If this image is any indication, pachisi seems pretty darn important if they are willing to put deific (?) figures in the art depicting its play. It’s also interesting that many of the pachisi illustrations depict women playing the game, which seems to say that women often had leisure time, the game was gender neutral,…

This week’s readings, at least the text-heavy pieces, though they covered a wide range of eras and games, all shared one assumption: that the games that are popular within a given culture or period can demonstrate certain values, priorities, or other characteristics about that time and place. I suppose this might be a pretty basic…

A lot of this week’s reading had one common notion or lesson, capitalism is bad. I probably should have seen this coming after last week’s class when Maggie warned us about this but after doing the reading I can see why Maggie was telling us about how bad capitalism is and I see why it…

In How Japanese is Pokemon, there seems to be a sociologist’s point of view on how audiovisual culture was an area dominated by the United States, but then the focus turned to Japan. This dawned the era we experience now through Japan being a technological powerhouse. Japanese animation, or anime, is interesting to follow. Tobin…

The conclusion of Freitag’s article, “Playing the American Dream”, argues that while there were American published board games that challenged the notions of capitalism or American idealism their short lived popularity only furthers the overall argument of the paper that American game boards outline the emergence of true capitalism. These exceptions say more about a…