Mochocki, Michal, ed. Abingdon, Oxon; New York, NY: Routledge, Taylor & Francis Group, 2024. 127 pp. ISBN 9781032411118; eBook ISBN 9781003356318.

Reviewed by Cheryl Oestreicher, Professor/Head, Special Collections and Archives, Boise State University [PDF Full Text]

When opportunities arise, I incorporate board games into class and patron visits. I especially like to show games to students learning about primary sources. As artifacts, games help expand the scope of what students consider a primary source, beyond the usual papers, photographs, scrapbooks, and maps. Plus, they are just fun!

It is this experience that drew me to Heritage, Memory and Identity in Postcolonial Board Games, an edited volume of international scholarship. The authors are scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film studies, game studies, communication, digital media and culture, literature, creative writing, and heritage studies from universities in Italy, Brazil, Mexico, Spain, the United States, Poland, Finland, and the United Kingdom. This broad representation of disciplines and location aptly highlights how game studies, like archives, is a global topic.

Archives scholars are increasingly examining archival practices through theoretical lenses such as feminist studies and postcolonial analysis. More scholars outside the field are also taking a close, critical view about how archival practices affect their disciplines. Although this book does not directly address archives—its primary audience is games studies scholars—archivists can nevertheless draw from its themes. The book’s introduction has an excellent summary of its chapters as well as an annotated bibliography. Rather than summarizing each chapter in this review, I want to call attention to select theories and concepts that archivists may find useful.

Authors explore how nostalgia, identity, and other topics influence colonialism-themed board games. In particular, the theme of nostalgia aligns with archives experiences. They characterize nostalgia not solely as an emotion “but as a way to reimagine and relive the past”; some games present a “nostalgic representation that glorifies this idyllic past” and ignores or glosses over episodes of slavery, political extremism, or other aspects of a country’s history that take away from the supposed triumphs of elite rulers (pp. 77–78). As I read about nostalgia and what was overlooked in the board games, I saw parallels with how the archives profession recognizes and works to overcome archival silences. Archivists are acutely aware that an “idyllic past” does not really exist and thus understand the importance of ensuring a more historically accurate record.

Authors also analyze the construction of a people’s or country’s identity through the culture, heritage, colonization, politicalization, and other aspects represented in a country’s games. An investigation into several Mexican board games unfolds the complicated narrative of what constitutes “Mexicanness” through different time periods from pre-Hispanic roots to colonization to contemporary Mexico. In another chapter, authors delve into how interpretations of one Finnish game changed over a period of fifty years. While reading these chapters, I readily saw parallels with how researchers’ interpretations of archival materials vary based on their knowledge and experiences.

The authors’ discussions about the term “postcolonial” are extremely helpful. This concept is common across many disciplines but somewhat new to game studies. In recent archival literature, the term generally refers to the recovering of marginalized or silenced voices and groups.[1] Several of this book’s chapters incorporate that definition, but also provide a deeper analysis and interpretation within the context of the games they analyze.

Authors take time to explain their use of postcolonial theory within game studies. As a US historian and an archivist, I see how, at times, the concept of postcolonialism may not be precisely reconciled among various disciplines. Yet, there is no right or wrong definition, and I found that even within this collection of game studies, different authors had different approaches to the application of postcolonial theory, one of the aspects of the book that I found most informative. Two of the interpretations that struck me the most were:

• The definition of postcolonialas “all the culture affected by the imperial process from the moment of colonization to the present day” (p. 26), and
• The assertion that postcolonialism is not simply “‘after colonialism,’ the end of colonialism, or even solely [addressing] scenarios in formerly colonized countries after their independence” (p. 57).

While I recognize that the term “postcolonial” varies across disciplines, I find it helpful to see it spelled out in a way that emphasizes how the interpretation is highly dependent on the context of what is being analyzed. For example, postcolonialism in the wargame about the Battle of Dien Bien Phu in Vietnam in 1954 is more clearly defined than in Spirit Island, a fictionalized game that presents “a counterfactual and ahistorical fantasy of anti-colonialist defense” (p. 45).  The different applications of postcolonialism are particularly evident as the book covers board games from areas across the world, including Mexico, Brazil, Africa, and Finland; each country has its own identity, heritage, culture, and people that provide varying contexts of postcolonialism.

Wargames are perhaps the epitome of postcolonialism and have familiar narratives: they are historical simulations of colonization in which the dominant individuals divide and conquer to take over land and power from insurgents or to eliminate the backwardness of the colonized. Author Maurice Suckling delves deeper into these games and discusses their “political complexity,” analyzing the intricacy of designing a wargame. In any conflict, there are imbalances of power, military, strategy, and resources. A wargame is therefore seldom designed to represent balance but instead how “strategic-level complexities leads to representing asymmetries.” The imbalance could be from the available resources (e.g., game pieces) used or assigned to individuals to play the game, as well as how “considerations like table space, component limitations, playability, and constrained play time” also contribute to the complexity of a wargame’s design (pp. 29–30). I saw two specific similarities between the imbalance of wargame design and archives. First, just as wargames can give agency to the dominant power, a creator, at times, curates their own collection to represent an imbalanced story, focusing on what makes them look good and leaving out anything that is less flattering. Second, just as the physical space and time constraints of a wargame can affect game play, an archival facility, reading room, and open hours potentially pose imbalance and constraints to users.

One theory that I was unfamiliar with was ludo-textual analysis, a theory specific to game studies. As Andrew Kemp-Wilcox notes, because “board games are use objects: meant to be touched, handled, manipulated, and altered,” it is imperative to analyze the interplay between the players, mechanics, and physical game (p. 50). Part of this analysis includes the game design, whether the pieces representing people are generic or assigned a particular identity, and the game experience itself, such as how a player feels during gameplay. I found the chapters about this theory particularly intriguing, and I will incorporate this whenever I bring out board games for instruction or research.

This book was a challenging read in the most positive sense. From the title, I expected and received an analysis of how board games reflect and perpetuate the imbalance of power and identity that marginalizes the colonized. As someone unfamiliar but curious about applying memory and identity theories to board games, I was fascinated with the authors’ dissections of game design, the in-depth analysis of board games within heritage studies, and interpretations of postcolonial and other theories.

This book will be of most interest to archivists who have collections of board games and would like to expand their knowledge about game theory to better engage with researchers who access them. However, the book is an intriguing read for anyone looking for a deeper analysis of postcolonialism. Though a densely written text, it is exemplary of applying the theories of postcolonialism to an artifact that is found in cultures across the world. As I read it, I reflected on the vast array of games I have played in my life, and I now have a new perspective that I will use far into the future, whether personally playing or working with users of board games.

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[1] Kellee E. Warren, “Reimagining Instruction in Special Collections: The Special Case of Haiti,” American Archivist  83, no. 2 (Fall/Winter 2020): 289–321, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-83.2.289; Veronica Ehrenreich-Risner, “Reading Geographical Names as Text: Refiguring the ‘Living Archive’ in Postcolonial South Africa,” American Archivist 83, no. 1 (Spring/Summer 2020): 21–56, https://doi.org/10.17723/0360-9081-83.1.21.