SPALDING WARGAMING CLUB
No, not the Led Zeppelin song. It's a quote from an interview on Radio 4's Sunday morning magazine show Broadcasting House (9am, 17 March, 2019), discussing board games once more, with familiar results. It's a tribute to how significant a cultural product board games have become that the BBC can't leave them alone. Yet the Beeb's pundits seem unequipped to discuss the topic.
Nowadays, an ordinary undergraduate or a particularly bright schoolboy (if such there be) could sum up the gist of Einstein's ideas, which goes to show that some concepts perplex very clever people, not because they are complicated, but because they are unfamiliar. Something like this seems to be true of board games at the moment. You can listen to the BBC piece here: don't listen from the start (you'll get Brexit commentary that is instantly out of date) or stick around after the end (you'll get the Irish Question which has never changed and never will).
If you don't know, Wingspan is the new game from Stonemeier Games (who brought us Vitculture) and it arrived in January this year after much anticipation, the advance reviews being so positive. Unfortunately, the first wave of stock was too small, so retailers couldn't fulfill advance orders and scalpers on eBay cleaned up, selling copies of a £70 game for three times that amount. Stonemeier Games apologised to fans after a Twitter-led crusade of disappointment. The game is already on its 3rd print run, with 30,000 English copies sold. Wingspan has a charming theme, which is that you are bird-lovers trying to attract the best collection of birds to your aviary. You can lure in different species by placing different types of food and you can choose between a diverse or a focused collection and whether or not to encourage them to nest and lay eggs. The mechanics are elegant but not especially original, being a sort of victory engine where birds played earlier interact with birds played later to trigger more powerful effects or more lucrative scores. There's a lot to say about Wingspan. It's physically beautiful (as Stonemeier games tend to be), with gorgeous avian art. Its sales illustrate the role key critics like Shut Up & Sit Down play in creating hype ahead of the release of a game and the economic heft a successful game now has. It has a conservationist theme, which taps into our current concerns. It was designed by a woman, Elizabeth Hargrave, and the artists are both women as well, and that too is culturally on-topic these days. Hargrave is a keen ornithologist and the game celebrates her enthusiasm for birds and science, being a careful representation of the feeding and mating habits of different species and their place in the wider eco-system. There's an excellent New York Times article on Hargrave, her game and her passion. With so much to commend this story to so many target audiences, the BBC decides to get this game reviewed by a chap called Irving Finkel, a curator at the British Museum, because, on a previous show about museums, he declared himself a fan of board games. Irving Finkel lives up to his name. He's the Assistant Keeper of Ancient Mesopotamian script, languages and cultures in the Department of the Middle East in the British Museum, where he specialises in cuneiform inscriptions on tablets of clay. However, he's also a historian of board games and in 1990 he set up the International Board Game Studies Association. A proper academic heavyweight! And he looks like Dumbledore! Finkel is one of those pet academics that Radio 4 loves to use because of his breathy, kid-in-a-sweet-shop voice and tendency to drop fey witticisms. He's all over the Internet too, teaching geeks to read cuneiform script and challenging people to play the Royal Game of Ur - a board game from 2,500 BCE, the rules for which he deciphered.
Watch either of these and you too will love The Fink! This means the BBC has brought together the game du jour and an academic in board game studies - and not a clapped-out comedian or retired athlete in sight to interrupt with asinine comments about Monopoly. All Bodes Well. Now: what does The Fink have to say about Wingspan, do you think? This is a typical modern game where you have to work very hard to work out how to win Hmm. Bridge is a game where it's hard to work out how to win, but this seems to be a back-handed way of saying that Wingspan is a Euro-style game. Surely, over at the International Board Games Studies Association, they know all about Euro-games? Maybe Fink doesn't want to dazzle R4 listeners with his erudition yet. It's a kind of resource game … overlaid with a tremendous repertoire of fiddly things where the actual fun element seems to me to be trampled underfoot What's going on? Even critics who don't much like Euro-games have praised Wingspan for its elegant design. Tom Vasel calls it "a medium weight gateway-plus game you can play in an hour" - so why does a scholar of board game studies find it 'fiddly' and lacking "fun"? The Fink expands on his critique: In the old days … you would learn [a game] simply by watching it and you’d be able to do it an hour later whereas it would take me I-don't-know-how-many months of incarceration really to understand how to play this game We've been here before. Clever people pretending to be stupid when confronted by a board game. Remember Jeremy Vine debating Brexit but professing himself baffled by Cluedo? Now here's Irving Finkel, who translates Babylonia cuneiform FOR FUN saying that he cannot wrap his head around the rules for a medium weight Euro-game. I smell a rat. But it doesn't end there. Finkel is confident that all the people who rushed to order Wingspan, sight unseen, are going to be bitterly disappointed when they discover what a dull-fest it really is: I’d be very interested to know whether the people who bought it have enjoyed it very much This is where the penny drops for me. The Internet is awash with testimonials for Wingspan from delighted players and gushing reviewers. How can Finkel be unaware of this? Because he hasn't even bothered to find out. This is confirmed when O'Connell asks whether the conservationist theme might explain the appeal of this fun-free game. Finkel sniffs at the idea. Well, I think they exploit the idea that people are supposed to be interested in wildlife by putting information on the cards, like their wingspan, how old they are and when they mate: that's all very well and good but it's a kind of 'nod', I think The simplicity of this remark is breathtaking. Let's pass over the slur that environmental concern is just something that people do because 'they're supposed to be interested in wildlife' - Finkel is clearly baffled by anyone whose sensibilities are drawn to sunlight and birds rather than dusty crypts and clay tablets. No. What's simplistic is his view that this game is a purely commercial venture, cashing in on faddish conservationism by tacking a wildlife theme onto a fiddly number puzzle. Mere minutes of Internet searching would have disabused Finkel of this. This game isn't by Hasbro; it comes from a small independent company that puts out labour-of-love projects and designer Elizabeth Hargrave is a real-deal nature geek with an educational agenda behind her game. Click the image to read a fantastic interview with Elizabeth Hargrave - the sort of reading Finkel should have done but didn't I don't know about you, but if I were asked to go on the BBC (that's the BBC! the BBC! the BB-freaking-C!) and talk for five minutes about something of interest, well I don't know, I might just hit Google and read up on it, briefly, you know, maybe while in the taxi heading to Broadcasting House. Or for spend an afternoon the day before, looking things up, just to make sure I didn't say accidentally say something completely stupid. I might actually play the game. Because this is the truth of things, isn't it? Finkel has opened the box, looked at the pretty cards with birds on them, skimmed the rules and formed a judgment. Of course he didn't round up his buddies in Egyptian Antiquities and Byzantine Reliquaries and other cobwebbed regions of the British Museum to sit down and actually play the game. Can you even imagine that? This is why the only aspect of the game Finkel enthuses about is a gimmicky component. There's a dice tower that looks like a bird feeder. Cute. But Finkel goes into raptures over this. Why? Well, it touches on his area of interest, you see. There’s an imitation of a Roman fritillus, so the bird box where you put the bird food is actually derived from this Roman tower with steps inside where you threw the dice in and they rattled down, to stop cheating. So that’s a rather interesting nod to the past What Finkel is whittering about is that the Ancient Romans loved dice games and they invented the idea of a dice tower (called a fritillus or 'dice box' in Latin, apparently; it's also called a pyrgus or 'tower'). The Vettweiss-Froitzheim Dice Tower (right) has the inscription "The Picts are defeated. The enemy is destroyed. Play in safety!" Yes, you can buy replicas. Finkel, like the old narcissist that he is, imagines that Stonemeier Games have included a dice tower as a deliberate nod to the Classical origins of dice games. He's simply unaware that dice towers are pretty common gaming accessories and have no Roman connotations for most people. But Finkel is so lost in his scholarship, he sees links that aren't there while missing features that are right under his nose. But isn't Irving Finkel on the editorial board of the International Board Game Studies Association? How did he manage to avoid knowing anything about modern board games? With difficulty, surely. But Finkel is an antiquarian rather than a board gamer. He sleeps through seminars on collectible card games and hidden role games, if he attends them at all. He's strictly there for the ancient stuff. This is why, when commenting on a game like Wingspan, Finkel speaks with no more authority (and perhaps less insight and sympathy) than, I don't know, maybe your Nan? If you're not out of patience with Irving Finkel, listen on past the 25:00 point where he gets to talk about stuff he knows something about: the Royal Game of Ur and an Indian game that's the precursor for Ludo. In his own field, Finkel bristles with learning. But he could not care less about 21st century board games. Card drafting? Worker placement? Resource management? Pointless fiddliness! But give him a roll-the-dice-and-chase-each-other-round-the-board game from 5,000 years ago and he's in heaven. Finkel demonstrates the Royal Game of Ur. He betrays no awareness that tetrahedral dice are used in modern games and are termed D4s. Finkel is the single-topic obsessive you don't want to find yourself sat next to on a long air flight. He simply doesn't take anything seriously if it's from after the invention of trousers. Getting him to review Wingspan is like bringing in an expert on the 1908 Model T Ford to present Top Gear or the world's leading authority on the invention of the abacus to offer her views on the latest iPad. Finkel's sheer cluelessness about life in the 21st century finds striking expression towards the end of the interview. He's talking about the elementary Victorian race game Ludo and is confident his listeners know what he's taking about: It’s under every television in the country Younger readers of this blog (i.e. the under-50s) might need help unpacking this gnomic remark. You see, once upon a time TVs were big bulky affairs that often lived in bespoke cabinets in people's living rooms, rather than slim panels that now hang artfully from their walls. Usually there was a lot of storage space under the TV and, before that space was filled with DVDs or VHS videos (yes, that's how far back you have to go to make sense of Finkel's allusion), it was often filled with dusty children's board games and copies of Trivial Pursuit with half the cards missing. And yes, under my grandmother's TV was a copy of Ludo. In other words the last time Finkel checked what board games modern people were playing, it was the 1950s. I don't blame Finkel. Yes, he's an old humbug who rolls up to the Beeb with his hands in his pockets and no notes, talks rubbish on things he knows nothing about and trousers a nice fat cheque, courtesy of the licence payer. But his enthusiasm for ancient gaming is infectious. Maybe, after some future holocaust blasts us back to the Bronze Age, he'll be able to take an interest in the world around him again and we'll all sit down together and play Ur. With that in mind, Finkel's final thoughts take on a delightfully apocalyptic tone: Board games will never die. The digital age will fail before board games die. If we're going to blame someone for making a mess of this, it's the BBC. It's the Beeb (perhaps Paddy O'Connell himself) who made the decision to treat the Wingspan story as essentially ridiculous ('grown adults playing a board game about birds!') and, rather than bringing in any of the informed, witty and charismatic commentators in the hobby scene, decided to get the phenomenon critiqued by someone whose perceptions were only ever going to be absurd. But Finkel is a Proper Historian, so he could balance this nonsense about birds with something that Actually Matters: like archaeology. I suspect that the ingenuous Finkel protested that he had neither the time nor the inclination to learn to play a ghastly modern board game, but was reassured by a BBC research assistant: 'Don't worry old chap. Just give it a look-over. Make a link to something historical. Then you can talk about your Babylonian game for 5 minutes.' I'm strengthened in this conviction by the appearance, towards the end of the interview, of one of O'Connell's R4 cronies, the presenter Jonny Diamond. Diamond has nothing to contribute to this discussion except to make chortling remarks about family feuds over Monopoly. Look, I can chuckle at Monopoly memes too. But is there any basis to them? Do people actually fight over Monopoly? Children will (I know!) fight over anything competitive and Monopoly is rather boring and protracted and once you start to lose there's nothing much you can do about it, but I wonder where the idea comes from that Monopoly is a uniquely fractious game? The competition in Monopoly is indirect; in Risk the other person is actually choosing to attack you, but in Monopoly you simply make an unlucky dice roll and land on someone else's space. What's there to fight about? The link between Monopoly - and board games in general - and socially dysfunctional behaviour is part of the wider negative stereotyping of the hobby as the preserve of misfits and inadequates. But it runs completely counter to my experience. Finkel, who knows a lot about board games but nothing about playing them, buys into this stereotype too. People are full of animosity and board games are a great way to reduce it to a manageable level without bloodshed This is the 'pressure cooker' model of human psychology, popularised by Freud. It suggests that we are boiling cauldrons of rage and negativity who need to vent our nastiness in safe doses through sport or art or politics, otherwise we explode in violence. It's a popular insight, but without a shred of research evidence to support it. Indeed, it was completely debunked in the 1960s. But insights from the 1960s are far too recent for Finkel to know anything about. People who play board games have a different experience. Games are largely harmonious. They bring people together rather than divide them. Good sportsmanship is the norm. Sure, there are sore losers, but they tend to get filtered out of the hobby. It's games with unwilling participants (the reluctant older brother, bored partner or roped-in friend) that produce the rage-quits and board-flips. The truth is much more interesting than Diamond's lazy quips and Finkel's obsolete pseudo-wisdom. People are not full of animosity, but curiosity. They enjoy coming together to solve problems and create things. They enjoy challenging themselves as much as each other. They like to experiment with what is possible and try out different strategies. Board games provide a structure for them to do constructive things together. Finkel is right that board games aren't going away. The BBC will keep returning to the hobby as its economic and cultural significance continues to rise. One day, the nation's broadcaster will decide to treat the story seriously.....
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