorado biologist Mark baykoff Uh and he
basically says that play is useful for developing a sense
of morality and social skills. Like play allows animals to
(26:34):
experience and internalize their social clan sense of fairness of
inclusion and exclusion of justice, and what cheating is. Oh yeah,
this is a very good, good point and something that
I see coming up in my own life with a
six year old playing some board games with him while
he's also learning how to play chess at school. And
a lot of it is, you know, certainly there's a
(26:56):
there's a you know, stressing abstract thought and learning systems
of rules and strategy, but a lot of it is
like learning how to lose, learning how to win, how
to do both of those things gracefully, how not to cheat,
how to respond to cheating, like these are all all
sort of aspects of the general exercise. Yeah, so I
think that that's a strong possibility as well. Another theory
(27:18):
is from the check researcher Mark Spinka, who says that
play is to help animals not necessarily just practice individual
skills like hunting, fighting and all that, but to generally
prepare for the unexpected. It's how an animal readies its
brain to be surprised by life and deal with that
surprise gracefully. So things like being knocked off balance when
(27:41):
you're not expecting it, or things like encountering failure in
a in a chase or something like this. Another way
of putting this is that play and games serve to
increase versatility. This is this is very a very good point,
because I'm thinking about like various physical sports, a lot
of it does seem to have a it seemed to
(28:01):
stress bodily awareness and being able to react physically to change.
And then most board games of any of any note,
you know, there's some level of you go into the
game with a certain strategy, there's a certain way you
can and perhaps will win. But then the best laid
plans right and foiled foiled. You have to figure out, well,
(28:24):
how am I going to react to this and still
try and achieve my initial goals. Maybe there's a different
way I'm going to have to win after all. Well,
and this, you know, you you can see it in
the way that we really we have an extremely derisive
attitude toward people who do not lose or face adversity
in games. Well, you know, the person who flips the
(28:44):
table when they get when they you know, get frustrated
in risk or something that's like an archetype we all
know about. We all know that guy, and that behavior
is strongly frowned upon. Right now, part of it might
be because they're playing Monopoly or some garbage game like that,
but but no, Yeah, people who react like that to games,
they can probably react like that too to just about
(29:05):
any game. And I think one of the important lessons
of gaming, like one that I continually try to embrace,
is in enjoying the way in which you lose. I
think I think it's a testament too of a well
designed game, because I've also played some games where I'm like, Okay,
this game is kind of BS and I'm losing. Uh,
there's really what am I doing? You know? But but
(29:26):
a really good game, you're like, oh, I see disaster
is coming, and isn't it interesting how it's playing out?
What can I do to minimize disaster? That can sometimes
become the new game that you're playing that is a
really great kind of game. I haven't even thought about that,
games that are interesting to lose. Yeah. Um So, one
more theory I want to mention before we move on.
(29:47):
The last one I came across was in a presentation
called what is Play for by the Penn State professor
Gary Chick, and this discusses the possibility that play is
favored by sexual selection, that it's at a Playfulness is
a signaling mechanism of fitness in adults, and that might
answer why even adults are playful and not just children.
(30:10):
Like animals including humans, tend to prefer mates that play
because play is interpreted as a signal of a few things.
Play signals youth, youthfulness, play signals good health, play signals intelligence,
and it signals good socialization. Yeah, these are all solid points.
But plus, in the more of the human context, there's
a sense of leisure there, right, Like this individual has
(30:33):
space in their life for something of little or no consequence,
like a game. Right, I mean in the animal context,
I think that's part of the good health signaling. Right,
If you show off that you can play a game,
you're showing off that you're not starving and sick and
at the edge, Like, hey, look, I'm chasing a ball.
This isn't gonna feed me, but I'm big enough I
can catch something later. Yeah. So, I mean, ultimately, we
(30:55):
don't know which of these theories are correct, and there
are other ones too, we don't have time to chase
them all on here. I guess you could also posit that,
of course, play is not for anything that it doesn't
serve any adaptive biological purpose. But given how widely play
is selected for, I really find this unlikely. But anyway
to come back to board games here, Given all of
this we've looked at, I think one of the interesting
(31:16):
questions to ask is what kind of play does a
board game represent? And how does does a board game
fit into this whole model. So if you take the
view that well, maybe a lot of play is training
for skills later in life. Maybe that's what most of
play is for in the animal world. That's obviously plausible
for a lot of different things, because, as we mentioned earlier,
(31:38):
how many types of play involved things that are necessary
for survival, like chasing, fighting, uh, you know, playing house,
imaginative playing with skills of you know, maintaining a domestic life,
that kind of thing, right, finding your mystery date, um,
you know, creating your ensuring your financial future, battling barbarians
(31:59):
um or or or so simply just responding to luck,
responding to chance, responding to to unforeseen events. Well, I
think that last one might be especially relevant with games
with board games, because what sets board games apart from
so many of these other games like play, fighting, play, chasing, playing,
house and all that is that, unlike these physical sports
(32:21):
and stuff, board games become almost entirely abstracted from any
physical activity that is important for survival or reproduction. They're
abstract games. Their games taken into an imaginary space that
you don't act out full behaviors with your body, you know, right, Yeah,
it becomes even though you may have some impressive, uh fluff,
(32:43):
you may have some you know, impressive materials, some very
nice figurines, etcetera, it's still largely something that is taking
place in the mind with the aid of some physical
materials and of course the system of rules. With that
in mind, I think we should maybe take a break
and then come back and focus on some of the
earliest known board games and and see what we can
make of them. Alright, we're back. So in researching this,
(33:12):
we we look to a number of different sources, but
of course I ended up picking up Brian and Fagin's
excellent The seventy Grade Inventions of the Ancient World is
a fun starting put place. Uh. He only devotes two
pages to board games, but it provides a nice overview,
and one of the things that he drives home is
that board games are probably as old as human culture.
(33:34):
Uh that pretty much any ancient or modern society has
some sort of board game. It just seems innately tied
to how we think and how we use objects and rules.
And you can even go so as far as to
say that they're a defining element of human society. Now,
obviously they came out of something though, right, But but
the details are lost to the myths of history. Is
(33:57):
unlikely that there's a single necess city or breakthrough that
evolved into game playing. But there are a couple of
key theories that I think are worth considering. So the
first is that, and this ties in with some of
the discussions we've had about play, is it is the
the safe sublimation of competition and rivalry. Oh, this is
often a theory about sports as well. That it does
(34:20):
something to Uh. It takes an instinct that we have
that can be destructive and gives us an outlet for
that instinct that is not destructive. Right. You know, today
we have a game night in which say employee employee,
fellow employees or friends or family members members will gather
together and attempt to crush each other so that one
may rise up victorious over the rest. This would be
(34:42):
terrible if we did this four real zes. But since
we're doing it within the confines of a board game
or card game or what have you, uh, it's it's
perfectly acceptable, it's even beneficial. I mean, look at the
way people practice sports fandom. You can clearly see in
this that we have some powerful instincts that that that
(35:03):
caused us to want to band together in groups and
support of, you know, against a common enemy that's also
banding together. We have, I think some inherent warlike instincts,
and I think it would probably be bad if we
just had these instincts bouncing around without any way to
express them. That wasn't actually harmful. But generally speaking, you're
dealing with with far lower stakes. Yes, even if there
(35:25):
is money on the line, it is still generally generally
your life is not on the line right now. The
second idea, and this one, this one I really find interesting,
is that board games emerged out of ritual and divination practices. Yes, yes, yes, yes,
this is really interesting. Now. Of course, divination practices would
be what would be trying to answer an unanswerable question
(35:48):
or gain some piece of knowledge by the invocation of
the gods or spirits or something, usually using a physical medium,
yeah too. Yeah, And sometimes it's overt it is, say,
asking spirit um deceased loved one or an ancestor or
a god or a goddess or a supernatural entity for help.
Other times it's it's a bit more obscure, like what
(36:11):
you're actually asking and why you're using a particular means
to do so. We had an episode of Stuff to
Blow your Mind where we talked about the eaching where
we get into a lot of this. Yeah, talking about
the eaching is essentially a randomization engine for divination that
depends on physical objects to create and record randomized events. Uh.
(36:31):
Specifically uh tossing a few coins, laying some sticks down
to keep track of what what the coins tell you,
and then referring to a system of rules to tell
you what these lines mean, and then of course how
you should act what you should expect based on that. Now, remember,
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind episode, we talked
(36:53):
about how even though you know, we're not positing that
sort of ledge methods where you like you know, cast
lots or something are actually giving you, say, knowledge of
the future or anything like that, they could still be
useful or adaptive in that they might tend to prompt
action when you were otherwise frozen, like it's possible, you know,
you're just faced with a problem, you don't know what
(37:14):
to do. And in fact it's the case that really
any action is better than no action, and thus consulting
a divination method gives you impetus to go forward with
some type of response. I remember in that issuing episode
that we did, we we looked to a quote from
Julian Jaynes, who is the individual that was behind the
(37:35):
the bicameral mind hypothesis. But but this particular quote has
has little to do with with with that particular hypothesis.
But he was talking about sortilage and uh he said quote.
But this simplicity, even uh, triviality to us, should not
blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as
(37:57):
well as appreciating its remarkable historical importance. We're so used
to the huge variety of games of chance, throwing dice
through let wheels, etcetera, all of them vestiges of this
ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it
difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically.
It is a help here to realize that there was
no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. So
(38:21):
he had to think about and he's tying that in
a little bit to his hypothesis. But but for the
most partly thinking of the primordial uh, you know, ancestors
to the board game, to games of chance being simply
a way of of figuring out how to act, like
what I must do something? But how do I possibly
weigh these two things? I must appeal to some other force? Yeah,
(38:44):
I mean, I think there's something to that. We we
can't know this for sure, that you know, ancient or
prehistoric people's had no concept of chance. But judging by
their writings when we have access to those, it does
seem like they didn't really have much of an idea
of endomness, at least to me. It seems more like
there's a general belief in sort of like determinism by
(39:05):
the gods or by some kind of power of fate
that you know, win something that that appears random happens,
say even just the outcome of a dice roll, that
was the will of the gods for it to happen
that way. And so if you imagine board games in
this context, they would take on a very different cast, right,
every time you throw the dice, which I guess at
(39:26):
that time probably wouldn't have been dice, but would have
been something like, you know, sticks that fall in a
certain way to tell you how many places to move
or what the outcome of something is, or a knuckle
bones or a common one. Yeah, yeah, rattle the bones.
I think there's this old Babylonian inscription that's like a
gambler's lament that says like, woe, woe, woe to me
the knuckle bones. It's like, you know, oh no that
(39:49):
you know, they gave me bad fate. But the bad
fate could be within a game, and within the game
this would still be interpreted, perhaps as a deliverance by
the gods or or a punishment by the gods, like
the gods are determining who wins your dice game. Yeah,
because it's kind of like you're going, all right, God,
I need some help on this. Give me a sign,
(40:09):
all right, I don't see a sign. What I'm gonna
do is I'm gonna i'm gonna throw this stick. If
it lands this way, i'm gonna assume that's a yes.
And if it lands the other way, I'm going to
take that as a no, So balls in your court. God,
here we go. But what if it's not a yes
or no about a question in your life, but about
do I get to advance a space in this game
on the board? Wow? Imagine if that was the case.
(40:32):
Every time we play a board game, a divine being
has to has to like clock in today, like, oh
my goodness, they're playing arkham Harror. I'm gonna be here
all night. I hate this one. Can't they just play
play checkers? You know? I wonder if this may come
in as One of the things I often wonder about
is like why do some religions for bid games of
(40:52):
chance or forbid gambling? What is it about that activity
that makes it detestable to the religious authorities and the
people who come up with the with these religious dogmas.
I wonder if games of chance, especially in the ancient
frame of mind, tend to suggest a belief in like
consulting demons and a non sanctioned spiritual authorities, you know,
(41:14):
so that when you roll a die or roll a knucklebone,
you may in fact be uh having a consult every
time you do it with some kind of illicit spirit
with a demon or something, huh, And it would be
interested to come back and do an Invention episode on gambling.
But I also wonder, and I may be completely off
on this, I wonder if it's ever a case where Okay,
(41:35):
if a board game or a game is simply a simulation,
simplification with lowered stakes, if you then raise the stakes again,
does that become gambling? And it's because that's kind of
how I always think about gambling. It's like playing cards
for fun, that's fun, playing cards for money. Okay, you've
taken taken something fun and you've made it a little dirty,
and you've made losing feel more real, and you've made
(41:59):
winning a little more icky. Somehow everyone's mileage is going
to vary on that. Well, but that's my take on
I think there could also be when you're talking about
not just games of chance, but like adding the gambling element, yes,
which does seem to be often crucial, you know, is
their money on the line there. You could also just
(42:19):
say that it's like, well, it's a basic social control
problem because for some reason, where there's gambling, there also
tends to be disorder and crime. You know, gambling tends
to lead to fights, and murder and stuff. It could
just be something like as simple as that, right. I know,
we were looking at at some sources about Islamic law
(42:39):
and the interpretation of Islamic laws concerning games of chance
versus games of skill, and it seems like for the
for the most part, based on what we're looking at,
generally gambling is bad. Gambling is against the rules. But
games that have dice in them, if they are games
of skill, you know, it's generally okay. So that specifically
the uh, you know, gungeon and dragons is fine. I
(43:02):
think there's a difference opinion among difference. Yes, you're still
you're still going to find some some individuals that have
you know, there are a lot stricter on this and
and and stricter on the interpretation and would say that no,
if their dice involved, or there's some sort of chance element,
then then it is not permitted. You know. Going back
to the sort of adaptive or revolutionary framework, I wonder
if you can fundamentally class games of chance versus games
(43:24):
of skill as as having different kinds of roles in
our biology and our psychology. Yeah, yeah, probably so. And
maybe that's again one of the reasons that it's so
perfect when when those two things are balanced in a
single game where you do need skill to win, and
yet there are these these these unpredictable moments, these these
(43:46):
turning points that can totally change the outcome, and no
amount of skill, Like maybe skill will be essential to
survive those twists and turns. Yeah, I mean dealing with
dealing with unforeseen circumstances is a skill in a way.
The the skill of versatility is the ability to face
the vicissitudes of fate and come up with a with
a way around. Like candy Land is definitely a game
(44:09):
that requires no skill. You know, if anybody has ever
played with the child knows virtually it's just all random movement.
There's there's not really any there are no decisions to
be made. You're the complete whims of the universe. When
it comes to that, that's going to be the one
that God's really hate clocking in for because they have
to do all the work. But then you have games
(44:31):
like chess right where yes you're having to respond to
changes that are perpetrated, but they're perpetrated by your opponent
at any rate. I do want to drive home that
whether we're looking at this idea of of games and
board games as the safe sublimation of competition, or as
something that emerged out of divination practices. Uh, we can't
really know for sure. There's evidence for both of these. Uh,
(44:52):
They're likely other reasons in play as well, including just
the desire to do something that is amuses you, something
that is fun. But I'm still haunted by that question.
How did the thing that amuses us, the thing that's fun,
become moving around little tiles on top of a pattern surface,
or you know, or like rolling a knucklebone and seeing
(45:13):
how many of a piece of tokens we got to take,
or something such a strange and abstract way of approaching games,
which in their core, they should involve the body, right,
they should involve like you should be playing house, or
you should be play fighting, you should be running a race,
but instead we're doing it in this abstract space with
(45:34):
these little representative figurines. I mean, it almost seems like
it suggests to me that there could be some kind
of relationship between the emergence of board games as this
abstracted form of play and the emergence of writing as
this abstracted form of representing thoughts. This abstracted form of speech. Yeah,
taking what's going on inside our minds and put in
(45:57):
externalizing it because they think of one of the the
key things that our mind does is we're we're simulating
future events. We're engaging in mental time travel, both past
and future. We're trying to envision what is going to
happen and how we're going to react to stuff like
that happening. And it's a purely mental, uh mental exercise.
So it's in a sense planning it all out or
(46:20):
doing just very abstract versions of planning it all out
in a physical system in a board game like that's
that's perfectly in keeping with the spirit of play fighting,
but it's a different type of fight. It's the kind
of fight that that that really only conscious beings are
capable of engaging. This is really interesting, and that's why
I am so excited to come back next time and
(46:41):
talk about the earliest known evidence of board games. What
do the earliest board games look like? What are they?
That's right, it's it's there's some fascinating examples to to
run through, but we've run the full course for this episode.
So in the meantime, as you're waiting for next week's
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Were you b
Hey, welcome to Invention. My name is Robert lamp and
I'm Joe McCormick. All right, today's episode, we're gonna be
talking about board games. So the most obvious place to
start here is, Joe, what about you? What are what
is your favorite board game? Or what are what board
games are you most nostalgic for? Well, uh, to have
a very conventional answer. I have a lot of fun
(00:30):
memories of playing Monopoly as a child, but I was
just thinking about how the board games I got most
excited about as a kid really had no staying power whatsoever.
They weren't games that people would still be talking about
or still playing really much twenty years later. I was
very interested in games that had a lot of complicated
(00:51):
physical apparatus, like I remember seeing the commercials for mouse Trap.
I think the game was that had all these traps
that would fall down on years, and I was really
into that, though I don't know if I ever actually
played it. It was a lot to set up in
mouse Trap, but more recent versions of mouse Trap, by
the Way, have simplified the set up a lot easier
to play. The game itself is still pretty basic, but
(01:13):
at least it's not this just box of junk that
has to be assembled. Well. Another example I remember being
super excited about but never actually playing, was I took
a class when I took I was in a class
when I was in elementary school's computer class, and it
was one of those cases where they tried to make
it cool by gamifying the class. So if you did
good things in the class, you get points and you
(01:34):
could spend those on prizes like it's Chucky cheese or something,
you know, get a switchblade comb but that I never
got enough points to get this one prize, but I
always I did, and every time we went into the
room and it was a it was a board game
called the Omega Virus, and I just had, like with
my wildest fantasies were about how cool this game was
(01:56):
because it seemed like it involved a talking robot on
the board, and I think the premise was like you're
on a space station and an evil computer virus takes
it over and you like go to spaces with your
little figuring. You have to press the robot and it
talks at you. It's like, you know, infection spreads and stuff. Um,
I can't be sure because I haven't played it. But
(02:16):
I'm almost positive this game must be terrible, like not
very fun, not very replayable. But I just sucked in
by that that fluff component, just this like the machine
that comes with it that you interact with. And I'm
sure I would have been suckered in the same way
by those horrible looking board games that have like VHS
tapes that would accompany them. As has been documented on
(02:39):
everything is terrible, like that Star Trek board game that
has h the guy who keeps saying experience beach. Yeah,
so you mentioned the fluff. We should go ahead and
h and describe this for everyone who may not be
familiar when when we when we talk about board games
and just gaming in general. Uh, generally there is a
distinct between fluff and mechanics, and I would add that
(03:02):
there is an additional um part of this trifecta, that
being materials. So, for instance, the pure mechanics of a
game are just the rules of the game, how things move,
how points are acquired, and how a winner or winners
is determined. So like if someone's play testing a game
that they've developed, it may have very little or even
(03:25):
no fluff. It could just be a system of numbers,
the kind of game that would would just totally not
appeal to someone like me, Like I like, I like
a hefty, hefty dose of good fluff, fluff being the story,
the character is the setting, Like, oh, I'm moving pieces
around on the board. What are they? Oh? They it's
(03:45):
a king and a queen and an army and some
guy's riding horses. Okay, now you're talking fluff. An example
of a game I think with no fluff is like go.
It is just tiles with rules or not. You know,
pieces on a board with rules, and there's no imagery.
There's no story there. You know that all that's gone.
Maybe you could apply things like that to it, and
(04:06):
maybe people have in some cases for all I know.
But the Bear game itself is the draw is just
the mechanics. Then you've got all these other games I
think of, like candy Land and the Game of Life,
where really what's attractive about the game is like the
illustrations on the board and the idea of what your character,
the story of what your characters are doing as you
you know, spin a wheel or roll dice and advance
(04:27):
along spaces. Yeah. So so the fluff and candy Land
is really good but also the material. You know, it
has a has a neat looking board. Also, it wasn't
Life the one that had the pophumatic bubble. That being
a bit maybe I'm thinking of another game I think
you are. I think Life has a spinning wheel like
the Wheel of Fortune, because you know it's Life so well,
there was some other game. I'm sure listeners will will
will clue us in here have the paphumatic bubble. You know.
(04:49):
I had this material aspect of the game where you're like,
that looks so fun. I just want to press that
thing all day and play this game, even though it
might suck. Um. Like one example from my childhood, I
remember being a super board with Monopoly. I hate Monopoly passion,
but I do remember loving Fireball Island like that was.
(05:10):
That was this game. For anyone who hasn't played it
or or seen that it's been it's actually been reissued.
There was like a Kickstarter for it. It's this game
with tremendous material and fluff features. It is a it's
like a three D topographic island, and there is a
monster head um temple at the top of a volcano
in the center that shoots out marbles at certain times
(05:32):
in the game to knock your player back down the mountain,
and so it's just you know, it had a great
ad campaign, but it was clearly the game itself is
not that complicated and probably not that good. I haven't
played it since I was a kid, but but clearly
it was leaning very heavily on material and fluff. But
this makes board games an interesting thing to discuss in
(05:52):
the context of invention, because board games are not the only,
not the only thing we use that has appeal on
both the material or not the both the mechanical side
and the fluff side. I mean lots of inventions. Uh,
the success of them depends on both. Some things become
very popular because they are inherently very useful in in
(06:13):
their most basic functional sense, and other things become popular
just because there's something esthetically cool about them. Oh yeah, um.
Like Like, another game that instantly comes to my mind
is Space Hulk, which was a game that that I
saw advertisements for as a kid, and I wanted just
because the the the Warhammer forty thou fluff too. It
(06:33):
was so good, you know, it's like these space soldiers
and armor fighting xenomorph like aliens, the tyranned gene Steelers,
and so I was instantly in I was instantly sold
by the fluff, the the figurines looked great, So I
was sold by the material, and later when I actually
got to play it, it's a fine game as well.
So all three of these things can line up, and
(06:54):
when they do, you often have a game that stands
the test of time. But the curious thing about time
in board games is you can look at something like Monopoly,
or you can look at a game like Space Hulk,
and if you strip them down, there's nothing about this
game that could not exist thirty years ago, a hundred
years ago, a thousand years ago, because you're ultimately just
(07:18):
moving pieces around, like the fluff can change, you know,
it's just like what is space? So it's it's people
in monsters and people have been battling monsters in human
myth uh for in a since time out of mind. Uh.
There's nothing about about most of these games when you
strip them down, that can't exist in another age. But
they but they didn't. There's this there's still this evolution
(07:41):
of of the mechanics of games, the way we play
games and the sort of games we play. Yes, that
is really interesting. The way that you know, it can
seem like, how how did it take thousands of years
for this game to be invented? But then again, almost
all board games are you could probably say, derivative of
forms of other board games that previously existed. I mean,
(08:02):
there are a few basic types. There's like the type
where you try to reach a space on a board
before everyone else does, or the type where you try
to accumulate the most of a certain type of token
or you know, money, type of currency. Uh, And then
there's the kind where you have armies that battle each
other until the other one is eliminated. So while we
(08:23):
keep coming up with new games that have never existed before,
almost all the games we come up with are in
some way that they've got ancestors in terms of their
basic format and play style. Absolutely, so you could take
various modern games take them back in time, and not
only would would would even ancient people recognize it as
a game, they would probably they might even be able
(08:45):
to say, oh, well, that's that's that's kind of like
this game that we play. It's kind of like a
it's a racing game, or it's a fighting game, etcetera.
Of course, board games are not something that is found
in nature. They are a product of human civilization, so
they had to be invented at some point. And that's
what we're going to be looking at today. What is
a board game, what does it mean, how is it invented?
(09:06):
And what role does it play for us? Now, before
we explore the the invention and the role of board
games in human culture, we usually like to ask the
question about an invention, what came before it? Right? That
helps you understand what it actually is. And so I
was trying to think what came before the board game.
It's not like, you know, there was a there was
a pre board game board game that we know about,
(09:28):
so it wasn't quite like that. But one thing we
can be very sure of is that before we had
board games, what do you do with a board game?
You play it. So before we had board games, we
had play That's right. If you look at a at
a board game or you know, in this whole episode,
you can also think a little outside of just board
game and think of games that maybe don't actually involve
a board or a play surface. What are they but
(09:50):
kind of a simulation of something in reality with lower
stakes usually uh, And that's something that can exist even
without some sort of phy the coal apparatus or materials. Right,
and certainly that's something we see animals do as well. Right, Well,
I mean we certainly don't see animals play board games.
We do see them play, yeah, yeah, we we see them,
let say, play fighting where it's like they're fighting, but
(10:12):
they're not really fighting. The stakes are not the same, right,
And this is a really interesting psychological and biological question.
It's interesting to me. But also there's a whole field
of study around the study of play. What is play? Exactly?
What is a game? It's one of those things, you know,
it's in the pornography category. We know when we see it.
But it's hard to set out a comprehensive definition of
(10:35):
what exactly play is, or what exactly a game is.
In fact, the philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein used the example of
a game as his prime illustration of how not all
useful categories can be bounded by a fixed set of
universal characteristics. You know, this is one of his philosophical principles,
like some concepts and categories instead operate on this principle
(10:58):
that he called family resemblances. Quote A complicated network of similarities,
overlapping and criss crossing. And to give a better example
of this, I want to quote from a section of
his book Philosophical Investigations that explains this thinking with with
a few abridgments. So Wittgenstein writes, quote, consider, for example,
(11:18):
the proceedings that we call games, I mean board games,
card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What
is common to them all? For if you look at them,
you will not see something that is common to all,
but similarities, relationships, and a whole series of them at
that Look, for example, at board games with their multifarious relationships.
(11:39):
Now pass to card games. Here you find many correspondences
with the first group, but many common features drop out
and others appear when we pass next to ball games.
Much that is common is retained, but much is lost.
Are they all amusing? Compare chess with knots and crosses,
or is there always winning and losing or competition between players?
(12:01):
Think of patients. In ball games, there is winning and losing,
But when a child throws his ball at the wall
and catches it again, this feature has disappeared. Look at
the parts played by skill and luck at the difference
between skill and chess and skill and tennis. I think
now of games like ring a ring of roses. I
think that's like ring around the rosie. Uh, here is
(12:22):
the element of amusement. But how many other characteristic features
have disappeared? And we can go through many many other
groups of games in the same way, can see how
similarities crop up and disappear. And the result of this
examination is we see a complicated network of similarities, overlapping
and criss crossing, sometimes overall similarities, sometimes similarities of detail.
(12:45):
And I've always thought that's a really interesting observation that
we have these categories. Game is one of them. I
guess play would be another one where we can identify
it when we see it. We point out a thing
and say that's a game or that is play, but
can't put together a comprehensive definition that includes everything that
is a game or everything that is play. Right. Yeah, Yeah,
(13:08):
I love I love what he's said here because it
it makes me think, for instance, of something like like bowling,
like bowling is is this uh this activity that you know?
Certainly one can make an argument for game. One can
make a strong argument for sport. And I think there
are elements of the two, like bowling. To me, it
feels like an activity where the world of sport and
(13:30):
game converge and perhaps cause a little bit of category confusion.
Wait do I detect from this? Are you staking out
of position that sports are not games? I'm I'm I'm
saying that the distinction kind of falls into what he's
talking about here. You know, like you look at the
baseball game, you look at a game of monopoly or cards,
and yeah, there are some things that line up about them,
(13:51):
and yet there is a distinctive difference between the two. Yeah,
it can be really difficult because so if Witgenstein is right,
we're faced with a problem trying to say, organize a
scientific study of the idea of play or of games,
because we want to understand what play is and what
role it plays, what games are, and what purpose they serve.
But we have trouble creating like an airtight definition. There
(14:14):
always seem to be some examples of things that just
don't quite fit the definition you come up with. But
we would still look at those things and call them
games or play. And yet for the purposes of research,
it's important to have clear definition. So a lot of
what these researchers do is just try to come up
with the definition, and they can end up feeling kind of, uh,
(14:35):
I don't know what the word is, kind of kind
of multifarious and plotting as far as definitions go, like,
they've got a lot of clauses in them, But I
want to read one I came across that I feel
like is a pretty good biological definition of play. Might
not get everything, but it's one of the best I've read.
And it was set up by a University of Tennessee
researcher named Gordon Burghardt in the American Journal of Play
(14:58):
in two thousand ten. And this is this is his
definition quote. Play is repeated behavior that is incompletely functional
in the context or at the age in which it
is performed, and is initiated voluntarily when the animal or
person is in a relaxed or low stress setting. So
(15:19):
that that that might be kind of hard to wrap
your brain around, but I want to break out it's
got like five parts there, because already I'm thinking this
applies to everything from hunting to well, no, that's the part, okay,
So so first thing is that the behavior is not functional,
It doesn't contribute to current survival. So hunting wouldn't count
unless you're doing it recreation. I feel like a lot.
(15:41):
I mean, there are a lot of people who do
it recreation. There are a lot of people who certainly
need to hunt to some degree or certainly consume the
the food that they obtain through hunting. But anyway, I continue. Okay,
So you might in that case class recreational hunting in
fact as a form of play. Maybe it is, but
(16:01):
so it's at least in the animals who need to
hunt to survive. Hunting is not play because hunting is functional.
So play is not functional. Number Two, it's done for
its own sake. It's this is what we would call fun.
It's intrinsically motivating. Right. You don't have to do it
for some other reason. It is itself attractive to you
as an activity. Right. You're not expecting to obtain food
(16:25):
by it. You're not expecting to obtain a mate by it. Uh,
you were doing it just for the love of the game, right.
It pulls you in on its own power. Three, The
behavior is different from normal survival behaviors in at least
one respect. So something that is exactly the same as
things you do for survival, even if you're not currently
doing it for survival. That's probably not play right. Play
(16:47):
tends to, in Burghart's words, quote, it is incomplete generally
through inhibited or dropped final elements. Think about the way
like play fighting can like have the first parts of
a fight there, but don't actually go in for the
kill or anything. So gladiator competition play in some cases, well,
that might be something up for debate. Yeah, But Burghart
(17:10):
also points out exaggerated awkward or precocious movements um or
behavior patterns with a modified form sequencing or targeting um
so like attack behaviors against a thing that would not
be normally a target of attack. I think about the way,
like a dog will play with a ball like it
(17:31):
is a piece of prey that I don't think the
dog actually thinks that the ball has meat in it.
It's playing with the ball, right, But it does the
same things to the ball roadly that it would do
to say, a rat that was in the house. Okay,
that's the third thing. Fourth thing, behavior is repeated. You
know you can do it more than once. Uh. And
then fifth it happens when stress is low. And this
(17:53):
doesn't have to mean that there is no stress, but
it just means it's not something that happens while you're
currently like be chase to buy a predator. And given
this kind of definition, again, I think we can probably
find ways that it might not perfectly fit what our
intuitive ideas of play are. But I think that's a
really good place to start, um and and that sort
of helps us think about what the roles of play
(18:15):
and games might be for biological organisms like us. All right,
on that note, we're going to take a quick break,
but we'll be right back, and we're back. One of
the things, of course, we mentioned earlier, is that we
know play predates things like board games because play is
(18:36):
present in non human animals. I mean, it's there, and
they're actually debates over how many animals it's present in, like,
for example, it's extremely common among mammals. It seems almost
universal among mammals. Like people have generally seen the way
dogs will chase and wrestle each other, the way kittens
stalk and pounce on each other and engage in various
forms of play. Fighting, cats are I think, sometimes even
(18:58):
more playful than people give them credit for. Oh yeah,
especially in the indoor variety that are cut off from
their natural world, and of course, you know, partially insane
because of what we've done to them. They're kind of
in a permanent state of kitten hood. For instance, my
cat um stalks and attacks my feet pretty much every day,
but does not seem to be doing it with intent
(19:19):
to um maim and consume my feet. No, I mean,
I would guess that's probably play. It is done intrinsically
for the fun of doing it right for her. It's not.
I don't find it tremendously fun myself, but she loves it.
She can't get enough of it. Well, why can't your
feet take a joke? It's more the claws and the
teeth than the joke. I'm all hot for the joke.
(19:40):
Uh So, yeah, we we know this is there in
these Uh. I guess we consider them since their predatory mammals.
We you know, we think about them as having like
more complex brains. But it's also there in say mice
like I was reading an article by the researchers Leel
and Dugatkin and Serena Rodriguez for a Berkeley publication, and
they were pointing out the research has found that mice
(20:01):
usually start playing about fifteen days after they're born. UH,
and that play activities peak around nineteen to twenty five days,
and this seems to coincide with neurosciences revealed coincide with
development of synapses in the cerebellum and those those synapses
are necessary for muscle control in life. So there seems
to be something going on where like young mice are
(20:23):
playing around the same time, their brains are developing the
stuff that they need for for running around and surviving
with with muscle control. And also, mice tend to show
greater brain development when they're raised in environments with wheels
and other play structures than in environments without them. Give
my something to play with and their brains do better.
(20:43):
So this is the basic idea that of play as
a rehearsal for something, play is practice for skills one
will need as an adult, yes, or play being necessary
for just normal brain development. Um. And both of those
are strong theories about why play exists in the animal world.
That will come back to that in some caveats in
just a minute. UH. An interesting question I came across
(21:06):
is is their play among non mammals. We know it's
pretty much universal among mammals but there are all these
debatable reports of play among various birds and reptiles. Um,
it does seem, for example, that ravens play. They do
stuff that's hard not to look at and say that's play.
Like juvenile ravens are attracted to novel objects almost in
the way, uh, you know, like like a dog would
(21:29):
be with toys, and they seem to play around with them.
One really interesting thing I came across was in the
zoologist Vladimir Denett's published a paper in Animal Behavior and
Cognition describing the play behaviors of crocodilians playful crocodiles, which
apparently was not news to people who worked regularly with
(21:50):
these animals. But you might be wondering, well, how the
heck does a crocodile play, or an alligator? You know,
what does that look like? They're all kinds of ways. Uh.
Sometimes they chase after inflata balls, they surf in waves,
they snap at flowing water, They give each other piggyback rides,
they blow bubbles. These are all things that seem to
meet these biological and ethological definitions of play. That's that's crazy,
(22:13):
because I would certainly have thought, okay, the raven might play,
it is an intelligent creature, but reptiles reptile Yeah, yeah,
I would have been there with you. But but apparently
this is just common knowledge to people who are hands
on with crocodilians a lot even fish. There there is
debate about this about whether this really counts is play.
But for example, they sometimes jump when there's no need to,
(22:36):
when stress levels are low. Why there's nothing chasing them.
They're not getting anything from it. We've talked about fish
jumping on stuff to blow your mind before. Uh, and
so there there are some ideas that maybe they're playing.
Maybe this is a form of play. Now, once you
get down to invertebrates, it really does get much trickier
to find things that could reasonably be classed as play, except,
(22:57):
of course, in the case of you know what, cephalopods right, Oh,
of course, yeah, I was. I was. I was thinking
about insects and I was thinking, oh, well, well, Dr
Seth Brundle told us that there there are no insect
politics and he didn't say anything about play. But it
kind of stands to reason that insects would not play.
But then, of course, I forget about about the the
invertebrate superstars of the cephalopod world. Yeah, which are you know,
(23:20):
the true aliens on Earth? Like octopuses are clearly one
of the most playful animals on this planet, though their
play might seem very strange to us. They seem to
enjoy puzzles and new toys and challenges, and sometimes they
like pull on people in what seemed to be strange
examples of social play. There are also even reports of
play like behaviors among insects like ants and wasps, but
(23:43):
these reports this is very controversial. I guess a lot
of this is getting into an individual organisms tendencies towards neophilia. Uh,
the the you know, the likelihood that they're gonna seek
out novel experiences or items if there's if they are
you know, a curious cree sure that benefits has a
survival benefit in trying things out, such as we talked
(24:04):
about raccoons on stuff to blow your mind before. Oh yeah,
of course raccoons being mammals, do seem to be somewhat playful.
But also we talked about the idea that like raccoons
who have stronger, stronger neophilia instincts, the ones that seek
out novel objects and approach them rather than avoid them.
They tend to do better and say urban environments, which
that makes sense. You approach some novel objects in an
(24:26):
urban environment, you will often get some fries out of
it or something. Um. But anyway, so I want to
come back and kind of rope in just a basic
overview of the ideas about why play exists in animals,
what biological purpose does it serve? Of course, this is
something we don't fully know the answer to right this
is this is an unsolved question, but there are some
(24:47):
some strong hypotheses with with some evidence behind them. So
one we already mentioned is that play is training for
crucial survival or reproductive skills. And in the words of
the English psychologist Peter case Myth, this would mean quote,
play primarily affords juveniles practice towards the exercise of later skills.
(25:07):
And you can already probably imagine tons of reasons for
thinking this is the case, Like think about, um, how
much of the play we see in other animals and
in humans frankly resembles forms of survival and reproduction behavior.
Play very often looks like fighting, hunting, escaping, feeding, or
mating actions that you know mimic. These activities in an
(25:30):
exaggerated or incomplete form make up a huge portion of
play behaviors, but there are also there's some evidence against
this too. There's studies in many animals, including some types
of mice and merecats, that have found that animals who
play at a skill like hunting or fighting do not
later show advantages at this skill compared to individuals that
(25:50):
play at the skill less. So maybe sometimes this isn't
the case. Uh. There's also the question of why forms
of play sometimes continue into adulthood after survival skills are mastered,
or why some play behaviors, especially in humans, do not
mimic physical survival behaviors. A classic example of this would
(26:10):
be the board game Yes. A couple of alternate theories
that came across because they were mentioned by dugatt Ken
and Rodriguez. One is that play is essentially for like
social species, it's for learning the rules. This is from
the University of Colorado biologist Mark baykoff Uh and he
basically says that play is useful for developing a sense
of morality and social skills. Like play allows animals to
(26:34):
experience and internalize their social clan sense of fairness of
inclusion and exclusion of justice, and what cheating is. Oh yeah,
this is a very good, good point and something that
I see coming up in my own life with a
six year old playing some board games with him while
he's also learning how to play chess at school. And
a lot of it is, you know, certainly there's a
(26:56):
there's a you know, stressing abstract thought and learning systems
of rules and strategy, but a lot of it is
like learning how to lose, learning how to win, how
to do both of those things gracefully, how not to cheat,
how to respond to cheating, like these are all all
sort of aspects of the general exercise. Yeah, so I
think that that's a strong possibility as well. Another theory
(27:18):
is from the check researcher Mark Spinka, who says that
play is to help animals not necessarily just practice individual
skills like hunting, fighting and all that, but to generally
prepare for the unexpected. It's how an animal readies its
brain to be surprised by life and deal with that
surprise gracefully. So things like being knocked off balance when
(27:41):
you're not expecting it, or things like encountering failure in
a in a chase or something like this. Another way
of putting this is that play and games serve to
increase versatility. This is this is very a very good point,
because I'm thinking about like various physical sports, a lot
of it does seem to have a it seemed to
(28:01):
stress bodily awareness and being able to react physically to change.
And then most board games of any of any note,
you know, there's some level of you go into the
game with a certain strategy, there's a certain way you
can and perhaps will win. But then the best laid
plans right and foiled foiled. You have to figure out, well,
(28:24):
how am I going to react to this and still
try and achieve my initial goals. Maybe there's a different
way I'm going to have to win after all. Well,
and this, you know, you you can see it in
the way that we really we have an extremely derisive
attitude toward people who do not lose or face adversity
in games. Well, you know, the person who flips the
(28:44):
table when they get when they you know, get frustrated
in risk or something that's like an archetype we all
know about. We all know that guy, and that behavior
is strongly frowned upon. Right now, part of it might
be because they're playing Monopoly or some garbage game like that,
but but no, Yeah, people who react like that to games,
they can probably react like that too to just about
(29:05):
any game. And I think one of the important lessons
of gaming, like one that I continually try to embrace,
is in enjoying the way in which you lose. I
think I think it's a testament too of a well
designed game, because I've also played some games where I'm like, Okay,
this game is kind of BS and I'm losing. Uh,
there's really what am I doing? You know? But but
(29:26):
a really good game, you're like, oh, I see disaster
is coming, and isn't it interesting how it's playing out?
What can I do to minimize disaster? That can sometimes
become the new game that you're playing that is a
really great kind of game. I haven't even thought about that,
games that are interesting to lose. Yeah. Um So, one
more theory I want to mention before we move on.
(29:47):
The last one I came across was in a presentation
called what is Play for by the Penn State professor
Gary Chick, and this discusses the possibility that play is
favored by sexual selection, that it's at a Playfulness is
a signaling mechanism of fitness in adults, and that might
answer why even adults are playful and not just children.
(30:10):
Like animals including humans, tend to prefer mates that play
because play is interpreted as a signal of a few things.
Play signals youth, youthfulness, play signals good health, play signals intelligence,
and it signals good socialization. Yeah, these are all solid points.
But plus, in the more of the human context, there's
a sense of leisure there, right, Like this individual has
(30:33):
space in their life for something of little or no consequence,
like a game. Right, I mean in the animal context,
I think that's part of the good health signaling. Right,
If you show off that you can play a game,
you're showing off that you're not starving and sick and
at the edge, Like, hey, look, I'm chasing a ball.
This isn't gonna feed me, but I'm big enough I
can catch something later. Yeah. So, I mean, ultimately, we
(30:55):
don't know which of these theories are correct, and there
are other ones too, we don't have time to chase
them all on here. I guess you could also posit that,
of course, play is not for anything that it doesn't
serve any adaptive biological purpose. But given how widely play
is selected for, I really find this unlikely. But anyway
to come back to board games here, Given all of
this we've looked at, I think one of the interesting
(31:16):
questions to ask is what kind of play does a
board game represent? And how does does a board game
fit into this whole model. So if you take the
view that well, maybe a lot of play is training
for skills later in life. Maybe that's what most of
play is for in the animal world. That's obviously plausible
for a lot of different things, because, as we mentioned earlier,
(31:38):
how many types of play involved things that are necessary
for survival, like chasing, fighting, uh, you know, playing house,
imaginative playing with skills of you know, maintaining a domestic life,
that kind of thing, right, finding your mystery date, um,
you know, creating your ensuring your financial future, battling barbarians
(31:59):
um or or or so simply just responding to luck,
responding to chance, responding to to unforeseen events. Well, I
think that last one might be especially relevant with games
with board games, because what sets board games apart from
so many of these other games like play, fighting, play, chasing, playing,
house and all that is that, unlike these physical sports
(32:21):
and stuff, board games become almost entirely abstracted from any
physical activity that is important for survival or reproduction. They're
abstract games. Their games taken into an imaginary space that
you don't act out full behaviors with your body, you know, right, Yeah,
it becomes even though you may have some impressive, uh fluff,
(32:43):
you may have some you know, impressive materials, some very
nice figurines, etcetera, it's still largely something that is taking
place in the mind with the aid of some physical
materials and of course the system of rules. With that
in mind, I think we should maybe take a break
and then come back and focus on some of the
earliest known board games and and see what we can
make of them. Alright, we're back. So in researching this,
(33:12):
we we look to a number of different sources, but
of course I ended up picking up Brian and Fagin's
excellent The seventy Grade Inventions of the Ancient World is
a fun starting put place. Uh. He only devotes two
pages to board games, but it provides a nice overview,
and one of the things that he drives home is
that board games are probably as old as human culture.
(33:34):
Uh that pretty much any ancient or modern society has
some sort of board game. It just seems innately tied
to how we think and how we use objects and rules.
And you can even go so as far as to
say that they're a defining element of human society. Now,
obviously they came out of something though, right, But but
the details are lost to the myths of history. Is
(33:57):
unlikely that there's a single necess city or breakthrough that
evolved into game playing. But there are a couple of
key theories that I think are worth considering. So the
first is that, and this ties in with some of
the discussions we've had about play, is it is the
the safe sublimation of competition and rivalry. Oh, this is
often a theory about sports as well. That it does
(34:20):
something to Uh. It takes an instinct that we have
that can be destructive and gives us an outlet for
that instinct that is not destructive. Right. You know, today
we have a game night in which say employee employee,
fellow employees or friends or family members members will gather
together and attempt to crush each other so that one
may rise up victorious over the rest. This would be
(34:42):
terrible if we did this four real zes. But since
we're doing it within the confines of a board game
or card game or what have you, uh, it's it's
perfectly acceptable, it's even beneficial. I mean, look at the
way people practice sports fandom. You can clearly see in
this that we have some powerful instincts that that that
(35:03):
caused us to want to band together in groups and
support of, you know, against a common enemy that's also
banding together. We have, I think some inherent warlike instincts,
and I think it would probably be bad if we
just had these instincts bouncing around without any way to
express them. That wasn't actually harmful. But generally speaking, you're
dealing with with far lower stakes. Yes, even if there
(35:25):
is money on the line, it is still generally generally
your life is not on the line right now. The
second idea, and this one, this one I really find interesting,
is that board games emerged out of ritual and divination practices. Yes, yes, yes, yes,
this is really interesting. Now. Of course, divination practices would
be what would be trying to answer an unanswerable question
(35:48):
or gain some piece of knowledge by the invocation of
the gods or spirits or something, usually using a physical medium,
yeah too. Yeah, And sometimes it's overt it is, say,
asking spirit um deceased loved one or an ancestor or
a god or a goddess or a supernatural entity for help.
Other times it's it's a bit more obscure, like what
(36:11):
you're actually asking and why you're using a particular means
to do so. We had an episode of Stuff to
Blow your Mind where we talked about the eaching where
we get into a lot of this. Yeah, talking about
the eaching is essentially a randomization engine for divination that
depends on physical objects to create and record randomized events. Uh.
(36:31):
Specifically uh tossing a few coins, laying some sticks down
to keep track of what what the coins tell you,
and then referring to a system of rules to tell
you what these lines mean, and then of course how
you should act what you should expect based on that. Now, remember,
in the Stuff to Blow your Mind episode, we talked
(36:53):
about how even though you know, we're not positing that
sort of ledge methods where you like you know, cast
lots or something are actually giving you, say, knowledge of
the future or anything like that, they could still be
useful or adaptive in that they might tend to prompt
action when you were otherwise frozen, like it's possible, you know,
you're just faced with a problem, you don't know what
(37:14):
to do. And in fact it's the case that really
any action is better than no action, and thus consulting
a divination method gives you impetus to go forward with
some type of response. I remember in that issuing episode
that we did, we we looked to a quote from
Julian Jaynes, who is the individual that was behind the
(37:35):
the bicameral mind hypothesis. But but this particular quote has
has little to do with with with that particular hypothesis.
But he was talking about sortilage and uh he said quote.
But this simplicity, even uh, triviality to us, should not
blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved, as
(37:57):
well as appreciating its remarkable historical importance. We're so used
to the huge variety of games of chance, throwing dice
through let wheels, etcetera, all of them vestiges of this
ancient practice of divination by lots, that we find it
difficult to really appreciate the significance of this practice historically.
It is a help here to realize that there was
no concept of chance whatever until very recent times. So
(38:21):
he had to think about and he's tying that in
a little bit to his hypothesis. But but for the
most partly thinking of the primordial uh, you know, ancestors
to the board game, to games of chance being simply
a way of of figuring out how to act, like
what I must do something? But how do I possibly
weigh these two things? I must appeal to some other force? Yeah,
(38:44):
I mean, I think there's something to that. We we
can't know this for sure, that you know, ancient or
prehistoric people's had no concept of chance. But judging by
their writings when we have access to those, it does
seem like they didn't really have much of an idea
of endomness, at least to me. It seems more like
there's a general belief in sort of like determinism by
(39:05):
the gods or by some kind of power of fate
that you know, win something that that appears random happens,
say even just the outcome of a dice roll, that
was the will of the gods for it to happen
that way. And so if you imagine board games in
this context, they would take on a very different cast, right,
every time you throw the dice, which I guess at
(39:26):
that time probably wouldn't have been dice, but would have
been something like, you know, sticks that fall in a
certain way to tell you how many places to move
or what the outcome of something is, or a knuckle
bones or a common one. Yeah, yeah, rattle the bones.
I think there's this old Babylonian inscription that's like a
gambler's lament that says like, woe, woe, woe to me
the knuckle bones. It's like, you know, oh no that
(39:49):
you know, they gave me bad fate. But the bad
fate could be within a game, and within the game
this would still be interpreted, perhaps as a deliverance by
the gods or or a punishment by the gods, like
the gods are determining who wins your dice game. Yeah,
because it's kind of like you're going, all right, God,
I need some help on this. Give me a sign,
(40:09):
all right, I don't see a sign. What I'm gonna
do is I'm gonna i'm gonna throw this stick. If
it lands this way, i'm gonna assume that's a yes.
And if it lands the other way, I'm going to
take that as a no, So balls in your court. God,
here we go. But what if it's not a yes
or no about a question in your life, but about
do I get to advance a space in this game
on the board? Wow? Imagine if that was the case.
(40:32):
Every time we play a board game, a divine being
has to has to like clock in today, like, oh
my goodness, they're playing arkham Harror. I'm gonna be here
all night. I hate this one. Can't they just play
play checkers? You know? I wonder if this may come
in as One of the things I often wonder about
is like why do some religions for bid games of
(40:52):
chance or forbid gambling? What is it about that activity
that makes it detestable to the religious authorities and the
people who come up with the with these religious dogmas.
I wonder if games of chance, especially in the ancient
frame of mind, tend to suggest a belief in like
consulting demons and a non sanctioned spiritual authorities, you know,
(41:14):
so that when you roll a die or roll a knucklebone,
you may in fact be uh having a consult every
time you do it with some kind of illicit spirit
with a demon or something, huh, And it would be
interested to come back and do an Invention episode on gambling.
But I also wonder, and I may be completely off
on this, I wonder if it's ever a case where Okay,
(41:35):
if a board game or a game is simply a simulation,
simplification with lowered stakes, if you then raise the stakes again,
does that become gambling? And it's because that's kind of
how I always think about gambling. It's like playing cards
for fun, that's fun, playing cards for money. Okay, you've
taken taken something fun and you've made it a little dirty,
and you've made losing feel more real, and you've made
(41:59):
winning a little more icky. Somehow everyone's mileage is going
to vary on that. Well, but that's my take on
I think there could also be when you're talking about
not just games of chance, but like adding the gambling element, yes,
which does seem to be often crucial, you know, is
their money on the line there. You could also just
(42:19):
say that it's like, well, it's a basic social control
problem because for some reason, where there's gambling, there also
tends to be disorder and crime. You know, gambling tends
to lead to fights, and murder and stuff. It could
just be something like as simple as that, right. I know,
we were looking at at some sources about Islamic law
(42:39):
and the interpretation of Islamic laws concerning games of chance
versus games of skill, and it seems like for the
for the most part, based on what we're looking at,
generally gambling is bad. Gambling is against the rules. But
games that have dice in them, if they are games
of skill, you know, it's generally okay. So that specifically
the uh, you know, gungeon and dragons is fine. I
(43:02):
think there's a difference opinion among difference. Yes, you're still
you're still going to find some some individuals that have
you know, there are a lot stricter on this and
and and stricter on the interpretation and would say that no,
if their dice involved, or there's some sort of chance element,
then then it is not permitted. You know. Going back
to the sort of adaptive or revolutionary framework, I wonder
if you can fundamentally class games of chance versus games
(43:24):
of skill as as having different kinds of roles in
our biology and our psychology. Yeah, yeah, probably so. And
maybe that's again one of the reasons that it's so
perfect when when those two things are balanced in a
single game where you do need skill to win, and
yet there are these these these unpredictable moments, these these
(43:46):
turning points that can totally change the outcome, and no
amount of skill, Like maybe skill will be essential to
survive those twists and turns. Yeah, I mean dealing with
dealing with unforeseen circumstances is a skill in a way.
The the skill of versatility is the ability to face
the vicissitudes of fate and come up with a with
a way around. Like candy Land is definitely a game
(44:09):
that requires no skill. You know, if anybody has ever
played with the child knows virtually it's just all random movement.
There's there's not really any there are no decisions to
be made. You're the complete whims of the universe. When
it comes to that, that's going to be the one
that God's really hate clocking in for because they have
to do all the work. But then you have games
(44:31):
like chess right where yes you're having to respond to
changes that are perpetrated, but they're perpetrated by your opponent
at any rate. I do want to drive home that
whether we're looking at this idea of of games and
board games as the safe sublimation of competition, or as
something that emerged out of divination practices. Uh, we can't
really know for sure. There's evidence for both of these. Uh,
(44:52):
They're likely other reasons in play as well, including just
the desire to do something that is amuses you, something
that is fun. But I'm still haunted by that question.
How did the thing that amuses us, the thing that's fun,
become moving around little tiles on top of a pattern surface,
or you know, or like rolling a knucklebone and seeing
(45:13):
how many of a piece of tokens we got to take,
or something such a strange and abstract way of approaching games,
which in their core, they should involve the body, right,
they should involve like you should be playing house, or
you should be play fighting, you should be running a race,
but instead we're doing it in this abstract space with
(45:34):
these little representative figurines. I mean, it almost seems like
it suggests to me that there could be some kind
of relationship between the emergence of board games as this
abstracted form of play and the emergence of writing as
this abstracted form of representing thoughts. This abstracted form of speech. Yeah,
taking what's going on inside our minds and put in
(45:57):
externalizing it because they think of one of the the
key things that our mind does is we're we're simulating
future events. We're engaging in mental time travel, both past
and future. We're trying to envision what is going to
happen and how we're going to react to stuff like
that happening. And it's a purely mental, uh mental exercise.
So it's in a sense planning it all out or
(46:20):
doing just very abstract versions of planning it all out
in a physical system in a board game like that's
that's perfectly in keeping with the spirit of play fighting,
but it's a different type of fight. It's the kind
of fight that that that really only conscious beings are
capable of engaging. This is really interesting, and that's why
I am so excited to come back next time and
(46:41):
talk about the earliest known evidence of board games. What
do the earliest board games look like? What are they?
That's right, it's it's there's some fascinating examples to to
run through, but we've run the full course for this episode.
So in the meantime, as you're waiting for next week's
episode to come out. Head on over to Invention paw
dot com. That is the mothership for this show. That's
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(47:23):
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(47:44):
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