This week’s readings, at least the text-heavy pieces, though they covered a wide range of eras and games, all shared one assumption: that the games that are popular within a given culture or period can demonstrate certain values, priorities, or other characteristics about that time and place. I suppose this might be a pretty basic assumption for some of you, but I think it’s worth establishing, since it’s at the heart of why we have a history class on games.

In the three pieces about the American games this is quite overt. Freitag, Hofer, Adams, and Edmonds take readers through the games of America’s post-Civil War period as American society and ideas about success shifted from focusing on things like virtue and religion to acquiring wealth and “getting ahead” (with the obvious caveat that we’re speaking in generalities).

Koichi Iwabuchi’s piece on the rise of Pokémon and Japanese culture in the global market in the 1990’s makes the same central assumption, especially when he mentions ideas like cultural fragrance and odorlessness. The practices of glocalization and removing overtly Japanese elements of Pokémon to make it more suitable for global consumption add an interesting dynamic that American game developers during the Gilded Age didn’t have to deal with, as their games were intended only for American audiences. It’s also interesting to see Nintendo of America’s attempts to control the localization of Pokémon and how they contrast pre-industrial games like pachisi which freely evolved to have a plethora of variations.

It does seem that Iwabuchi primarily refers to surface level cultural characteristics, especially the appearance of characters. I don’t really have any experience with Pokémon, but I’m sure there have been plenty of texts written that explore how Pokémon still inherently reflects certain characteristics of Japanese culture. The District Messenger Boy is a quintessentially American not because of the flag and the white kid on the front of the box, but because of the deep-seated values inherent in the game.

One last point I’ll raise is that many of the American board games discussed in this week’s readings were essentially the same game from a game theory standpoint. There isn’t much to them, players simply roll a dice and follow the instructions on the board. The difference between the game penalizing you for a failure of virtue or a failure of business acumen is a cosmetic one. A different area of study might be to examine games that allow for different play styles. If one were able to quantify how players from different cultures or eras went about playing the same game it might provide an even more accurate portrayal of that culture.