Tag Archives: board games

“A board-game sociopath” and social interactions

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Perhaps you have played games with someone like this:

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Within the confines of the rules, there’s not much I won’t stoop to, and not only in games where lying is the point, as it is in Werewolf. If we are playing Settlers of Catan, where players trade resources and build settlements, I will manipulate you to try to get the best possible deal, and I will downplay how well I’m doing so I seem unthreatening until I swoop in and win in one massive turn. If we’re playing some kind of war game, say, Risk or Root, I will lock in on the person most likely to keep me from winning and work to convince everyone they’re a bigger threat than I am. I don’t always lie—that would be too predictable. A mix of heartfelt honesty and bald-faced lies keeps my opponents on their toes. All for the glory of winning at moving little plastic pieces around a cardboard surface.

This gets at the competitive nature of games: there are winners and losers. Some games might have reputations for pitting people against each other – ask people about family histories of playing Monopoly or Risk – and others might be gentler. Even cooperative games have collective winners.

Games are also social:

Of course, how you behave in a game can still affect how people see you outside of it. If you’re a poor sport, or if you go too far with the playful deceptions and actually start bending the rules, that could degrade your real-life relationships. But people can usually tell what’s all in good fun. Even if you’re backstabbing, deceiving, and betraying one another, “our brains are very smart,” Kowert said. “We know what’s real and what’s not.” For instance, in a game, “I’ll throw my husband under the bus so quick,” she said. “And I wouldn’t do that in real life.”

Both Tilton and Kowert emphasized that the main thing games teach their players is social skills. Tilton has used Werewolf in the classroom to teach small-group communication. Because the fantasy scenarios of games don’t really translate to real life, what’s most likely to carry over is the practice you get at reading people and communicating with them.

Throughout games, players interact. Sometimes those interactions are directly about the game, with some games encouraging more of this than others, and other times the interactions are about other aspects of life. Gaming groups can involve long-time friends and also help new people meet each other.

If some people are board game sociopaths, how many others are glue people that help the group stick together? Or people who help other players along? Or players who care less about the outcome and enjoy the process? Could a group of people only devoted to winning continue over time?

In the bigger picture, games and leisure activities offer humans opportunities to build relationships and practice interactions that take place in other settings. Can you handle winning and losing a board game? Can players develop skills in negotiating? Can they learn how to have small talk? Yes, they are “just games” and the consequences of winning and losing are usually small but they can be learning opportunities for other areas of life.

Urbanism in board game form, 7 Wonders Duel edition

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I am intrigued when the topics I study as a sociologist intersect with board games. Here is another example: the highly rated two person 7 Wonders Duel game includes a token that through science gains you can acquire called “urbanism”:

The way it works is that it immediately provides the player 6 coins and then each time they acquire a building for free, possible if you have already constructed a building linked to the proposed structure, they gain 4 additional coins. In short, you get more coins for constructing free buildings. Hence, urbanism as you are building your city faster.

There is little doubt that urbanism is one of the most important forces in human history. This is about the process of cities developing as well as a particular way of life that emerged in and around cities. Urbanism was important in multiple time periods. This includes the last two centuries as megacities developed around the globe concurrently with industrial, economic, and societal change. It is also the case in the last five or so millennia as population centers around the globe emerged. This is the period that 7 Wonders is covering as ancient wonders are constructed and denser permanent centers of political, religious, and economic life emerge. Most of these cities are not the size of cities today yet their permanence and way of life transformed human and societal fortunes.

In playing the game, having free buildings also contribute free coins is a helpful bonus. More buildings beget more buildings and wealth.

Monopoly, racism in Atlantic City, and ongoing effects

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The board game Monopoly papered over racism and residential segregation in the city and its legacy in that city and in New Jersey is ongoing:

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For white Americans, “Atlantic City, like all mass resorts, manufactured and sold an easily consumed and widely shared fantasy,” Bryant Simon, a history professor at Temple University and the author of Boardwalk of Dreams: Atlantic City and the Fate of Urban America, told me. “Southernness is used to sell that fantasy in the North,” he explained, pointing to marketing that focused on the stereotypically white, southern luxury of hiring Black laborers to shuttle visitors around in rolling chairs, wait on their tables, or otherwise serve them. Jim Crow, Simon said, existed everywhere. Around the time that Monopoly was taking hold in Atlantic City, ballots there were marked “W” for white voters and “C” for “colored” voters, Simon said. It would take countless demonstrations and protests and a long struggle by the city’s Black residents to secure their civil rights, but the Monopoly board records a world of ubiquitous racism.

Although Black residents and tourists could work at hotels such as the Claridge, between Park Place and Indiana Avenue, they were not permitted to dine or lodge there. Some hotels even offered white guests the option of having only white workers wait on them. Black employment was largely limited to the tourist industry, as political and municipal jobs were reserved for white residents.

Atlantic City’s Boardwalk staged minstrel shows, but Black people were largely barred from attending any form of entertainment on the famed Steel Pier. Schools in the area were segregated, clerks at many hotels did not check in Black tourists, and what antidiscrimination laws were on the books were not enforced, Simon said. If Black residents were found to be on a beach that wasn’t designated for Black patrons only, “it wasn’t just like they were run off,” Simon said. “They would be arrested. The police enforced segregation in the city.”…

The impact of the decisions made during Monopoly’s heyday is still felt today. Atlantic City is a “redlined epicenter” of the state, according to the New Jersey Institute for Social Justice, and it leads the state in foreclosures. The rate of white homeownership in New Jersey stands at 77 percent, but Black homeownership is scarcely half of that, at 41 percent. A typical Black family in New Jersey has less than two cents for every dollar of wealth held by a typical white family.

Monopoly is meant to be fun. Until it is not quite the same when we know more about the city behind the game. The game ignores the racial and housing discrimination elements of real life while the winner is a good capitalist who rode real estate luck and development to the top. Few, if any, games deal with this dimension of social life even as the patterns are long-established.

Similarly, the effects of these past actions are long-reaching. The wealth gap in the United States as a whole between white and Black households is roughly 9-10 to 1 so this larger gap in New Jersey is even more troubling. The state also has a long legacy of limited affordable housing as well as racial tension, illustrated in the Mount Laurel case and ongoing clashes in suburbia (see examples here and here).

Creating the antidote to Monopoly may only be able to go so far to remedy the historical record and improve conditions in New Jersey. Yet, at least knowing that there is more behind the story of Atlantic City and those who were not intended to be included in the game can help us remember which narratives carry the day – and which others could.

Subways: “New York City is the demented spin-off of Settlers of Catan”

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The New York subway system has some problems:

New York City subway service isn’t consistently bad. It isn’t consistently anything. It mixes days of normalcy with surprise disasters whose disruptive effect is something like an air-raid drill, leaving hundreds of thousands of people stranded underground, while their kids wait at schools, their office chairs sit empty, and their shifts begin. If, as former New Jersey Transportation Commissioner Jack Lettiere once put it, transportation is “the game board upon which the economy is played,” New York City is the demented spinoff of Settlers of Catan. The board changes every day, with a debilitating effect on businesses, birthday parties, and everything in between.

That delays have tripled in four years, that subway ridership is declining, that bus ridership is plummeting—these things should alarm Gov. Andrew Cuomo, who runs the Metropolitan Transportation Authority and bears ultimate responsibility for its failings, despite his protests otherwise….

Last Monday, the MTA announced a six-point plan to address delays. “Decades of underinvestment … has led to a system that is excessively vulnerable to failures,” the statement read. (Interestingly, New York has been governed by a Cuomo for 18 of the past 35 years.) The order includes some good news, like the imminent arrival of newer subway cars and deployments of teams to handle broken signals and sick passengers, two major causes of delays. It also appears to have been devised rather quickly—an MTA board member found out about it from the press—and as such, does not account for the subway’s two biggest problems: its ancient signal system and its insanely high construction costs.

Those two things are interrelated and together account for virtually every other problem with the subway. Signals break, hinder the deployment of countdown clocks and driverless trains, and prevent trains from running closer together. High costs impede the development of 20th-century signal technology and other capital improvements, including region-altering projects like the Triboro RX and low-hanging fruit like reopening closed subway entrances. (Read Alon Levy’s excellent coverage of the cost issue and weep.) As long as the MTA fails to address these issues, its troubles will continue.

Bonus points for working Settlers of Catan into a discussion of infrastructure. At the same time, the roads of Settlers might be crazy (particularly when they are blocked by other players) but wouldn’t a better analogy be to a transportation game, perhaps Ticket to Ride?

Seriously though, cities and other levels of government ignore infrastructure at their own peril. It may be easier in the short-term to push off the repairs and costs but the problems only continue to affect users and then are even more costly in terms of money and time down the road.