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…

Between ‘Playing the American Dream’ and ‘How Japanese is Pokemon’ there is an interesting through line of games as both reflections and perpetuations of the culture that makes them. I’m genuinely happy that we got to read some material that brought that up, as it very much validates the analysis of games. That being said,…

“Round and Round the Houses: the Game of Parchisi” Figure 3:11. A pair of parchisi pieces, described as “matronly”, are made of intricately decorated carved ivory and wood.  The matrons skirts are hallowed to house small metal shavings that were made to rattle when the pieces were moved. Money, resources, and unique design techniques were…

I found our Playing the American Dream reading to be the most grabbing of this weeks readings. I suppose that I have always known that games like Monopoly are capitalist in nature, and that they advocate capitalism-related success stories of lucky “dramatic upward mobility” that is so prevalent in the capitalist realm. However, I never…