How the games we play shape our lives
Daniel Bluzer-Fry, development partner at FORWARD — The RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation — writing with director Peter Thomas and development partners Pete Cohen, Inder Singh, Kate Spencer, Sally McNamara, Helen Babb Delia, Soolin Barclay and Courtney Guilliatt.
In September of 2022, I noticed a curious campaign for Monopoly that was produced by Dutch Advertising Agency KesselsKramer.
The path to the creative work was spurred from the insight that eight out of ten people fight whilst playing Monopoly, with this fighting being considered a positive thing, as “Monopoly can teach you a lot about how to express your emotions and deal with disappointments”.
My initial response was a chuckle. I was transported back to various games of Monopoly and memorable moments of conflict, along with playing in chess tournaments as a child and the meltdowns that would happen over the course of any given day.
I then thought about a book that stirred up controversy when it was released: Zero to One: Notes on Startups and How To Build the Future. Celebrated by entrepreneurial figures such as Mark Zuckerberg and Elon Musk, Zero to One has venture capitalist Peter Thiel sharing his advice on pursuing monopolies and shunning competition, amongst other topics. I thought about neoliberal ideology, capitalism, and the role of aspiration in our consumer story*, along with all of the artefacts and narratives that shape our world views from an early age.
*See Jon Alexander’s 2022 book titled Citizens, which examines the fundamentally flawed overarching narrative we find ourselves in, and the need and power of shifting to a Citizen Story.
And then — to the amusement of several friends — I played around with the campaign to try and articulate a different idea.
play /pleɪ/
[intransitive, transitive] to do things for pleasure, as children do; to enjoy yourself, rather than work.
There have been voluminous amounts of research examining the significance of play in our lives. The word ‘play’ can be applied in a vast amount of settings. People can play instruments, competitive sports, board games and video games, amongst other things.
In fact, so broad is the application of the term ‘play’, that one could argue the term lacks clarity and nuance. As Bildung leader and Forward Fellow Lene Rachel Andersen noted in a recent exchange, in the Danish language, there are two words used to identify two fundamentally different forms of ‘play’.
One of these words is Spil, means ‘rule-based play’ in which one enters a predefined structure for allowed action (think about a playing a card game with clearly defined rules), although this word is also associated with playing instruments and music. Whilst I can understand how music is associated with structures such as time and scales, I do wonder about the suitability of Spil’s use when playing certain styles of music that are more discordant, atmospheric or experimental that seemingly break with such structures.
The other is Leg (pronounced Ley), in which there are no predefined rules or where the rules are developed as the activity progresses (think about a group of kids deciding to play Robin Hood in the schoolyard where roles are distributed, the playground becomes the forests of Nottingham, and the bicycle shed becomes an imaginary prison in which Maid Marian is kept captive).
Yet as our English dictionary definition suggests, much of what we associate with the idea of play is connected to childhood. This could be a product of the many developmental theories around the role of play that emerged in the 20th century from thinkers including Piaget, Erikson, Vygotsky and Freud.
Today, the study of play and its practical application in developing skills and capabilities in children and adults continues. For instance, a recent Australian study suggested that young children who rate themselves highly at computer games are likelier to set themselves up for a digital career.
Governments and educators have recognised the importance of play in education. Take, for example, Armenia, where the government mandated chess as a school subject for every child over the age of six a little over a decade ago. Officials said the motivation was to foster a higher level of independent strategic thinking amongst future generations at school, in workplaces and in society.
And, of course, much has been written about the importance of play and creativity — something that has greater resonance in an era of extreme automation. In Mitchel Resnick’s Lifelong Kindergarten: Cultivating Creativity through Projects, Passion, Peers and Play, he looks at play environments, and the kinds of play that occur in them can foster “mastery, creativity, self-confidence and open exploration”.
But one aspect of play that is less examined is how the games we play can shape our mental models around the world we live in, both individually and collectively.
It’s impossible to overestimate the significance of Monopoly in Australian culture.
It was recently announced that Melbourne would be getting a Monopoly theme park in the near future, and one of the most enduring and engaging commercial loyalty initiatives in the country has been the annual McDonald’s Monopoly promotion. The game has also extended its brand into other entertainment formats, such as the video game arcade (with Monopoly Roll N Go Redemption) and the shorter form Monopoly Deal.
Monopoly has a fascinating history. The game’s popularity throughout the Great Depression has been extensively documented, as it enabled family play and escapism amidst daily austerity.
But what is far less known are its origins.
So the story goes, the Parker Brothers acquired the game from Charles Darrow in 1935. What is typically Less known is that Darrow’s original game evolved from a creation by Lizzie Magie, who, in 1904, patented a game called The Landlord’s Game. Having sold the game to The Parker Brothers, Magie — who had designed it as a teaching tool — hoped it would find a larger audience, as it focused on the progressive economic theories of Henry George and taxation. Ultimately, The Landlords Game was unsuccessful, and the Monopoly played today continues to showcase a neoliberal, capitalist ideology of success.
The power of the games we play and how they can shape our world views shouldn’t be underestimated.
Matt Leacock's Pandemic is widely celebrated as one of the better cooperative games, originally released in 2008. In 2020, at the onset of the Coronavirus pandemic, Leacock said in an interview that the game “takes a good mix of short-term thinking, and long-term thinking and a lot of communication” and requires cooperation and the managing of resources.
Games like Pandemic may give us the opportunity to practice skills we might need in the real world. Still, perhaps these kinds of games could speak to our ideological orientations, for example showing the precarious nature of our socioecological systems: one can only begin to wonder if citizen and governmental responses to Covid may have been different if Pandemic, rather than Monopoly, had been one of the best selling games ever.
Against the backdrop of a climate emergency, Pandemic creator Matt Leacock and Matteo Menapace, a designer and educator focused on cooperative play, are crowdfunding Daybreak, which is focused on stopping climate change. As a recent piece in The Guardian said, there is academic research emerging that shows how playing games connected to climate has increased game players’ sense of responsibility toward the environment, added to their confidence in climate cooperation, and proven to be a valuable tool for dialogue, and simplified the communication of complex climate concepts.
Beyond speaking to our often unconscious ideological orientation, games may also help us unlock meaningful conversation and reflection in ways that can challenge how we view ourselves and the world around us.
Beyond the game design and mechanics, perhaps the context of the game matters.
Social Psychologist Paul Piff may have run one of the most revealing experiments around wealth and entitlement in the 21st century using Monopoly.
In his version, he had two participants enter a lab environment and toss a coin to determine who would be the ‘rich’ player and who would be the ‘poor’ player. In addition to being given dramatically different opening bank balances, the ‘poor’ player was given a smaller payment when passing go and only had the ability to roll one — versus two — dice to slow the rate at which they could cover the board.
Outside of observing gestures displaying power and dominance — from the ‘rich’ players’ verbal comments during play to their greater consumption of a strategically placed bowl of pretzels — the most remarkable learning was from participant interviews. The ‘rich’ players attributed their success largely to what they’d done to earn their success in the game rather than examining their randomly determined starting advantage.
One implication of this study and Piff’s other work is that as people’s wealth increases, their feelings of compassion and empathy diminish, whilst feelings of entitlement, deservingness and self-interest increase. Here, Monopoly could prove to be a useful game for players to understand how inequitable our existing economic systems are and how in the real world, we don’t start on an equal footing and that it is improbable to win/accumulate wealth starting from a disadvantage.
Play was how this story started. And play is a big topic. The value of play has been recognised for a long time, not least by LEGO, who have their own ideation methodology (using, inevitably, LEGO) called Serious Play.
Like the movies, advertisements and books we were exposed to, the games we play are cultural artefacts that embody all kinds of assumptions, biases and perspectives that expand beyond simple game design and mechanics.
And maybe something bigger sits around designing games and/or experimenting with rule changes within them (a playful process in the ‘Leg’ sense). Perhaps this kind of activity could make us better systems thinkers, enhance our critical thinking skills, or even force us to examine our assumptions and ideological leanings.
FORWARD is the RMIT Centre for Future Skills and Workforce Transformation.
Our role is to build an innovative learning ecosystem at scale, create new collaborative applied research and invent next-generation skills solutions that will catalyse workforce development in the future-oriented industries crucial to Victoria’s economic renewal.
We lead collaborative applied research on future skills and workforce transformation from within RMIT’s College of Vocational Education, building and scaling the evidence and practice base to support Victorian workforce planning and delivery and acting as a test lab for future skills to develop and pilot new approaches to skills training and education through digital transformation and pedagogical innovation.
We leverage RMIT’s multi-sector advantage to translate research insights into identifying workforce requirements and the co-design of practice-based approaches with industry.
