Commentary: Commentary: It is commonly accepted, if not always understood, that play is essential for child development; but what about adults?
Joan Moriarity has no board certification, but in her role as “game guru” at the Snakes & Lattes Board Game Café in Toronto, she is something of a play therapist for adults, because play is also necessary for grown human beings.
With journalist and tabletop game enthusiast Jonathan Kay as coauthor, Moriarity has produced a collection of short essays on human themes both in the design of games and in the conventions of play.
“Your Move: What board games teach us about life,” out next week from Sutherland House, serves not only as an introduction to a variety of games old and new, generally from Europe and America, but as a beginner-level sociology of how modern humans imagine history and society through play.
Games involving boards, dice, cards and physical accoutrements have not only survived alongside video games, but the billion-dollar industry is thriving in what Kay calls a “modern board game renaissance.”
The spirit of play is not dependent on manufactured games, of course: Humans are adept at creating games and finding a sense of play in all manner of tasks. When humans play games together, however, there are certain conventions and an imaginary space — Moriarity calls it the ‘magic circle’ — that govern how players treat the game and one another, and how much everyday reality is allowed in the space. The conventions may be unspoken but when one is violated, everyone notices.
Moriarity elaborates on that “play contract” in an essay using the 2008 cooperative game Pandemic to explore the tension between striving for success in a game while remaining detached enough to experiment without fear of loss and failure.
It reminded me of the night I gave up competitive sports, after my middle school basketball team lost an exciting and competitive match, when a fellow player slammed me against a locker and scolded me for admitting I had enjoyed the game despite our loss.“The brutal reality of our lives has taught us that when we face a challenge, there are only two acceptable outcomes,” she writes in the introduction of her new book. “Succeed brilliantly on your first attempt, or do not try at all … We ignore the slogans that tell us to be daring and obey the unspoken rules that tell us to be invisible, even though we well know that the challenges of our time will not be solved without bold, creative approaches.”
Meanwhile, Moriarity and Kay explore some of the behaviors encouraged by how games are designed, exploring how games like Scattergories and even Scrabble can subtly jeopardize harmony among family and friends.
Kay interviews game designers and explores some of the book’s more abstract themes through descriptions of games exploring historical battles, economic relations, cultural appropriation, differences between post-war games popular in the U.S. and Europe — and the inevitable chapter on Monopoly and capitalism.
Kay and I approach capital through different frameworks, inclining me to refute his view of capitalist relations via stability theory and system dynamics, but that would be a matter for conversation over Monopoly, perhaps, or even Class Struggle, the 1978 tongue-in-cheek Marxist answer to Monopoly. (If we could find a copy.)
The authors’ voices and interests dovetail beautifully in prose that is conversational yet thoughtful and intellectually curious, accessible enough to open doors to further reading, and perhaps to a decent game store to find something new to explore with friends and family.
“Your Move: What board games teach us about life,” by Joan Moriarity and Jonathan Kay. Sutherland House, 192 pages, $17.95 (softcover)