Recently I’ve noticed a number of game-related items demonstrating
how powerfully games can affect real life when they move beyond the
comfortable confines where we safely enjoy them: the kitchen table,
family game night, the game club shed, teen gaming day at the
library, the Friendly Local Game Store, game conventions. Certainly
games occur in reality – read Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens
and one learns games and game-like activities occupy particular
spaces in which specific rules of play operate – but when games
move beyond their usual boundaries they can exert a positive
influence in the real world, sometimes just for fun, sometimes for
serious issues.
Self
Improvement
Anneliese Griffin’s recent article at Quake,
“Playing board games can make you a nicer person with better relationships,” saw widespread circulation on my Google+ feeds
among gaming geeks, and justly so. While it might seem like a
superficial exploration of the topic, it offers a few juicy quotes
summarizing some benefits we gain when we gather around the table for
a friendly game “Board
games, along with role playing and table games like Magic:
The Gathering
and Dungeons
and Dragons,
allow players to enter into a controlled state of conflict.” Every
day we face difficult situations, whether simply unpleasant to dire.
Games
allow us to face
conflicts
in a safe space, the gaming table, where we can take risks, spar with
opponents, and not worry about the real-world implications. While
games can offer a respite from real life issues, it can also help
prepare us to deal better with them and with each other. “As
film and media studies professor Mary Flanagan tells The
Atlantic,
board games prompt us to reflect on ‘turn-taking and rules and
fairness.’” When we step back from the gaming table, and even as
we play, we get a chance to look at ourselves and each other. How do
we handle winning and losing? Do we celebrate the well-played game or
do we wallow in defeat and gloat in victory? If we can learn to be
more gracious and understanding during the ups and downs of a game,
can we translate that to how we manage the difficulties of everyday
real life? The article reflects on some introductory issues we might
explore more deeply in experimenting with positive ways games can
affect rela life.
Let’s
Pretend
This past Saturday our family spent the day in Staunton, VA, for
Queen City Mischief & Magic, a weekend-long celebration of all
things Harry Potter. The city closed downtown streets, retailers
offered special Potter-themed goodies for sale and fun giveaways,
other groups provided crafts and events, and costumed volunteers
posed for photos, performed magic tricks, sorted people into
Hogwarts’ houses, and otherwise enabled fans to geek out over the
Harry Potter universe. Not everything here was a game of the more
rigid kind adventure gamers like, but it certainly involved lots of
play with some game-related elements. We didn’t make the Quidditch
game Friday night, but our son, the Little Guy, signed up for a
Wizard Dueling Class; after learning spells and their effects he
engaged in a friendly (and rather energetic) mock duel against a
fellow student. We spent some time tossing the golden snitches he
made into the air to see how well they’d spin on their feather
wings. People in amazing Potter-inspired costumes crowded downtown
Staunton along with regularly dressed Muggles/mundanes, everyone
complimenting folks on costumes, interacting in and out of character,
and having a wonderful time with a playful spirit. We even stopped by
an actual game store, the venerable Dragon’s Hoard, a pillar of the
Virginia gaming community, where my wife bought me a King of Tokyo
monster pack featuring Great Cthulhu. The event brought together
Potter fans, community volunteers, and local merchants for a unique
experience, encouraging positive play and engagement in a public
space.
Panzer
Kids Not Just for Kids
On a more serious and still personal note, members of the HAWKS (Harford Area Weekly Kriegspielers), a wargaming club based in
Maryland, recently used my Panzer Kids miniatures game to help
engage Alzheimer’s patients at a facility in nearby Pennsylvania.
While this was certainly a controlled environment, it wasn’t one we
normally associate with game playing. Frequent readers know I’m a
huge advocate of introducing gaming to kids and newcomers; it was my
primary motivation designing Panzer Kids. But I never thought
the basic game, combined with the visual spectacle of a miniature
wargame and tabletop interaction among players could move beyond the
goal of promoting the adventure gaming hobby and serve as a tool to
reach out and engage an often neglected community in our society. Ed
Duffy and Sam Fuson prepared a game specifically to involve
the participants in problem solving and decision making, promote
motor functions moving tanks and rolling dice, offer an interesting
visual display, and give them a chance to try something new. (You
can read the entire “after action report” at the HAWKS website.)
We don’t usually think of introducing adventure gaming to the older
demographic, but the same strategy of distilling games to basic
elements for kids also works when using games to engage the
elderly...though still with some adjustments for the specific
audience’s needs. In bringing games beyond the club setting and
their usual audience, the HAWKS helped engage Alzheimer’s patients
at various levels to enrich their experiences in this stage of their
lives. It’s also a great demonstration of taking the initiative to
serve this community through play.
Simulating
the Real World
Connections UK is an amazing annual conference with the stated aims of bringing
“professional wargame practitioners together to share and spread
best practice” and “to advance and sustain the art, science and
application of wargaming”...including military professionals,
scholars and students, and hobby gamers.
It crossed my radar thanks to British wargamer veteran Robert
(Bob) Cordery’s fine Wargaming Miscellany blog, where he featured
daily reports on the sessions. The highlight this year was a
“megagame” called Dire Straits simulating a near-future
military and political tensions centered on the Korean peninsula. The
game was so topical the BBC News featured a story about it, “Can war games help us avoid real-world conflict?” The game included
more than 100 participants representing nations involved in the
region, numerous maps and pieces, and occasional developments in the
forms of “live inserts,” including actual Tweets from a sitting
United States president, to add elements of uncertainty to the
situation. Thankfully all teams managed to avoid open conflict and
nuclear war, though upon evaluating the game afterward it seemed “An
unpredictable US policy led North Korea’s neighbours to seek regional
solutions. None relied on US leadership in the game,” with other
regional powers working toward their own agendas.
Exploring the Connections UK website allows access
to presentation materials not only from the 2017 conference but also
from previous years. For those interested how the
military and academia are integrating games
as training/learning tools the
site’s a veritable rabbit hole into which one can easily disappear.
Of particular note are the Wargaming 101 presentation with a pack of
online reading materials; a talk about the British Defence Wargaming
Handbook, also available online; a session on wargaming in education;
a piece on the Western Approaches Tactical Unit, which demonstrates
how wargaming simulations helped convoy operations during World War
II. As
I explored the conference sites I stumbled upon Professor Philip
Sabin’s excellent game, Take
That Hill!,
an engaging solitaire exercise showing how wargames can serve to
train soldiers in some tactical basics like “fire and movement”
(find it on the conference’s Introduction to Wargaming page not far
from the top). Oddly
enough, when I checked the corresponding site for the American
version of Connections I could find no such treasure trove of
information shared with the public....
These all represent small steps in moving gaming from the hobby
sphere into more mainstream pursuits in all fun or seriousness. I
sometimes worry we don’t play as much as we should, certainly not
face-to-face with others in this overly connected electronic age of
the internet, cell phones, apps, and other distractions. Maybe our
lives and those of others around us might improve through games,
whether as safe-space diversions from reality where we can interact
without risk or as means for education and scholarship to broaden our
horizons.
