Reading 00: Board Games Will Always Survive
Games always boil down to one thing, entertainment. Whether it’s entertainment to distract you, occupy your time, compete against others, or have some fun with your friends, if it wasn’t entertaining we wouldn’t still do it. Games go back all the way to 5000 BC, and if there wasn’t something about them that we all loved and found fun, they wouldn’t still be a main part of pop culture 7000 years later. I believe that main thing about them is that they can provide entertainment for so many different people in so many different ways. There’s always some game that someone will be interested in or that seems like it was tailored to them.
I grew up in a competitive household with competitive people, the games we played were tailored to outdoing everyone else in the house. There was a lot of Trouble, Sorry, Uno, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, Connect 4, and anything else that was individual competition. We even went so far as to get Seinfeld Scene-It to test our knowledge of our favorite household TV show. Those were all some of my favorite games growing up, and some are still go-to’s now like Uno or Risk. What made them all entertaining for me was that they were competitive, but also that everyone could stay in the game for a super long time. They were meant to be family time games, and it was nice for everyone to actually be involved the entire time.
That’s probably one of the biggest entertaining elements of board games, the fact that usually everyone can be involved for the entirety of the game. These games are social activities for the most part, and as social creatures that immediately attracts us to them. Most people enjoy competition, and maybe a little trash talking, and thinking that they’re luckier or smarter than the people that they’re playing against, but the fact that these games are social is probably the biggest selling factor. That’s why LAN parties were a thing for video games, and why online multiplayer is so popular. Everyone wants to play together most of the time, and these games let us.
These games were great inspiration for video games and the direction that they developed in. We still see video games that are based on board games, and even video games that are being turned into board games. These games are more interconnected than people think at first because of the medium that they are played in. They still serve the same entertainment purposes, are always incorporating social features, have the same elements of luck and skill, and are essentially the same thing when you get to the heart of them. They are essentially the same thing just in a physical vs technological medium. We’re even trying to get back to the physical medium with video games as can be seen with the Wii controllers, PlayStation’s DualShock motion control, and the huge interest in VR. I think board games and video games are very intertwined, and you’re going to have a hard time coming up with differences between them other than the medium that they’re played through. So saying all that, I think board and video games are here to stay for a very long time, and they’ll keep growing together and learning from each other, and becoming even more intertwined.
