In Umberto Eco’s brilliant Foucault’s Pendulum, we watch as characters play with global conspiracy theory and occultism as a satirical, intellectual game. This game leads the characters down a dark path, but we understand completely why that path is worth following. Games are important. They are important when we’re children, and then we forget how important they are for a while as we chase adult pleasures. Then we recognise that those too were games, of a sort, and having won and lost and won and lost we return to more obvious and literal games. Ones we can play on our TVs and place on our tables. Ones that hurt less when we fail.
Increasingly, for people of my generation, the games we are playing are on tables. When I started playing board games regularly about five years ago, it seemed that no-one else in the country was doing it. I’d just finished an exhausting and stressful TV show that saw me reviewing one or more video games every episode, and those video games had all merged into one violent, brown, ugly whole. I was completely and utterly numbed by them. I’d had enough. I wanted to play a different kind of game. After hunting down all the great board games of my youth (Space Hulk, HeroQuest, Warhammer Quest) I flung myself into an online community to find out what board games were out there right now. There was no flesh and blood person I could speak to about board games at that point. I had to type words at strangers in Baltimore or Ontario or Berlin. I had to seek out little points of light, distant illuminated tables, wherever I could find them. The scene, over here in the UK at least, was as good as dead.
But that’s all changed. And I think I know why.
The saviour of video games, over the last few years, has been the growth of the indie sector. Those little points of digital light have grown and massed into something bright and warming. We see innovation on a weekly basis. There’s always something new, and usually that something new has something new within it. These games, from tiny teams of creators, even make us question what games are. While the big-budget blockbusters remain risk-averse and repetitive, the indie sector zigs and zags and experiments with the form.
When you’ve played computer and video games for 30 years, as I have, the indie sector’s vigour is an essential thing. It keeps us from getting jaded. It’s starting to steal headlines too, simply because quality is difficult to ignore. There are no big marketing budgets or PR flim-flam in indie gaming – it’s just become embarrassing for major gaming news sources to not talk about what’s happening. The indie sector never really went away, but these days it feels like it’s “in”, like it’s maybe the only part of the industry that genuinely matters. Only ten years ago we would talk about how the “bedroom coder” was a thing of the past. We were wrong. We just hadn’t tired enough of the living room entertainment yet to start checking in all those bedrooms. Just like in MTV Cribs, the bedroom is where the magic happens.
It’s the magic of innovation that leads us to board games. I’ve spoken many times before about the emotional benefits of board games. Spending time with people you love, playing at a table, communicating? That’s all essential stuff in this age of social networking. But I think the main reason why so many video gamers have started board gaming is that it feels like board games are part of the whole indie movement. Look, almost every board game is an indie game. Most board games are created by one person, and that one person is trying to come up with new ideas, or new spins on old ones. When you have a question about some element of the game, you can often just ask the designer. He’ll be on Twitter or something, probably, and will be happy to have you pestering him about a rule clarification. The creator is a human being, not some corporate machine. The indie sector, in video gaming and board gaming, is full of people who are doing what they do for the love of play. Are they making fortunes? No. They’re just people like us, who know that games are important. They’re the types who understand characters like Eco’s imperilled Foucault’s Pendulum trio. They would follow that path with them, with us, because hey, this is fun. Games are worth it, whatever the cost.
For children, it’s never just about “Will we play today?” It’s about “What will we play today?” It’s about being stimulated intellectually, and revelling in the creativity of the games they invent. Children rarely play the same game two days in a row. They don’t spend entire summers as the same bald, grunting space marine, shooting his way through waves of endlessly re-spawning enemies. They don’t spend every single day fighting over who gets to be the main nameless soldier dude in that helicopter full of nameless soldier dudes who are about to land in that nameless Middle Eastern country again. They tweak their games up, change them and introduce new mechanics. It might seem odd to say that your 6-year-olds are creating new game mechanics when they’re out in your back garden, but it’s true. The minute they ask for a password to the secret hideout, a new mechanic is in the rulebook.
And that’s just the thing. Board games, and indie video games, are always changing the password to the hideout. And it’s exactly why you should want in.
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