Games Britannia – part 1

Here are the notes I took after watching the first part of 'Games Britannia' the documentary seems to delve well into our past and pose good questions while giving relevant insight into the pure essence and origins of games.

Interesting how people approach working out games origins and mechanics and how they work.

Games are a human specific thing. Different from play, which other species would have experienced across the ages, for this reason it could be argued that games are one of the things that makes us human (take that nostalgic critics of the game industry!).

Perhaps the Stanway game is not a game board, but in fact a tactical map layout? With different stones resembling units within an army.

Refers to video games as being played by teenage boys; that is subjective/ stereotypical; there are many girl gamers and mature gamers.

alea evangelii – game seems like it could possibly be more about extensive patience of slowly moving your whole defence across in a direction, at first look at least, this could be proven wrong; by the look of it the removal of pieces operates in such a way you might be forced to rush. Personally I would have to do play it to truly understand it, as is the case with many games.

A game that mixes both the elements of skill and luck; this type of game would be the perfect analogy of life itself, as life involves both skill and luck. The game that was used to represent this was backgammon.

Games are essential to the homosapien due to our inherent nature that animals do not possess; a nature to get bored.

9 mens morris – essentially noughts and crosses. Although on a bigger scale, kind of like when playing noughts and crosses you try to play on a 4x4 grid, but it doesn’t work. 9 mens morris was a vastly played game used repetitively in medieval times to pass time.

Hazard – a basic gambling game and thus considered a game in service of the devil in the times of its creation. Reason being that dices are considered a thing of evil, demise and deconstructive to civilization. The game simply incorporates betting on the roll of a dice, each round you must bet more and more to stay in.

Faro – gambling game of 50/50 chance to win, it became very addictive, and was very easy to become submerged in debt.

But all of these gambling ‘games’ raises the question; do gambling games really count as actual games? Don’t games involve fun, challenge and no tangible direct material gain? In fact the dangers and aggressions in gambling seem to have a negative stereotype on games as a whole, they seem to promote nonsense that games encourage violence, and simply not the attitude of the player themselves.

18^th-19^th century dice were replaced by spinning tops in children games as dice were still more than ever hit with a stigma of being ‘evil’.

Goose – a game about the moral and virtue choices in life. The virtues were harder and more challenging, leading to the point that life is about overcoming hardship to be virtuous, whereas greed and morally wrong decisions might be easier, but may have incurred issues later on. This game in fact could be considered the origin of the games industry, the point where it all began to kick-off.

Snakes and ladders – based on a Hindu game that’s objective is to achieve enlightenment, the objective of the game isn’t to be fun or challenging, but to understand the religion and to give a true insight into what enlightenment is. Snakes and ladders straight away removed the moral elements and over time snakes and ladders went from circle to square, from complicated to less complicated.

Ludo – a perfect example of another Asian game altered into simplicity, this becomes an issue with games, oversimplifying can pervert the true experience of complication that presents a true challenge to the player.

Chess – origin in Asia again, but from country to country each played the game differently, possibly one of the best examples of this is the Egyptian version; which in comparison to most is a very thin board. Chess is possibly the most skilful and evolved form of gaming ever, there is no chance, no messing around. It is simply incredibly unique. There’s a theory that chess started off as a method of developing tactical skill. The game is essentially a game that anyone can get into, but a game that is incredibly hard to master. These sort of games are incredibly hard to produce, a game that anyone, absolutely anyone could learn fairly quickly, but you could take years upon years to win!