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Reading 00: Beyond the Board

I signed up for this class without knowing what exactly it was about. Maybe I'm just a masochist and enjoy the "reasonable workloads" pbui gives out, idk. I think at the end of the day though, I was drawn to this class because it was about the history of video games. Playing games has always been something I’m passionate about, whether it was the endless days of monopoly when I was a kid, or the thousands of hours I sunk into League of Legends when I was in High School. So to have this chance to learn more about the history of games, and discuss it with other people is something I’m looking forward to.

I think that board games and video games share a symbiotic relationship. Video games and board games have always drawn inspiration from one another. Board games are adapted to video games and more recently, board games have been created that are based on video games. Video games like Tabletop Simulator blur the boundary between the two genres and allow for interesting new interactions. The constant back and forth between video and board games has improved the quality of both.

Both retro and modern video games have drawn from board games in different ways. In the early days video games were a way to adapt popular titles into single player experiences. Baldur’s Gate was a wildly successful adaptation of the Dungeons and Dragons ruleset into a pc game. In more recent times, successful video games such as the X-COM (or is it just XCOM now?) reboot have been adapted into board games of their own. The trend here is that adapting board games to video games and vice-versa allows them to reach broader audiences then they otherwise would. Look no further than the recent surge of digital card games as proof of this trend, from Yu-Gi-Oh Duel Links to Gwent, to the biggest of them all Hearthstone, card games are coming back in a big way in a new digital form. By transitioning from traditional physical cards to a digital format, huge segments of the market have access to games they have never played before, forming new fans of the source material the games are based on.

This isn’t to say that video games are just cribbing all their ideas from board games for a quick buck. VR is an exciting area to watch when it comes to the future of gaming because itallows for a level of immersion that is difficult for either traditional video games or board games to achieve. There is enormous potential for exciting new ways of interacting with games that nobody has ever seen before. One of my favorite VR games right now is called Keep Talking and Nobody Explodes. The goal of the game is for the person wearing the VR headset to defuse a bomb. The only problem is that they have no idea how to. That job falls to the other players, who have a physical bomb defusal manual printed out. Their task is to guide the defuser through the process using only their verbal description of what the bomb looks like. It can lead to some very intense moments for everyone involved, which is pretty incredible considering the majority of the people playing can’t see the actual game at all!

Games like these are especially exciting because of how they manage to blend the virtual and physical aspects of gameplay into a single experience. In the future I’m hopeful that more developers will take advantage of these aspects of VR to craft truly unique gameplay experiences.

This blog has been a long and disjointed ramble through things I’ve noticed and that make me excited for the future of games in general, whether they be video games or board games. It’s hard to contain my enthusiasm about this subject as there’s just so much more to say than just one short blog post. But, to make a long story short and answer the original prompt, I think that board games and video games are permanently intertwined, the yin to the other’s yang. They are two sides of the same coin of gaming and each is made better by innovations of the other. The future of games looks great and I can’t wait to see what comes next.

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