nothin It’s All Fun And Games — Until Someone Loses… | New Haven Independent

It’s All Fun And Games — Until Someone Loses An Empire

The Paths of Life.

The Paths of Life, a board game, uses a teetotum, a four-sided top, instead of dice, because the designers thought dice were too close to gambling for children to be using them.

There are two paths in the game. The good path leads through places like Discreet County and Good Book Pasture to arrive at Happy Old Age Hall. The bad path leads through Cock-Match Pit, Gaming Quicksand, and the Poverty Maze to arrive at the Bottomless Pit.

Roll a 1 or a 2 at the beginning of the game, and you ended up on the bad path, with few chances for redemption. Roll a 3 or 4, and you were gifted with the good path, with only a couple chances for failure. Whether you won or lost was pretty much decided from the beginning.

The Paths of Life, from 1840, is one of several diverting games on display in Instruction and Delight: Children’s Games from the Ellen and Arthur Liman Collection,” running at the Yale Center for British Art through May 23. The games reflect a growing awareness in British society a couple hundred years ago that children weren’t just little adults, and might benefit from styles of learning that were more, well, fun. In a sly way, which the accompanying text is cheekily a part of, the games also reflect the society that these kids were growing up in — one of rigid class structure and manners, presiding over a rapacious global empire — and just what was expected of children as they learned to navigate it.

By the beginning of the eighteenth century in Britain, parents and teachers had begun to embrace wholeheartedly a suggestion from the philosopher John Locke (1632 – 1704) that learning might be made a Play and Recreation to Children,’” the exhibit’s mean text reads. The material culture of this period, and the subsequent generation, reveals a significant shift in thinking, as adults found fresh value in childhood and in play for its own sake. British publishers leapt at the chance to design books and games for both instruction and delight.”

But The Paths of Life, as spelled out in the dryly written description of the rules, was really about accepting your lot in life from the start. Other games — in addition to teaching principles of arithmetic and basic geography — sought to show a child how to get on the good path as soon as possible, and stay there.

The Mirror of Truth.

This game from 1811, with the snappy title of The Mirror of Truth: Exhibiting a Variety of Biographical Anecdotes and Moral Essays, Calculated to Inspire a Love of Virtue and Abhorrence of Vice, attempted to teach children how live a virtuous life despite the attraction of a full range of vices (including, but not limited to, intemperance, idleness, selfishness, lying, envy, hypocrisy, passion, and pride),” the accompanying text relates. The game makers hoped that youth might play this game instead of playing cards. In the course of the game, players would read stories of virtuous people from a booklet and, having hopefully internalized these histories, arrive in the center at the Temple of Happiness.

The Wonders of the World.

For the virtuous — or at least the most diligent student — the architectural marvels of Europe were their oysters. The board for Wonders of the World was printed purposely without numbered spaces,” the exhibit informs us, so the game forced a player to study the text of the accompanying booklet before a move could be made … the first player to land on the Parthenon — at the top of the board — would win the game.” Other games explore astronomy and the natural sciences. But several games, including Wallis’s Elegant and Instructive Game Exhibiting the Wonders of Art, in Each Quarter of the World, fall into the narrative of children growing into adults able to reap the benefits of being wealthy subjects of a global empire, embarking on a Grand Tour of Europe for the budding upwardly mobile Englishman. The British Tourist: A New Game makes the connection explicit, including 65 select views in the British Empire” — even though it focuses on castles, country houses, and other tourist sites solely in Britain.”

The games were meant as child’s play, but there were serious ambitions embedded in their rules. Those ambitions may seem all too transparent now, sometimes hilariously so. And therein lies the warning in this exhibit: Have times really changed all that much?

In the Center for British Art’s gift shop, in the game section, is one that invites us to play with just the kind of structures that New Haven has been building and tearing down. They don’t call it the Model City for nothing.

But that’s just the start. There’s Sorry!, perhaps one of the more sarcastically titled games of the modern era. There is, of course, Monopoly, which makes a virtue of financially destroying your opponents in a death march of increasingly desperate real estate deals. And video games increasingly mirror society in their vivid color, their speed, their complexity, and their violence. We let our guard down a little when we play; maybe then we get a glimpse of how we really live.

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