[On December 1, 1948, a Connecticut inventor named James Brunot copyrighted a new board game called Scrabble. Like many great games Scrabble has endured and grown ever since, so for the 75th anniversary of that pivotal moment I’ll AmericanStudy it and a handful of other board games. I’d love your thoughts on these, others, and board games over for a competitive yet collaborative crowd-sourced weekend post!]
[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 board games tomorrow,
Ben
PS. What
do you think? Other games you’d highlight for the weekend post?
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