USask Professor explores how history can inform more respectful gaming

In January 2020, the Illingworth Kerr Gallery in Calgary hosted Ready Player 2, an art exhibition about games and their impact on culture. Created by Brendan Lee Satish Tang and Sonny Assu, Ready Player 2 combined “elements from science fiction, comic book, and gaming cultures to consider how these forms alternately reinforce and transcend racial boundaries in youth culture.”

As part of the promotion for that exhibition, Dr. Benjamin Hoy and Ta7talíya Michelle Nahanee (Squamish) showcased their own work on the relationship between colonialism and games. At the event Nahanee demoed her game Sínulhkay and Ladders, an adaptation of Snakes and Ladders designed to foster reconciliation in Canada. The event also included a public lecture by Dr. Benjamin Hoy on the historic ways board games and video games have used racial stereotypes over the past hundred years to market their products. The talk highlighted the steps necessary for moving forwards towards designing good games that teach respectful histories and outlined the differences in representations between games marketed for European and American audiences.

The event concluded with a games night, which featured demonstrations of close to a dozen games celebrated for their inclusive design and appropriate handling of difficult historical topics. The end goal of the exhibit, the talks, and the games night was to encourage the public to think about the games they consumed and the lessons those games passed on to future generations.

You can read more about Dr. Hoy's research and teaching connecting history with board games here.

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