Are you a board game loser? Real life is leaving you behind

Literally thousands of new titles are released every year, it seems, with something for progressives ( “in Biome, players aim to build diverse ecosystems and raise baby animals”) as well as conservatives (“Wokelandia is an educational, fun-with-friends battle between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. The first persxn with 100 oppression points wins!”). Fifty million people now play Dungeons and Dragons, apparently. Those without a Dungeon Master in their life to consult might well wonder: what is going on?

A feelgood answer — sort of — is that living in a dispersed digital world has left us “hungry” for “real-world connection and community”, something that’s provided by tangible boards, counters, and cards. A more jaundiced answer is that board games help you avoid talking in any depth to others, where you are all forced to be in the same room together and are nervous about being cancelled for your opinions. At least this way, your arguments can be about really important matters — like whether a helmet really counts as a weapon, or how long a burning cart would take to immolate the walls of a castle, given the viscosity of tar.

Another explanation — not necessarily competing with the last -— says that online gaming has been growing in popularity for decades, Covid lockdowns intensified the trend and brought in new cohorts of users; and now the vibe has finally spilled over into real world spaces as well. On this interpretation, we are not so much getting away from the online world as enacting it more vividly with the help of physical props.

Sometimes it seems like the lines between game and life are blurring — not helped by the gamification of everything, occurring in parallel. This is the application of game design to ordinary life, in order to better incentivise some desired outcome. Educational programmes send school pupils on virtual quests and give them progress badges; dating apps encourage users to proliferate “matches” as a fun end in itself; workplace training schemes make cute emoji faces at you for meeting particular challenges.

Only this week I received an email from Adidas, telling me that I had “gone down a level” in their club. Reassuringly though, it also said I could regain my previous status by “earning 2,900 points” — otherwise known as buying more stuff from Adidas.

Occasionally a company gets carried away and blatantly starts to treat employees like soulless avatars driven by blind competition: as when Disney Hotels disastrously introduced an electronic leader board to rank workers’ speeds loading laundry into machines. But even if gamification is more benevolent than this — all dopamine hits and no cortisol, so to speak — it still has significant downsides.

In his funny, clever book The Grasshopper, written in 1978, philosopher Bernard Suits used the fable of the playful grasshopper and diligent ant to make the provocative claim that in Utopia we would all be grasshoppers, for game-playing would be the only activity carried out there. Along the way — and picking up the famous gauntlet thrown by Wittgenstein, who said it couldn’t be done — he offered a persuasive definition of a game as an activity with three necessary and sufficient aspects.

First, he said, a game must have a “prelusory goal” which can be specified independently of playing, and is usually something trivial: getting a ball into a hole, say, or picking up a king-shaped counter. Then there are the rules, which must by definition introduce unnecessary complications to achieving the prelusory goal, so that the most efficient means of doing it are disallowed: you can’t just manually drop the ball into the hole, or grab the King on your second go. And finally there is the “lusory attitude” required of a player: to accept the rules voluntarily because otherwise there is no game. In a memorable summation, Suits wrote that “playing a game is a voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles”. Rule-benders can’t win, technically speaking, because in cheating, they have literally stopped playing the game.

Ultimately, I think it’s false that in Utopia everyone would be a grasshopper. Other intrinsically valuable lifestyles are also available. But more to the point, the worry about the rapid rise of both games and gamification is that they turn ants into grasshoppers, right here on earth. This is not a worry about productivity; on the contrary, gamification is supposed to increase it. It’s more about the solipsistic habit of eyeing up real-world tasks and collaborators as things to be weaved into fictional quests and challenges; to view them primarily as sources of short-term personal reward.

It is sometimes observed that games put a player in a metaphorical “magic circle”: an imaginary space where striking at an opponent, say, is not just equivalent to pushing a piece of plastic from one square to another, or piling up bits of coloured cardboard. Fictional and symbolic dimensions of such actions are the primary focus instead, and consciousness of the real world mostly drops out. Equally, gamification takes as a goal something highly important to a corporation or government, rather than something silly or trivial, but then distracts the “player” from that fact by introducing circuitous intermediate steps involving jeopardy, thrill, or virtual head pats. A desire to replicate the subjective feelings produced, rather than paying attention to the goal itself or to how you are objectively achieving it, is the whole idea.

In an ideal gamified context, you would sleepwalk towards the end planned out for you almost by accident, driven onward by jolts to the dopamine system. The internet is full of business gurus trying to explain why Gen Z are relatively demanding in the workplace, uncritically telling us that this generation above others  “expects reward”  and is full of “affirmation addicts”. Yet this is also the generation that grew up with the cultural dominance of gaming, and I don’t think it is too farfetched to make a connection. For their sake, we probably shouldn’t indulge the trend.

Which is not to say I won’t be throwing a dice or two this December, fortified by a few margaritas to increase the jeopardy for all concerned. Distracting yourself from a rainy afternoon or an unpleasant chore — or indeed, a difficult dinner party — by turning proceedings into a literal points-scoring exercise is always tempting. Games, though, only have their proper place in life because life is not one.

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Kathleen Stock is an UnHerd columnist and a co-director of The Lesbian Project.

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