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 \u201cdramatic upward mobility\u201d that is so prevalent in the capitalist realm. However, I never thought about how these games can work to affirm peoples belief in the capitalist system.
\nAlthough Peter Freitag does not exactly say this, he does claim that \u201cwinning the board game may help players believe that they too are worthy and that someday they may win as well the real game of life.\u201d Freitag does mention, \u201crags to riches\u201d stories, and \u201cthe American dream\u201d in relation to board games, which to me comes as a statement that American board games would all have the blessing of Ayn Rand, which is a scary thought.
\nThere was also a passage in this weeks reading Pikachus Global Adventure that I have been thinking about. In the reading Tobin recalls that producers of the Pokemon television show knew the program would be easily marketable on a global stale because it was \u201creligion-free.\u201d I found this intentional \u201codorlessness\u201d on the part of the shows producers to be genius. As Tobin points out later, things like \u201ccute\u201d and \u201ccool\u201d are global, and are not restricted culturally. In this sense, the producers of Pokemon intentionally created a program that did not show traces of any specific culture, and that instead relied on the international languages of \u201ccute\u201d and \u201ccool.\u201d
\nThe image that caught my eye this week was Image 3:13 from the \u201cArt of Contest.\u201d I think that this image says about how dear the game of Pachisi is to some people. Seeing the image of the gods Siva and Parvati in front of a Parchisi board made me think about how weird it would be to see a picture of Moses and David in a foot race.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 \u201cdramatic upward mobility\u201d that is so prevalent in the capitalist realm. However, I never…<\/p>\n