[One of the most
consistent
through-lines in my life as an AmericanStudier, from my own childhood
through my experiences with my sons, has been games, both board/card and video.
So this week I’ll analyze a handful of games that offer complex lessons about
our past, leading up to a Guest Post on the wonderful Reacting to the Past pedagogical
games!]
[NB. I wrote
this piece for the Fitchburg Historical Society’s Summer 2020 newsletter, so it’s
a bit longer than my usual blog posts, but it’s also too perfect for this week’s
series not to include here!]
My sons and I have been serious board gamers for most of
their young lives (they’re now 14 and 13 years old), but in this locked-down
moment we have taken our board gaming to a whole new level. As usual that has
meant multiple daily repeats of the same current obsessions, which at the
moment includes a new favorite, the delightful card game Exploding Kittens; and a 1980s classic, Iron Crown Enterprise’s
wonderful Middle-earth-set Riddle of the
Ring. But this new reality has likewise required a deep dive into the
backbench of our voluminous collection, assembled across many years, three
apartments, and roughly three-dozen obsessions. At the bottom of one of our
piles, hidden beneath larger boxes and thus far too long forgotten, was a game
I had ordered from eBay many years ago: the 1971 version of Careers.
The original Careers (which
we had played with my parents at their Virginia home, prompting our interest in
ordering our own version of the game) was released by Parker Brothers in 1957.
The 1971 edition kept much of the same design and gameplay, but offered, as the
back of the box notes, “a bright, new board and some new career choices, like
Ecology, which reflect the world of the 1970s.” And indeed, playing the 1971
game with two curious and thoughtful middle schoolers felt very much like
entering a time machine and emerging in early 1970s America, to learn a number
of interesting and at times frustrating lessons about that moment (and perhaps about
legacies into our own).
As you might expect, gender was a particularly overt and
eye-opening subject. The 60s women’s rights movement meant that the most
blatant sexism of the 1957 edition—which featured for example a space called
“Shopping Spree” in which “your wife” spent an exorbitant amount of your cash
on hand—had disappeared. But the 1971 game still has a number of details which
read quite differently in the era of #MeToo. In the “Big Business” career path,
you can receive 4 hearts (a measure of happiness, but one often linked to relationships
and love) for “Lunch with your secretary.” In the “Sports” path, you receive 2
hearts for “Play touch football with the girls.” And in the “Teaching” path,
you receive 4 hearts when your “New principal is a bachelor,” which of course
not only condones workplace romances with serious boss/employee and power
dynamic issues, but also assumes that anyone going through the “Teaching” path
is a woman (compared to the game’s overall default, which as these other
“romantic” spaces suggest tends to be that the player is male).
That latter space likewise illustrates a second, somewhat
subtler takeaway from the game: the cultural attitudes toward distinct career
paths. Perhaps it’s because I’m a teacher so my sensitivity was up, but I found
the attitudes toward teaching particularly striking. Besides that “bachelor”
space and its assumption of teaching as a gendered (and romance-centered) profession,
it’s interesting to note that teaching is the career which features the most
happiness rewards, but through one specific and strange lens: of the three
other happiness spaces in the path, two are framed as opportunities to not have
to do the job at all (“Snow storm, no school” gives you 2 hearts; while the
culminating “School’s out” space gives you 8, one of the game’s biggest
happiness payouts overall). Taken together, these spaces create an image of
teaching as a profession for women who are more interested in landing a
powerful bachelor than, y’know, educating young people.
Perhaps the other most telling career path is “Space.” Just
the existence of this career path at all reflects a very different historical
moment than our own, the era of the 1969 Apollo XI moon landing and subsequent
missions which made astronaut was one of America’s most desirable careers (as
in the 1957 edition, “Space” is tied with “Sports” for the career path which
offers the most rewards). Moreover, while some of the Space path’s rewards are
for successes within the career itself (“Successful lift-off” offers 6 stars
[fame], while “1st man on Mars” offers a game-high 16 stars), many
others indicate that a career in Space is geared more towards celebrity than
exploration. If you “Endorse Crunchies,” you receive a “$2000 fee”; if you
“Sell your life story,” you “Collect $5,000”; and if you “Sell moon craters,”
you “Earn $10,000.” Those financial rewards are second only to those available
in the “Sports” path (and in both cases they are among the path’s culminating,
most rewarding spaces), illustrating a pair of careers in which capitalizing on
celebrity seems to be a chief pursuit.
While the American Studies scholar in me might have expected
some of these details about 1971 attitudes, it’s also important to note a final
category of lessons from the 1971 edition of Careers: unexpected, surprising details. For example, one of the
biggest punishments in the “Politics” career path (and in the game overall) is
the culminating “Caught with mink” space, which causes you to “Lose ½ your Fame”;
I wouldn’t have said that the anti-fur and animal rights movements were
prominent enough in the early 70s to occasion such a punishment (and it’s
possible that they weren’t, as my fellow American Studies scholar father
reminded me that VP candidate Richard Nixon had famously claimed that his wife
Pat would never wear a “mink coat” in his 1952 “Checkers” speech). On the other
hand, the “Big Business” career path features a number of surprising spaces
which indicate just how fully (in the game’s imagining) the corporate world
remained about cozying up and kowtowing to power rather than achievement or
innovation: if your “Uncle is the treasurer” your salary goes up $1000 (which
seems unethical and potentially illegal, but hey) and if you “Let Boss win at
golf” it goes up $2000, while “Dent boss’s car” is one of the path’s negative
experiences.
Perhaps the most surprising details are contained within the
aforementioned, new “Ecology” career path. While the path is partly oriented
toward scientific study (if you earn a “Science” degree in College you can
enter Ecology for free), many of its spaces focus instead on the goal of living
a more environmentally aware life. That includes both individual actions (both
“Bicycle 50 miles to work” and “Invent self-destructing containers” earn you
financial rewards) and collective goals (“A smog-free day” and “Swim in
unpolluted river” both earn you happiness rewards). Since this was the only new
career path in the 1971 edition, it’s fair to say that the creators wanted to
emphasize both threats to the environment and opportunities for action with
this addition to the game; just a year after the 1970 founding of Earth Day,
then, the American environmental movement was clearly making an impact on
national conversations and narratives.
Who said that homeschooling and play have to be two
different lockdown activities? Next game tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What do you
think? Other historical games you’d highlight?
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