Mary Flanagan’s chapter “Board Games” in her book Critical Play: Radical Game Design discusses how spiritual connections are seen in the early forms of board games. Playing board games is shown by Flanagan to have an added factor for both conscious and unconscious learning. Conscious learning is the ability to develop skills such as mathematics while unconscious learning refers to unawareness of understanding and obtaining religion, or society’s belief towards their social standards.
The development of societal skills through board games is a common aspect of them. This aspect of the board game, Go, presents an ancient calendar that corresponds to “[a]gricultural planning, the saving of seeds, animal breeding and domestication…” (Flanagan 79). The practical skills from Go’s calendar teach a mathematical approach to improving the future’s harvest.
Players are consciously improving individual mathematical skills by engaging with the calendar through fewer physical actions and less risk. It increases the competitive edge without worrying about their safety. Video games such as Call of Duty from the twenty-first century have increased competitive playing due to the game having no harmful elements for players. However, with Call of Duty games, the practical skills translate to psychological skills such as warfare, and hand-eye coordination due to computerization. The blog “Do Video Games Actually Improve Hand-Eye Coordination?” published by Vision Works Optometrists discusses a recent study from the University of Toronto comparing regular video game users to non-video game users. This study found that regular video game users “perform better in sensorimotor tasks and improve hand-eye coordination, than people who do not play video games”.
The significance of analyzing historical board game elements that are related to the religion, or society’s beliefs from 2000 BC to fifth-century BC highlighted the importance of interconnecting morals or lessons. For example, the board game Hounds and Jackals, or Fifty-Eight Holes, started in the Middle Kingdom of Egypt.
The original game was made by “two parallel tracks of twenty-nine holes assembled in groups of five” (Flanagan 68). During the fifth century, a version of Hounds and Jackals, called Fifty-Eight Holes, included “a sculpture of a hippopotamus, likely Taueret, the goddess of maternity and childbirth” (Flanagan 68). In this case, players expect the new version to convey the same as the original one but are unaware of any modifications based on religion, society’s morals, or lessons. These modifications refer to efforts made to instill certain values or beliefs in individuals through subconscious learning.
Overall, the evolution of early forms of board games to the present computerization of video games consists of conscious and subconscious learning. The digital era of computerization has modified practical skills to be based on computers, problem-solving, and strategy. Chess and Minecraft are two separate games however, problem solving and strategy skills are in both of these games. Whereas the unconscious learning of chess has kings and queens based on medieval religions compared to social and creative skills from building and interacting within Minecraft. The partnership between Microsoft and Getting Smart conducted research on the impact of Minecraft: Education Edition on social and emotional learning (SEL) in K-12 grade students. From their global case study “How Minecraft Supports Social and Emotional Learning in K–12 Education” they found that Minecraft: Education Edition increases students’ social and creative skills. Even though learning has shifted to the digital age, historians, scholars, and researchers can trace modern games back to early board games.