Games of History

Games and Gaming as Historical Sources

Apostolos Spanos

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• ISBN:
  9781000397437
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Historiography
• Index: History

Games of History provides an understanding of how games as artefacts, textual and visual sources on games and gaming as a pastime or a "serious" activity can be used as sources for the study of history.

From the vast world of games, the book's focus is on board and card games, with reference to physical games, sports and digital games as well. Considering culture, society, politics and metaphysics, the author uses examples from various places around the world and from ancient times to the present to demonstrate how games and gaming can offer the historian an alternative, often very valuable and sometimes unique path to the past. The book offers a thorough discussion of conceptual and material approaches to games as sources, while also providing the reader with a theoretical starting point for further study within specific thematic chapters. The book concludes with three case studies of different types of games and how they can be considered as historical sources: the gladiatorial games, chess and the digital game Civilization.

Offering an alternative approach to the study of history through its focus on games and gaming as historical sources, this is the ideal volume for students considering different types of sources and how they can be used for historical study, as well as students who study games as primary or secondary sources in their history projects.

1

Conceptual Approaches to Games

Kings and queens, bishops and jokers, homes and prisons, area control and castle building, buying and selling, tiles and tickets, ladders and sandboxes, death and survival, attack and defense, tactics and strategy. Most of the names we use for game pieces, or moves or the overall ways of playing a game, are metaphors of concepts used originally in warfare, politics, social organization, cultural interactions, economic activities and everyday life.

Even though, the study of game concepts is still a white spot on the map of the game world, an unexplored area waiting for its study. From a historical perspective, the study of concepts related to specific games played in specific periods may shed light to the relevant historical entity's notion of human identity, everyday life, sociocultural and political interactions, or even warfare. As we will see in the following chapters, the names of game pieces, rules, tactics, or strategies illustrate the interaction between the magic circle of a game and the cultural, social, political and economic context in which the game was designed, produced and played.

But the study of game concepts is not easy and unproblematic. One of the main problems encountered by historians (as well as any other scholars in human and social studies) is related to the fact that most concepts do not always have the same content and the same meaning. This is something that applies to a considerable amount of social, cultural and political concepts. Concepts like democracy, justice, culture and truth, for example, have been discussed for centuries without getting a content we all, or at least most of us, may agree upon.

Before getting to the varied meaning of game concepts, I would like to say a few words on the difference between word and concept. Although they are often used as synonyms, the two terms are different. A word is just a series of letters or sounds put together to signify something. If this something is an object (a book, for example) the word remains a word. But if this something is an abstract idea, or a practice or a historical phenomenon, the word signifies a concept, for example the concepts of humanity, truth, or education. In some cases, a word that originally signifies an object may become a concept, if it reflects a political, social or cultural context and meaning. The word book is a word when it signifies a book in a library, but it becomes a concept in the expression “religions of the book” (referring to Judaism, Christianity and Islam), as the word book here signifies the holy texts the three religions are based on, or in the expression “by the book”, as here it signifies a set of rules or principles.

Conceptual studies focus on the content, meaning and development of concepts. An important dimension of the historical study of concepts is related to their relation and interaction with what Reinhart Koselleck has coined as historical situation (Zustand).¹ Such a perspective is something game scholars, game historians and historians in general might, and indeed should, include in their study of past games and gaming. Focusing on the relevant conceptual dimensions of games and gaming means in fact an effort to understand game terminology (a) as the result of a constant dialogue between games and historical reality and (b) as something that is susceptible to changes related to alterations of the historical reality in social and/or cultural and/or political terms.

The study of a game from a conceptual perspective could be based on two questions. The first focuses on the empirical evidence: Which terms are used to name the game itself, its pieces, sections, or movements, or its rules, the players, the expected or demanded interactions between players, or the ways players consider and use the rules? The second is analytical: What can we learn by studying these terms? The latter question might be approached from two different perspectives. Game studies could learn a lot about the game itself and its development in time. Human and social studies would focus on what we might learn about the inventors, designers, producers, promoters, sellers and buyers, and finally players of the game.

These questions, particularly the second, might be answered by using various methods, as for example hermeneutics or content analysis. Most conceptual approaches are efforts of contextualization: The concept at question has to be studied in relation to its historical context, which in its turn has several dimensions, the linguistic and the cultural being probably the most important ones. For the historian, such a contextualization cannot be only spatial, i.e. dedicated to political and cultural geography. It must be temporal as well, i.e. related to the period(s) at question. When trying to contextualize in terms of time, the historian should always remember that “the past is a foreign country”² and that one of the most serious mistakes s/he may make is to look at the past through her/his present eyeglasses. This includes the study of concepts: Every time we consider the use of a concept in the past, we have to be aware of its meaning in its specific period.³

What makes things more difficult is that various environments (scientific, political, social, cultural, professional, with many more) often build up their own content for various concepts that are central in their inquiries. Sometimes, concepts may be very useful when we try to describe one thing and may turn useless when used to describe something else that is supposed to belong to the same semantic field, as for example when one tries to describe games of different types. Think for example of sport games as football, card games as poker, board games as backgammon, digital games as Civilization, or any fantasy role-playing game, and imagine the challenges related to the use of the same concepts to speak about these so very different games as games.

Travelling game concepts

To understand better the challenges related to concepts changing meanings in different environments, I would like to refer to the theory of travelling concepts⁴, which we owe to the Dutch cultural theorist Mieke Bal. She writes:

[Concepts travel] between disciplines, between individual scholars, between historical periods, and between geographically dispersed academic communities. Between disciplines, their meaning, reach and operational value differ. These processes of differing need to be assessed before, during and after each “trip”. […] Between individual scholars, each user of a concept constantly wavers between unreflected assumptions and threatening misunderstandings in communication with others. […] Between historical periods, the meaning and use of concepts change dramatically. […] Finally, concepts function differently in geographically dispersed academic communities with their different traditions. This is as true for the choice and use of concepts as for their definitions and the traditions within the different disciplines, even the newer ones like Cultural Studies.⁵

At this point, I would like to say just a few words on the reasons why I present this theory. First, any kind of historical research includes the study, or at least the use of concepts. You consider concepts every time you read any kind of historical text, every time you read a novel or the newspaper. I hope that from now on you will do it knowing that there is a possibility that the writers of the texts you read do not necessarily mean exactly the same as you do when they use any given concept.

Second, this applies to the study of things that look extremely familiar, as for example games and gaming. The world of games is full of concepts that play significant roles in understanding not only the games but also the players and their intensions.

Finally, when it comes to the definition of games and gaming, an introduction to the theory of travelling concepts may help us understand the plurality of definitions and definitional approaches—approaches that are both spatial and temporal (and in some cases, both). Referring to spatial approaches, I mean that we should be aware of the fact that in the same period the same concepts may have different meanings in different places or environments. This applies not only to different countries or linguistic environments, but also to different scientific or social environments.

Let me try to illustrate by a very brief conceptual discussion of chess. By studying the names used in various areas and/or periods for the chess pieces and movements, and especially by contextualising these names, the historian may come up to important conclusions about both the game and the historical entity, or entities, at question.

Originally, the names and the movements of pieces reflected the Indian (and later the Persian) army and warfare in the period of the invention of the game, sometime in or before the sixth century. The shah (king) had by his side the vizier, his counsellor or adviser, a piece rather weak, as he could only mode one square diagonally. The rest of the pieces reflected the four divisions of the army: Elephants, horses (cavalry), chariots and soldiers (infantry).

Centuries after its invention, chess was introduced to medieval Europe and underwent changes to fit better to its new political, social and cultural environment (as we will see in Chapter 3, this process is called culturalization). As monarchy was also the dominating political system in Europe, the king remained the central piece of the game. The name of the shah was simply translated into king. The vizier survived for some centuries as ferz (in some places, for example in Russia, the piece is still called ferz). But later, the vizier was replaced by the queen, which finally became the most powerful piece of the board. This replacement and the changes it caused in the rules of the game has been discussed as reflecting changes in the position of women in medieval society as well as their participation in the execution of political power.⁶ The elephant was transformed into an officer, or, in most places, a bishop. In other places, the piece was called runner or messenger or fool. But the most common names of bishop and officer reflect the power that the Church and the army had in medieval Europe as two of the pillars of socio-political systems, an influence illustrated in their position of the piece just beside the royal couple. The horse was also transformed into a human being, the knight; a symbol of military and social power, but also of the feudal system of medieval Europe (let us not forget that the feudal lords were usually depicted in medieval art as mounted on their horses). The chariot became a tower, symbol of the castles and the defensive walls that protected medieval societies from their enemies. The soldiers, finally, kept their name and function. But in some places, as for example in Norway, they were also transformed and renamed into peasants. So, the pawns were those who would fight or produce, or both.⁷

Summing up, by reflecting on the original names of chess pieces and their changes in the medieval space-time, we realize that even if remaining for the most part the same, the game was changed from a military into a sociopolitical simulation. In medieval Europe, the political power was centralized in the hands of kings and queens, but the church and the army as institutions had a crucial, and sometimes vital, role to play. The provinces were ruled by feudal lords, with local social and political power. Towers and strong walls dominated the landscape, being one of the trademarks of medieval times. Within and outside the walls of cities and towns, the majority of ordinary, non-privileged people dedicated their lives to fighting as soldiers or producing as peasants.

The study of names used for chess pieces might be enriched by more local piece names and names of movements and tactics. Analytical questions on what we might learn by studying the relevant game names and concepts might vary; I would claim that the possibilities are many, depending on the starting point of contextualization. Let me turn to another example related to modern times. Gary Alan Fine considered how names of chess pawns were influenced by changes in the political system and thinking after the Russian Revolution in 1917. Studying the sociopolitical culture of chess in communist Russia, he underlines that “while Russian chess has a ‘king,’ the word used for king is korol, not czar”, adding the fact that the atheist Russians still call the bishop an elephant. He also refers to other names of game pieces used in other places, to turn to an analysis of the relation between political changes and game terminology.

An account of the naming of chess pieces reveals much about the societies in which they are used. At moments of transition, as in the Middle Ages, names are “in play.” At the time of the American Revolution there was an attempt to rename king, queen and pawn as governor, general and pioneer. After their revolution Soviets wanted to use the name commissar and to turn black into red, with its pieces representing the proletariat. Such changes, however, could not overturn the inertia of collective knowledge. These fights over metaphors indicate how tightly linked chess is to the social structure of its location and how its location affects its image.⁸

To Fine's interesting points I would like to add another one. The resistance of players in changing game terminology established over a longer period of time demonstrates a tendency in history: Changes in concepts, top-down changes in particular, are not easy. Sometimes this is related to the power of tradition, sometimes it is the result of what Fine calls “inertia of collective knowledge”, a kind of a strong dependence to the past that prohibits, or at least hinders, (any kind of) change and innovation.

Conceptual travels of game names and terms might cause misconceptions in the work of game scholars, historians and other human and social scientists. This section had the main task of underlining the challenge and asking for conceptual awareness and consciousness in the study of games. In the following pages, I ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Pregame
• 1 Conceptual approaches to games
• 2 Material approaches to games
• 3 Games of culture
• 4 Games of society
• 5 Games of politics
• 6 Games of metaphysics
• 7 The gladiatorial games as a historical source
• 8 Chess as a historical source
• 9 Sid Meier’s Civilization as a historical source
• Endgame
• Bibliography
• Index