Students in GAM206: History of Games are assigned to find primary and secondary sources on the history of a board or card game selected by the professor. CDM Associate Professor Robin Burke, who designed the History of Games course, states “Games are an experiential medium – you play a game in order to have a particular kind of experience. For this reason, it is vital that students not just read about games from history, but actually play them. I tell them that you can’t learn about food by reading menus, and so you can’t learn about a game by reading its rules. With funding from the Quality of Instruction Council, I was able to build up a collection of historic games housed within our PC games lab at CDM, and Dean Miller has supported regular additions of new inventory.”
Burke acknowledges that “games are a challenging historical subject because for most of human history they weren’t considered worth writing about. You learned by observation and word of mouth the games that people around you played and that was that. Few chroniclers wrote about people’s leisure activities like they did battles and affairs of state.” Carson Cunningham, Visiting Assistant Professor in DePaul’s History Department elaborates. “I think students, and most other people that I talk to about the history of games, are surprised to learn how connected our games are to our lives–politically, economically, and culturally. It’s largely overlooked, but Monopoly is rooted in Henry George’s 19th century political movement for a ‘single tax’ on land. In fact, the original creator of what we now call Monopoly, Quaker Elizabeth Magie, a ‘single tax’ proponent, wanted her game to show the downsides of land monopolies. My, how the game has changed since then! As for poker, a quintessential American game of wit and daring and luck, economic theorists John von Neumann and Oskar Morganstern based their ‘Game Theory’ on a simplified version of it. In short, our games tell us a lot about ourselves and that’s why they’re both dynamic and fun to study.”
When students confront the prospect of researching a game, according to Johnny L. Wilson, CDM Adjunct Faculty and co-author of High Score: An Illustrated History of Electronic Games, “they become so focused on the game that they forget to research the culture in which the game was introduced, disseminated, or developed. The assignment calls for them to draw conclusions about the game’s contribution to and place in the culture, but they have a tendency to drift into opinion on this without having any historical or sociological citations to back up their assertions.
Reference Librarians love a mystery, and interpreting assignments gives us plenty of practice. What seems daunting to students can be tackled similarly to literature or art history assignments where students need to contextualize an object within a specific geographic region and time. Librarians help students navigate this unchartered territory by leading them to sources starting with basic encyclopedias such as History of Board-Games Other Than Chess, Oxford History of Board Games, etc. and show them how to find items using the DePaul and I-Share Catalogs. But possibly our most important job is to engage them in thinking creatively about approaching research. If a student is investigating a game originated in England but adapted by an Indian audience, for example, it’s helpful to engage them in a discussion about the “who, what, when, where and why,” encouraging them to think more broadly about the game’s context. Once students focus on the context, there will be plenty of scholarly secondary information available for them in databases such as America: History & Life – and primary sources such as newspaper ads touting the new game.
Burke concedes that classes on the history of games is a rarity but at DePaul it’s becoming a favorite among students. “As far as I have been able to find, there are only one or two other institutions in the world that teach a course like it. It has proven very popular, attracting enough students for 3 or 4 sections every quarter. I’ve taught the class a half-dozen times and each time I’m glad that I can point students towards the library and its reference staff with confidence.”
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