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I know this advice comes too late in the year to be effective, but here’s a gift idea for next Christmas: Get the Royal Game of Ur, the world’s oldest playable board game, in your life.
This ancient Mesopotamian game of strategy and movement is the oldest whose rules have survived to the modern day, thanks to a tablet inscribed by a Babylonian astronomer in 177BC and a painstaking reconstruction by Irving Finkel of the British Museum. (You can see pieces of the original game on display at the museum.)
While the Ur Royale game is unlikely to replace Twilight Struggle in our household (the latter is a thrilling game of Cold War intrigue for two players where I like to play as the USSR, while my partner usually chooses the Great Satan), it always thrills me to see the original pieces on display. They bring an unexpected sense of connection with those long dead, a shared sense of our common humanity in something as simple and silly as playing a game.
Why do we play? Why I’ll spend so much of this festive season losing to my partner in Twilight Struggle, participating in endless rounds of Monopoly (the addictive, fast-paced card game that adds some much-needed speed and verve to its state board progenitor), on the Nintendo Switch. Playing classic games or playing modern games on PlayStation? Why are ancient excavation sites littered with backgammon sets and manacle pieces? Why do ancient urns depict Achilles and Ajax turning to concentration on some sort of dice game?
I think there are two answers. The first is that gaming is a lot of fun: you choose poker, dungeons and dragons or fifaPlaying together — or competitively — over food and drinks with friends makes for an evening well spent Whether in the present day or as a respite from that distant Trojan War, we all have a desire for blissful escapism.
But the second reason is that gaming doesn’t just entertain: gaming often expresses. The kind aunt who, while playing Scrabble or poker, turns out to be a badass, always wins. The arch-scenic who points out a potential triple word score to a younger relative. A friend who loves to gloat by winning the game of chameleon. Yes, games entertain us, but they also tell us truths about our characters that are often hidden.
Of course, one significant change between us and the ancient Mesopotamians is that there are now many more games that can be played alone, and often are, thanks to the rise of home video games. Single-player games aren’t new either — jigsaw puzzles have been played since at least the 18th century, when a version of the “choose-your-own-adventure” novel (“To check the door, turn to page 24. To ignore the whining and go to bed, page 122”) Go back to at least the 1930s.
Many modern games owe a conscious debt to both of these genres. Starting with the game Tetris Wordle is part of that very old puzzle tradition. A game as different as an interesting political thriller Suzanne Or a brilliant bloody love story Kill the princess In many ways just a more complex choose-your-own-adventure novel.
But the important difference is that never before have we been able to log how much time we spend playing puzzles or scrambling through these books. We entertained ourselves, we learned something about our own preferences, but we didn’t learn much about each other. Today, thanks to the vast amount of data collected by various game consoles and digital distribution platforms like Steam, we now know a great deal about the choices we make in games.
Some of this isn’t particularly interesting: I don’t think people make decisions about how to structure their teams football manager All that reveals about the human condition.
But others. Games, I think, tell us something about ourselves when we choose between good and evil. Take video games for example I was a teenage exocolonistor Baldur’s Gate 3Where you can choose between villainy or heroism.
The two games and the backgrounds they come from are very different: I was a teenage exocolonist was produced by a small studio run by a husband and wife, while Baldur’s Gate 3 Made by a company spanning multiple countries. They have two things in common: the first is that both are brilliant uses of an afternoon. Second, and more importantly, in both games, more players seem to choose good over evil. About twice as much, I believe, counting from the achievements for the “good” ending than the “bad” ending of Steam. In fact, the ranks of those who choose evil are often fattened by people (myself included) who have already played it once and want to see what happens if they choose evil instead.
In the real world, of course, history tells us that, despite our long love of games, we are capable of choosing cruelty over kindness. But it still says something positive, I think, that our ideals are more likely to choose well.
