Abstract

This paper outlines a PhD research project exploring the intersection between postcolonial studies, hobby board games and the museum sector. Many public museums in Europe have their genesis in the idea of ‘educating the masses’ and fostering the notion of nationhood. For Britain, this meant establishing the nation as an imperial and colonial force (Bennett, 1995). Modern hobby board games first hit the shelves with the publication of The Settlers of Catan in 1995.[1] Since then, the industry has continued to expand, with a projected worth of US$2.12 billion by the end of 2023 (Statista, 2023). But this ostensibly cozy hobby hides a dark underside: an industry and community seemingly obsessed with games re-enacting colonial settings and exploitation, but almost entirely lacking in critical reflection. Today, both the museum sector and the board game industry are in desperate need of decolonising their processes and practices. Using an iterative participatory action research methodology that centres on the affective nature of play (Pearce, 1992), this article asks how playing these colonial themed board games can be used as a method through which to explore the construction of knowledge around colonial histories and legacies, and the potential for them to act as decolonising tools.[2] How can we use what we learn about knowledge construction through play to improve both the board game industry, and the way play is utilised in museum environments?

Footnotes

[1] The ‘modern board game hobby’ is widely accepted by hobbyists as starting with the publication of ‘The Settlers of Catan’ designed by Klaus Teuber and published by Kosmos in 1995.

[2] I have chosen to use the word ‘decolonising’ rather than ‘decolonisation’ here, as I feel the latter bears connotations of a defined process with a specific endpoint. To me, decolonising is a fluid and ongoing process, hence the use of the present-continuous tense.

Introduction

“Ok, so now that all of us have decided our bids in secret, we can lift our player screens and reveal who has won each auction.”

We are playing as 19th century natural scientists exploring the island of Papua and collecting ‘new species’ for ‘prestige’. The ‘species’ that we’re bidding on this round are a beetle, a snake, and an Indigenous man.

The description above comes from a trial play session I facilitated as part of my current research project, which explores the connections between the representation of colonialism in Euro-American designed board games, museum practice, the act of play in knowledge construction and decolonising. The board game we’re playing is Papua, designed by Javier Garcia and Diego Ibáñez and released in 2018 by publisher Devir. In many respects, Papua is a typical modern board game in the ‘Euro’ style – there’s no direct conflict between players and there are multiple ways to gain points. Even the theme of White men travelling to an exotic land to exploit its Peoples and resources is a common one.[1] The fact that the game encourages you to collect and sometimes discard ‘tribe cards’, featuring an illustration of an exoticised Indigenous Papuan man, is perhaps a shade more on the nose than many other games of its kind. More often, the dominant White male culture of both the board game industry and the gamers themselves acts as a veil to help normalise the ‘othering’ of people of colour and non-western cultures. As the industry and the community surrounding it continues to expand however, that veil is slipping, revealing an ugly underside to an ostensibly benign hobby.

The box cover art for Papua, released in 2018 by Devir.

Image: author’s own.

“Whoever manages to collect the most relevant discoveries will be remembered throughout history.”[2]

Papua was the game that solidified my interest in pursuing a PhD. I was working for Leeds Museums and Galleries and my role included creating online learning resources for teachers to use in the classroom. Increasingly, these resources were focusing on colonial histories and legacies. I was (and still am) part of the museum’s Colonial Histories Working Group and these experiences provided me with opportunities to trace some of the contemporary social, political and economic ramifications of colonial oppression, and explore the multiple meanings of decolonisation within a (UK) museum context.[3]

Many public museums in Europe have their genesis in the idea of ‘educating the masses’ and fostering the notion of nationhood (Bennett, 1995; McLean, 1998). For Britain, this meant establishing the nation as an imperial and colonial force, helping to cultivate and reinforce the belief that the average British citizen was superior to their colonised subjects (Bennett, 1995). Many thousands of objects collected during British colonial and imperial oppression wound up in private collections and public museums. Through the processes of cataloguing, displaying and interpretating these objects, museums in Britain reinforced the ‘othering’ of colonised Peoples, labelling them as ‘savages’, with ‘primitive’ cultures that could only benefit from the ‘civilising’ effects of colonisation (Prianti and Suyadnya, 2022). Today, these same objects are still found in museum collections across the U.K. with the most famous perhaps being the Benin bronzes and Parthenon marbles, currently held by the British Museum. 

“Race around Jamaica to claim its spoils!”[4]

At the same time that I was exploring Britain’s colonial histories and legacies in my professional role, in my personal life, I was delving deeper into the board game hobby, listening to gaming podcasts, watching video reviews and growing and curating my collection of games. In doing so, I became increasingly aware of the industry’s apparent endless and uncritical repackaging of colonial settings and mechanisms and the ‘great White man’ trope, and the tendency of some (vocal) members of the community to disarm any critique of these by employing the argument of ‘it’s just a game’; the implication being ‘and therefore it doesn’t matter’.[5]

This juxtaposition between the museum sector on one side and the board game industry on the other started to both fascinate and perturb me. On the one hand, I was contributing to the ongoing process of learning to decolonise our work at Leeds Museums and Galleries, and understanding the extent to which Whiteness has been normalised and deeply embedded within the systems (and myself). On the other, as a board gamer, I was encountering the same normalisation of Whiteness and the uncritical use of colonial themes to sell objects of leisure.

“…find treasures and make the most money possible by selling them to the museum.”[6]

As my interest in this problem grew, I began to search academic literature for relevant papers and discovered that board games have long been overlooked in academia, with the burgeoning field of ‘game studies’ overwhelmingly focused on their younger - and arguably flashier – cousin; the video game (Perron and Wolf, 2008; Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023). Approaching board games from the viewpoint of a museum professional, the dearth of academic interest and lack of recognition of the significance of board games as objects of cultural media struck me as a strange oversight. In museum catalogues, board games sit within the social history collection and, as objects of material culture, they take their place on an equal par with all other objects in the collection. They are recognised for their role in reflecting dominant cultural norms, they regularly feature in exhibitions and they are even the subject of learning resources (Leeds Museums and Galleries, 2019).[7]

Thankfully, the last few years have seen this tide of academic disinterest beginning to turn. The role of board games as meaningful objects of cultural media has been recognised and discussed (Begy, 2017; Booth, 2018, 2021). Tanya Pobuda’s (2018, 2022) important work highlighted and critiqued the lack of racial and gender diversity within the board game industry. More recently, the publication Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games (Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023) caught the interest of both academics and members of the board game industry and community. On the community side, podcasts and vlogs such as Beyond Solitaire (Davidson, 2020 (ongoing)), Shelf Stories (Perez, 2020 (ongoing)) and No Pun Included (Bladukas, 2020 (ongoing)) regularly include detailed and nuanced critiques on what has been called the industry’s ‘colonialism problem’ (Winkie 2021). As a result, the problematic nature of some aspects of the hobby are becoming more visible and the voices calling for change are multiplying.

“Try to make a fortune in the spice market with your European shipping company.”[8]

Where does all of this leave the role of play in my research? While board games are objects of material culture and can (and should) be analysed as such, they are designed primarily as objects to be played with. A game includes rules - systems and constraints that players must follow - and without these, it would cease to be a game, but would simply be a collection of miscellaneous components in a box. Playing the game, by applying said rules, sets games apart from other forms of cultural media and, crucially, in the act of playing the game, the primary meaning making is revealed (Mäyrä, 2008). If we accept that board games are a legitimate form of cultural media, reflecting and helping to shape dominant cultural values through both semiosis and through the act of gameplay, or ‘ludosis’ to use Mäyrä’s (2008) term, then we need to start asking some difficult questions of colonial themed games, and their affective role on gameplayers.

Play is an integral part of human nature (Huizinga, 1949; Mäyrä, 2008), and different aspects of play have been widely documented across different cultures, both ancient and modern (de Voogt et al., 2013). Most museums offer a range of playful activities in the gallery or specially designed sessions, or both. These are generally aimed at younger audiences and often labelled ‘family activities’. We seem to have a hard time accepting that adults too want opportunities to play (Sutton-Smith, 1997), and research on play and adults has lagged far behind that focused on the role of play in child development, although this is now beginning to change (Cohen, 2018). Audience age aside, the multiple roles of games and play in museums, and the practicalities involved in enabling play in a gallery setting, is a hot topic in the sector, with a two-day conference dedicated to the subject occurring just a few weeks before I wrote this article (MuseumNext, 2023). Through my research, I want to also challenge the prevailing culture in museums of using games to predominantly engage younger audiences and, instead, shift the focus towards the potential of play to facilitate new and meaningful discussions around museums, artefacts and colonial histories and legacies.

“Take on the role of a colonial power seeking fame, glory, and riches in the New World.”[9]

Drawing these postcolonial, museum sector and board game industry strands together, my research utilises an iterative form of participant action research, involving playing chosen board games with participants and engaging in facilitated discussion. In this way I am both the researcher and participant, necessitating a high degree of reflexivity. The approach aims to utilise the affective nature of playing the chosen games as a form of object-based learning, a concept that forms the core of all museum-based educational activities, from exhibitions, to school workshops and everything in between. Museum educators recognise the value of material objects both for their very materiality, and for their affective nature. This research project takes that object-based approach and augments it, utilising the physical, mental and social interactions of gameplay to ask questions about how play shapes knowledge about colonisation and decolonisation, and how it can help us understand the process of that knowledge construction. The board games will be used as a scaffold, to facilitate the complex and often difficult conversations around colonial histories and legacies, with the research method posing the question of whether these games can be used as tools of decolonising. 

To capture gameplay and discussion amongst research participants, the play sessions will be audio and video recorded, using a top-down camera that will record player actions, interactions and conversation, but exclude participant faces. This approach has been chosen to help make the experience as welcoming and non-invasive as possible, while still enabling meaningful recording of the process. Reflection and evaluation of each session will enable adjustments to take place between sessions in an iterative process aimed at responding to both my impressions of the effectiveness of the approach as the researcher, and those of the participants. 

This leads me into the autoethnographic aspect of my research. I am a White woman, educated through the British comprehensive school system, following the national curriculum. In preparation for the participatory side of my research, I have been reflecting on the impact of my different life experiences and the intersectionality of my identities. Learning to recognise my enculturation into a White, western epistemology, to challenge my own biases and to critically reflect on my positionality in terms of researcher and research participant has been a difficult, fascinating and, at times, deeply disturbing process. This is, of course, an ongoing process, and one that will be directly impacted by the input of research participants engaged in my project.

“Go on expeditions to find artefacts, then sell them to museums for fame and fortune”.[10]

With the hundreds of games that feature colonialism, I was faced with the conundrum of how to pick the few games to focus on for my research. I want to use the games and game play to explore knowledge construction around colonial histories and legacies, including the role of museums in the past, present and future. I also want to make sure that the research is open to as wide a range of people as possible, whether gamers or not. I therefore selected three games, each one of different complexity and length, and each featuring museums in some way. The chosen games are Archaeology: The New Expedition (Walker-Harding, 2016), Papua (Garcia, 2018) and Museum (Dubus and Melison, 2019).[11]

The box cover art for Archaeology: The New Expedition, released in 2016 by Z-Man Games.

Image: author’s own.

Archaeology: The New Expedition is a simple card game that puts players in the role of a pastiche Indiana Jones character, digging in ancient Egypt to uncover precious artefacts. Players collect sets of different artefact cards, ranging in value from scraps of parchment and broken cups, up to the rare pharaoh mask (that looks suspiciously like Tutankhamun’s). Players compete to sell their collected artefacts to the museum, all the while attempting to evade the robber character, who is depicted wearing a shemagh and brandishing a curved knife. There are variations in the game which allow players to delve into tombs, pyramids and sphinx statues to uncover more artefacts, but the premise remains the same: collect and sell more ancient Egyptian artefacts than the other players to win.

Three cards from the game Archaeology: The New Exhibitions, released in 2016 by Z-Man Games.

Image: author’s own.

I introduced Papua at the beginning of this article, but it’s worth spending a bit more time to describe the game since the natural sciences continues to be an area that is easily overlooked when talking about colonial impacts. In Papua, you play as the leader of a scientific exhibition tasked with collecting plants and animals and must manage your team of workers, which may include ‘natives’. It’s a dice and auction game, where players compete to collect sets of specimens, with the highly disturbing inclusion of an Indigenous man represented in the game by ‘tribe cards’. Event cards can provide players with special bonuses, such as receiving financial support from back home (depicted on the card by a group of elderly White men clapping) and giving a seminar (depicted by an elderly White man giving a lecture). Players can also either gain ‘help from the natives’ or be ‘captured’ (presumably by the ‘natives’ as the card for this shows White men held at spearpoint).

Three ‘event cards’ from the game Papua, released in 2018 by Devir.

Image: author’s own.

Perhaps unsurprisingly, Museum is a game about collecting artefacts from all over the world and displaying them in your own (European or American) museum. The game is set ‘… at the start of the 20th century, the golden age of museums’ (Dubus and Melison, 2019), and players can choose what to collect from 300 ‘artefacts’ including the “Great Wall of China”, the “Ziggurat of Ur” and “Inca Warrior Weapons”. Interestingly, the aforementioned Benin bronzes and Parthenon marbles do not appear in the game. The time period it is set in and the location of the museums that players manage in the game function together to identify players as White men. That they have the ‘right’ to collect these cultural artefacts and display them in their museums is a given.

All of these games normalise a historic White, Euro-American centric worldview, where exotic lands and Peoples exist to be exploited for their resources or labour and where cultural artefacts are available to be removed from their location of origin and deposited in a western museum. While it could be argued that on some level this is indeed historically accurate, the lack of criticality on the part of the game designers and publishers is highly problematic. By normalising these attitudes through game settings and mechanisms, the dominant culture within the board game industry (i.e. White male culture) is rendered invisible. As researcher Aaron Trammell (2023a) makes explicit in his work examining the development of the modern board game industry and the affective nature of play on people of colour; “Even though the hobby is international in scope, it still reflects a privileged white subjectivity with historical roots in imperialism”. In this cultural environment, play can represent an act of violence against those who are not part of this dominant culture (Trammell, 2023b).

Conclusion

The modern board game industry is growing rapidly. Just under 1,000 hobby games were released during 1990 but, by 2018, that number had increased to 4,500 (Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023). Within this, the number of games that utilise colonial settings also continues to grow. No longer tucked away in side streets, board game specific shops and cafes are spreading and, perhaps more interestingly, modern board games are going mainstream. In the US, they can now be found on the shelves of Walmart and Target, alongside mass-market stalwarts such as Monopoly, Connect 4 and Clue(do). In the UK, a similar story is playing out in Waterstones bookshops, with larger stores now stocking an impressive number of games that would once have only been found in a ‘friendly local games shop’. As more and more people are exposed to these games, it becomes increasingly important that we understand the impacts on knowledge construction through playing games with colonial settings and mechanisms, and the potential for utilising games and play as tools for decolonising, both in the museums sector and the board game industry. So, if you’re ready, grab your player piece and take your place at the table!

Footnotes

[1] Despite the depiction of a White woman on Papua’s box cover, no women feature in the actual game.

I have chosen to capitalise the W for ‘White’ to convey the concept that race is a cultural construct and that, while not all people who share the same skin colour share all the same experiences, there are some histories or social or cultural experiences that are shared by a large proportion of that group.

[2] Part of the publisher’s description of the board game Papua, released by Devir in 2018.

[3] The Colonial Histories Working Group is a voluntary working group withing Leeds Museums and Galleries, with members from across different teams, including Senior Management, Learning and Access, Curatorial and Audience Development.

[4] Strapline from the 2007 game Jamaica, released by Space Cowboys.

[5] There are many forum threads online, such as on Reddit, on the board game aggregator BoardGameGeek.com or comments on vlogs where ‘it’s only a game’ is put forward as a valid argument for upholding the status quo within the industry in terms of game settings, mechanisms and issues around representation.

[6] This is part of the description for the game Archaeology: The New Expedition, released in 2016 by Z-Man games.

[7] To give two recent, but very different, examples of board games forming part of museum exhibitions, Leeds Museums and Galleries 2022 exhibition ‘Money Talks’ included a stack of economic and stock market themed board games, and the antisemitic ‘Juden Raus!’ (Jews Out!) game, published in Germany in 1938, was featured in the Wiener Library’s temporary exhibition in 2023.

[8] The strapline for the 2023 game ‘East India Companies’ published by HUCH!

[9] Strapline for Empires: Age of Discovery, published by Eagle-Gryphon Games in 2015.

[10] Strapline for Artifacts, Inc. published by Red Raven Games in 2014.

[11] Descriptions, images and reviews of all these games (and thousands more) can be found on the website BoardGameGeek.com.

Author Biography

Izzy Bartley is a WRoCAH funded PhD Researcher at the University of Leeds, and a Digital Learning Officer at Leeds Museums and Galleries. Her research sits at the intersection between (board) games, play, museum practice and postcolonial theory.

Ethics and Funding Statement

Ethical approval for this research was provided by the University of Leeds. This work was supported by the Arts and Humanities Research Council (grant number AH/R012733/1) through the White Rose College of the Arts and Humanities.

How to cite this paper: Bartley, I. (2024). Learning from colonial themed board games: How can play help us explore knowledge construction and potentials for decolonising the museum sector and the board game industry? ‘Race’ and Socially Engaged Research Working Paper 2023: Contributions from inaugural conference held in York. Volume 1, pp. 20-33, https://sites.google.com/view/raceandsociallyengagedresearch/publications/working-paper/2024-volume-1 

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