Can We Go from Moving Game Pieces to Creating World Peace?
Can a board game promote world peace? Maybe that is a stretch, but the thought did cross my mind while I attended my first game jam hosted by Dr. Sarah Stang, Associate Professor in Brock University’s Department of Digital Humanities.
Wargaming dates back over 5,000 years to ancient China and India. Games like Wei-Hai (also known as Go) and Chaturanga are some of the earliest examples of wargaming. If conflict can inspire an entire genre of games, why not peace? They are two sides of the same coin.
The mother of all game jams
A game jam is a competition to see which team can create an analog or video game within a limited timeframe, usually 1–2 days. Because the event was open to all experience levels, we approached creation collaboratively.
The jam was built around a central theme: motherhood.
Though every person in the history of humanity came from their mother, you do not often hear about motherhood in the gaming world. This was our starting point.
In two days, my team had created a playable prototype of our board game. The gameplay is simple; place a wooden tile on the board, then spin the spinner. The picture and spinner determine what kind of story you will tell the other player. We chose broad topics like food, music, and travel to make the game as culturally accessible as possible.
For example, my tile has the symbol for music (a musical note) and the spinner lands on “motherly advice” during my turn. I would then share how my mother has been telling me to wear earplugs to concerts since I was 15. I still conveniently “forget” to do this. Now I have hearing damage.
Sometimes mother knows best.
Within a day, we had made tiles that looked like dominoes with pictures on them and established game rules.
We had created Mominoes.
Mominoes is a game of storytelling and memory-sharing about the mothers and mother figures in our lives. Though we are all individuals with unique experiences, we each share the connection of being cared for by another person.
Place the wooden tiles on the board to create a journey of getting to know the other player for the first time or better than you did before. Once your paths link together, the game ends — but getting to know that person doesn’t have to! Mominoes seeks to elevate the role of caregiving while promoting plurality and understanding.
“Mother” is not defined by blood relations in this game and can extend outside the nuclear family. Players are encouraged to talk about their own motherhood, older siblings, aunts, mentors, grandmothers, or other elders. Who you consider your mother is up to you. In many communities, chosen family is an integral part of giving and receiving care.
Did I mention that the four of us had never met before? This is where the real magic happened.
Collective creativity for a better tomorrow
Our team was comprised of myself, an Associate Professor in the Department of Child and Youth Studies, a playwright and actor, and an older couple from the local area who met as Brock students. We were people from different backgrounds and generations all working towards the same goal; to make this wholesome as heck game.
We learned a lot about one another while conceptualizing our game and playtesting the prototype. We shared stories about our families, some of which were funny while others were about overcoming adversity. In those two days, a group of strangers created a connection between one another through something as simple as play.
Play is essential for children to develop the social and emotional skills necessary for building healthy relationships. Ludology, the study of games, says we do not need to stop playing once we become adults. Play allows us to modulate our emotions and find joy in exploring our imagination.
Envision a world where people engage in playful storytelling more often. How much could we learn from people different from ourselves? What if our common goal was realizing that we are not so different?
Maybe then it might be easier to imagine the faces of your loved ones transposed onto the victims of wars. If you could do that, the thought of war would be unbearable.
In something as destructive as war, family bonds and caregiving become a lifeline holding people together. My PhD research deals with the medical relief efforts immediately after the atomic bombing of Hiroshima. Survivors desperately tried to nurse critically wounded family members with limited supplies. There was a heartbreaking deluge of people searching for their loved ones, not knowing whether they were alive or dead.
Thousands of children lost their mothers or primary caregivers. After the war, families fractured by death and loss had to decide who could care for orphaned children. Sometimes relatives stepped in to fill this role, often while struggling to feed and shelter their own children. Many other parentless children were sent to orphanages.
In war, your mother could be your aunt, grandmother, family friend, or even a stranger. Motherhood may even require role reversal where a child must care for an ill or injured parent. Children are sometimes put in the impossible position of having to parent younger siblings, a process of adultification that has lasting psychological consequences.
When everything else is taken from you, these connections are all you have left. We do not have to suffer a catastrophic loss to foster a connection with others.
Games without frontiers
There is a robust international representation at my university. I work and study among people from China, Iran, and Russia to name a few — nations considered an enemy of my country of origin.
Some students have been affected by American military operations. During a class discussion my husband was facilitating, a young Iraqi woman shared how American soldiers burst into her family’s home looking for an insurgent when she was a child. She remembers crying at the sight of the guns.
It is one thing to know my country terrorizes innocent people, a concept that seems distant and abstract at times. It is something else entirely to be confronted with how that aggression impacted a real human being.
How can these people be my enemies? In this liminal space of higher-ed, we are not enemies. We are here to learn and grow together, to develop ideas that will make the world a better place. The mothers in our lives have shaped us all in some fundamental way.
Climate change has created a world where mass migration is becoming common. Competition for resources and a place of refuge will drive regional conflicts and the displacement of large populations.
This will happen regardless of how you feel about immigration issues and multiculturalism.
Make no mistake, I am a realist. I am not naïve enough to believe that empathy will dissuade someone like Vladimir Putin from carrying out military aggression. There will always be people in power who prioritize themselves above all others. Diaspora communities experience barriers to acceptance and integration in every generation.
We are facing serious challenges on a global scale. But there are times when we can still embrace our playful nature in the pursuit of overcoming hardship. We must remember that each of us was a mother’s child and like children, we are always discovering something new.
