This Christmas as some of you go home to your families, we expect one of the things many of you will do is play some games. In this (actually fairly lighthearted) episode (especially compared to the last one), we give you an opportunity to reflect a little bit on what role that play has in your life and in the larger context of society. Do games need to be decolonizing spaces? Or is it actually OK that many of the games we like to play explore violent themes that may be on the wrong side of history from a modern-day social justice perspective? Deondre' and Isabel both really love playing Catan, which is a game that is all but explicitly colonial, as it's a game about taking over an island and extracting all of its resources.

It was a joy to have this conversation with a professional Game Master at Isabel's local board game cafe, Wesley Bogan. When people come into the cafe, called Queen and Rooke, they can ask the Game Masters what games they recommend and receive instruction on how to play them, so Wesley has had a lot of time to think about games. This conversation went deep into the philosophy of play and why we like to do it.

Is it wrong for games to provide a space to explore the darker sides of ourselves, or, on this flip side, is this actually completely necessary for us to have a space to explore things that are taboo or stigmatized outside of the "play" space of a game? One very extreme example of this is the game "Train" which, for the record, Queen and Rooke would never carry, which is a cross between a social experiment and a board game in which (spoiler) the players realize halfway through playing what otherwise looks like an innocuous train game like Ticket to Ride, that they are actually building a train to Auschwitz. Players can choose to keep playing and try to "win" or they can stop playing on moral grounds. It's one of the most often-referenced examples of a game that takes breaking the 4th wall to an uncomfortable extreme.

At the end of the episode, even though we did not know this beforehand, Deondre' comes up with a series of scenarios for Wesley to come up with board game recommendations for, from an awkward couple on a first date, to a rowdy crew of frat bros, which is exactly the training Wesley gives his new gamemasters when they start the job.

Links:
Book referenced in the beginning of the episode, Homo Ludens by Johan Huizinga: https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/233221.Homo_Ludens
Train game referenced: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Train_(board_game)