Invention Playlist 3: Board Games, Part 1

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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(02:12):
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

(02:33):
of fun 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 physical apparatus, like I remember seeing the commercials

(02:58):
for mouse Trap. I think the game was that had
all these traps that would fall down on figures, 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 at least it's not this just box
of junk that has to be assembled. Well. Another example

(03:21):
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 could spend those on prizes like it's Chucky
cheese or something, you know, get a switchblade comb but

(03:42):
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 because it seemed get involved a talking robot
on the board, and I think the premise was like

(04:04):
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 I'm almost positive this game must be terrible,
like not very fun, not very replayable. But I just

(04:27):
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 everything is terrible, like that Star Trek board
game that has a the guy who keeps saying experience beach. Yeah,

(04:50):
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 game in general, generally, there is a distinction between
fluff and mechanics, and I would add that there is
an additional um part of this trifecta, that being materials. So,

(05:11):
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 no fluff. It
could just be a system of numbers, the kind of

(05:32):
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 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

(05:54):
think with no fluff is like go it is just
tiles with rules or not. You know, Peace is 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 maybe people
have in some cases for all I know. But the
Bear game itself is the draw is just the mechanics.

(06:15):
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 along spaces. Yeah,
so so the fluff and candy Land is really good,
but also the material you know, it has a has

(06:36):
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, I had
this material aspect of the game where you're like, that
looks so fun. I just want to press that thing

(06:57):
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. 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

(07:18):
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 in the
game to knock your player back down the mountain. And

(07:39):
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 the context
of invention, because board games are not the only, not

(08:00):
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 their most
basic functional sense, and other things become popular just because

(08:20):
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 was so good,
you know. It's like these space soldiers and armor fighting
xenomorph like aliens, the tyranned gene steelers, and so I

(08:44):
was instantly in. I was instantly sold by the fluff,
the the figurines look 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 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

(09:07):
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 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

(09:28):
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 of of
the mechanics of games, the way we play games and
the sort of games we play. Yes, that is really

(09:50):
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, there are
a few basic types. There's like the type where you
try to reach a space on a board before everyone

(10:11):
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 keep coming up with
new games that have never existed before, almost all the
games we come up with are in some way that

(10:33):
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 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

(10:53):
it's a fighting game, etcetera. Of course, board games are
not something that is found in nature. They are a
product of humans have iization, 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? And what role
does it play for us? Now, before we explore the
the invention and the role of board games in human culture,

(11:16):
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, 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

(11:37):
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 kind of a simulation of something
in reality with lower stakes usually, uh, And that's something

(12:00):
it can exist even without some sort of physical 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's say, play fighting where it's
like they're fighting, but they're not really fighting. The stakes
are not the same, right, And that this is a
really interesting psychological and biological question. It's interesting to me.

(12:23):
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 what exactly
play is, or what exactly a game is. In fact,
that the philosopher Ludvig Wittgenstein used the example of a

(12:46):
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 that
he called family resemblances quote a complicated network of similarities,

(13:07):
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,
the proceedings that we call games, I mean board games,
card games, ball games, Olympic games, and so on. What

(13:29):
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.
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.

(13:52):
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?
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

(14:13):
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 here
is 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

(14:34):
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.
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

(14:58):
it when we see it. We point out a thing
and say that's a game or that is play, But
you can't put together a comprehensive definition that includes everything
that is a game or everything that is play, right, Yeah, Yeah,
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,

(15:20):
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
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

(15:43):
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,
and yet there is a distinctive difference between the two. Yeah,
it can be really difficult. Is so if Witgenstein is right,
we're faced with a problem in trying to, say, organize

(16:04):
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
always seemed 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

(16:25):
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,
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

(16:46):
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
in two thousand and ten. And this is this is
his definition quote. Play is repeated behavior that is incompletely

(17:09):
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 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

(17:33):
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. I mean, there are a lot
of people who do it recreat So there are a
lot of people who certainly need to hunt to some
degree or certainly consume the the food that they obtain

(17:54):
through hunting. But anyway, I continue, Okay, so you might
in that case, last recreational hunting in fact, as a
form of play. Maybe it is, but 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.

(18:19):
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 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

(18:41):
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
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 you don't actually go in for

(19:04):
the kill or anything. So gladiator competition play in some cases,
well that might be something up for debate. Yeah, But
Burghard 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

(19:26):
not be normally a target of attack. I think about
the way like a dog will play with a ball
like it 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,

(19:47):
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
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 being chased 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

(20:10):
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
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. Today's episode is brought to

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(22:51):
the things, of course, we mentioned earlier, is that we
know play pre dates things like board games because play
is 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

(23:14):
stalk and pounce on each other and engage in various
forms of play. Fighting. Cats are I think, sometimes even
more playful than people give them credit for. Oh yeah,
especially to 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 that permanent state of kitten hood. For instance, my
cat um stalks and attacks my feet pretty much every day,

(23:38):
but does not seem to be doing it with intent
to um maime 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

(23:58):
than that joke at for the joke. 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 they're in say mice, Like I was
reading an article by the researchers Leelle and Dugatkin and
Serena Rodriguez for Berkeley Publication and uh, they were pointing

(24:20):
out that research has found that mice 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 controlling life. So there seems to be something

(24:42):
going on where like young mice are 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. So this is the

(25:05):
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

(25:26):
interesting question I came across 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,

(25:49):
like like a dog would 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

(26:10):
to people who worked regularly with 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
inflatable 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

(26:32):
ethological definitions of play. That's that's crazy because I would
certainly have thought, okay, the raven might play, it is
an intelligent creature. But reptiles, yeah, yeah, I would have
been there with you. But but apparently this is just
common knowledge to people who wear hands on with crocodilians
a lot, even fish. There there is debate about this

(26:52):
about whether this really counts is play. But for example,
they sometimes jump when there's no need to, when stress
levels are low. Why there's nothing chasing them. They're not
getting anything from it. And we've talked about fish jumping
on stuff to play your mind. 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

(27:13):
to invertebrates, it really does get much trickier to find
things that could reasonably be classed as play, except, 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

(27:33):
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, 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

(27:54):
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 these
reports this is very controversial. I guess a lot of
this is getting into an individual organisms u tendencies towards neophilia, uh,
the the you know, the likelihood that they're gonna seek

(28:16):
out novel experiences or items, and there's if they are
you know, a curious creature that benefits has a survival
benefit in trying things out, such as we talked 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

(28:38):
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
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 an moals,

(29:00):
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
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 K. Smith, this would mean quote

(29:23):
play primarily affords juveniles practice towards the exercise of later skills.
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

(29:47):
mating actions that you know mimic these activities in an
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

(30:08):
later show advantages at this skill compared to individuals that
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

(30:32):
be the board game. A couple of alternate theories that
came across because they were mentioned by dugat 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

(30:52):
and social skills, like play allows animals to experience and
internalize their social clan sense of fairness, 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

(31:13):
learning how to play chess at school, and a lot
of it is, you know, certainly there's a there's a
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

(31:35):
general exercise. Yeah, so I think that that's a strong
possibility as well. Another theory is from the check researcher
Marx 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

(31:57):
life and deal with that surprise graceful. So things like
being knocked off balance when 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 very good point, because I'm thinking about like

(32:18):
various physical sports, a lot of it does seem to
have a it seemed to 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.

(32:41):
But then the best laid plans right foiled foiled. You
have to figure out, well, 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 towards people who do not

(33:01):
lose or face adversity in games. Well, you know, the
person who flips the 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

(33:23):
react like that to games, they can probably react like
that too to just about 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. But I think I think it's
a testament to 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

(33:46):
what am I doing? You know? But but 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

(34:06):
theory I want to mention before we move on. 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

(34:29):
even adults are playful and not just children. 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

(34:51):
a sense of leisure there, right, Like this individual has
space in their life for something of little or no
consequence like a game. Right, I mean, in the more 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, and I'm chasing a
ball isn't gonna feed me, but I'm big enough I

(35:13):
can catch something later. Yeah. So I mean, ultimately we
don't know which of these theories are correct, and there
are other ones too, we don't have time to chase
them all down 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

(35:35):
this we've looked at, I think one of the interesting
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

(35:57):
for a lot of different things, because, as we mentioned earlier,
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

(36:20):
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

(36:42):
sports 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

(37:03):
have some impressive uh floff, 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

(37:24):
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at eight p m. Easter seventh Central on b e T. Alright,
we're back. So in researching this 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

(40:20):
provides a nice overview, and one of the things that
he drives home is that board games are probably as
old as human culture. 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

(40:41):
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 unlikely that there's a single necessity or breakthrough that
evolved into game playing. But there are a cup of
key theories that I think are worth considering. Okay, So

(41:03):
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 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,

(41:23):
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
terrible if we did this full 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

(41:45):
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
caused us to want to band together in groups in
support of, you know, against a common enemy that's also
banding together. We have I think some inherent warlike instincts,

(42:07):
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
is money on the line, it is still general generally
your life is not on the line right now. The
second idea, and this one, this one I really find interesting,

(42:30):
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 I would be trying to answer an unanswerable
question 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,

(42:54):
asking a 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 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,

(43:14):
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 specifically UH tossing a few coins, laying some sticks
down to keep track of what what the coins tell you,

(43:34):
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 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

(43:56):
of the future or anything like that, they could still
be useful or adaptive in that they might tend to
prompt action when you are otherwise frozen, Like it's possible,
you know, you're just faced with a problem, you don't
know what 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

(44:19):
forward with some type of response. I remember in that
eaching episode that we did, we we looked to a
quote from Julian Jaynes, who is the individual that was
behind the 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,

(44:42):
he said quote. But this simplicity, even uh, triviality to us,
should not blind us from seeing the profound psychological problem involved,
as well as appreciating its remarkable historical importance. We are
so used to the huge variety of games of chance,
throwing dice through lett wheels, itse ra all of them
vestiges of this ancient practice of divination by lots, that

(45:04):
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 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,

(45:25):
you know, ancestors to the board game, to games of
chance being simply a way 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, 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

(45:47):
judging by their writings when we have access to those,
it does seem like they didn't really have much of
an idea of randomness, at least to me. It seems
more like there's a general belief in sort of like
determine as them by the gods or by some kind
of power of fate that you know, wins something that
that appears random happens, say even just the outcome of

(46:08):
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 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,

(46:29):
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 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

(46:52):
deliverance by the gods or or a punishment by the gods,
like the gods are determining who wins your dice game. Yeah,
it's kind of like you're going, all right, God, I
need some help on this. Give me a sign. 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

(47:14):
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. 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.

(47:37):
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 forbid games of 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

(47:58):
have 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, 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

(48:20):
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, if
a board game or a game is simply a simulation,
a simplification with lowered stakes, if you then raise the
stakes again, does that become gambling? And it's because that's

(48:41):
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 winning a little more icky. Somehow everyone's mileage
is going to very on that. Well, but that's my

(49:01):
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 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,

(49:23):
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 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.

(49:47):
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, gungeons and Dragons is fine. Uh,
I think there's a difference opinion among difference You're you're
we're 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

(50:07):
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
of skill as as having different kinds of roles in
our biology and our psychology. Yeah, yeah, probably so. And
maybe maybe that's again one of the reasons that it's

(50:30):
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 uh,
these 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

(50:50):
with dealing with unforeseen circumstances is a skill in a way.
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 that
requires no skill. You know, if anybody has ever played
with the child knows virtually it's just all random movement.

(51:12):
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
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

(51:34):
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,
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,

(51:56):
how did the thing that amuses us. The thing that's
fun be come moving around little tiles on top of
a pattern surface, or you know, or like rolling a
knucklebone and seeing 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

(52:18):
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 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

(52:41):
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 externalizing it,
because they think of one of 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

(53:02):
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 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

(53:23):
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 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

(53:44):
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 pod dot com.
That is the mothership for this show. That's where we'll
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(54:28):
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