June 12, 2009
How a Board Game Can Make You Cry
Brenda Brathwaite makes rather unusual boardgames. Take, for example, a game she wrote to teach her 10-year-old daughter about the slave trade:
Brathwaite assembled a collection of tiny wooden figures, then had her daughter group them into “families.” After her daughter was finished, she picked them up by the handful and placed them on a makeshift boat. Her daughter was confused: Why would she take the parents but leave the baby? Why wouldn’t brothers stay with their sisters? “No one wants to go,” Brathwaite explained. That’s when it started to click.
Then Brathwaite devised a primitive resource management mechanic. It took 10 turns for the boat to cross the Atlantic. The boat had 30 units of food. Each turn, the player had to roll a d6, and reduce their food stores by that number. By the trip’s halfway point, it was clear to her daughter that her “cargo” wouldn’t make it. It wasn’t a “fun” game by any means, but it served a different purpose: It helped her daughter intuitively understand the emotional experience of the slave trade, a lesson that numbers on a chalkboard couldn’t provide.
Hat tip to Nick Montfort who wrote a short overview of a few of them.
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3 Responses to “How a Board Game Can Make You Cry”
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Wow.
I think her method could be quite effective in teaching people about a variety of social issues.
We need board games showing what it’s like to be a minority, gay, or a woman, then send the whole lot to the Republican Party.