Jaiganesh Nagarajan - Week 8 - American Board Games
America has gone through many years with a wide variety of board games. Some popular ones being catan, sorry, monopoly, and candy land. While all these games have a similar goal, to outlast all your opponents, they all have their own respective rules and the way people played them while growing up adds to our identity and personality. The board games mentioned above are ones I found myself playing as I grew up and there were many more like Uno, Jenga, Catan, and Clue. The more I went through elementary and middle the less often I would play these games and I really only revisited them during quarantine where me and my friends would play online since we were bored.
The more people grow up the more these games do not have use anymore. I still have an unopened game of clues from 4 years ago since no one plays it anymore. While they may have lost their purpose, the memories people made from them is what makes them special. And there are still more and more games that are being made to cater to a wider audience so they haven’t lost all their meaning. People do revisit these games from time to time and the nostalgia from them never changes. The memories of going to a friend's house and they had a lot of board games and you wouldn’t know what to play since they were all good. The different versions of games also made them fun. For instance a lot of my friends each had different versions of monopoly so every time we went over to one of their houses it would always be fun as each game would be completely different from the other. Overall these games bring back a lot of memories and they have added to my identity and many others as well.
Hi Jaiganesh! I enjoyed reading your discussion of the declining relevance of board games. Monopoly, Rummikub, Uno, and other card games were the center of so many wholesome memories with family and friends. My favorite board game is called Dominion, which I play with my brother’s friends. It is a really fun, competitive, and partly luck-based game that satisfies the players’ inner capitalistic desires. Board games had a universal appeal, allowing grandparents to compete against grandchildren. They also had a human appeal, as the motionless set of instructions, toy figures, and paper provided a platform for each player to express themselves and build connections in unanticipated ways. In my eyes, board games still maintain these appeals, but they seem to have gone away as people tend to favor other mediums. People follow the herd; video games become relevant, so they appear to have a greater importance. Students can discuss video games in school and then instantly connect with others online. In addition, the growth of our generation also limits the need for board games. One of board games’ strengths is connecting parents and children, but teenagers usually want to avoid interacting with parents. To tie the discussion into America and capitalism, the self-reinforcing cycle of demand and supply means that board game companies are unable to produce and earn the same amount as before the rise of video games.
ReplyDeleteHi Jaiganesh! While I had rarely ever played board games, my little experience with them has always held a special part in my heart. When I was in elementary school, I went to an afterschool program, where sometimes, the other kids would play games such as Monopoly, leading to hours and hours (as Monopoly is a long-winded game) of fun and laughter. Sometimes, it would be so fun that I would feel like I would rather stay at my afterschool program than go home. I don't know if it counts as a board game, but up to last year (when my schedule was less hectic), I would go camping with family and friends, and we would spend nearly the whole night on a cold bench, or stuffed into a singular tent, playing card games such as Bluff, or Blackjack, until the adults would yell at us to be more quiet, or to go to sleep. Of course, we would continue to play secretly. Although their popularity has diminished significantly, I would disagree with your statement that board games have lost their use. Many board games, such as Dungeons and Dragons, and cards, are still incredibly relevant today and will continue to be relevant for a very long time. And even if the board games themselves die, their spirit lives on in many of their genre's successors: the video games. Many board games, such as UNO, have moved on from being just stuck to a board, and have been eternalized online, as video games, their main successor. Furthermore, the spirit and influence of board games still live on in mainstream video games, such as Inscryption, or Marvel Snap.
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