Published: CT magazine, June 2004
Spammers, gen-xers, hackers, texters and culture jammers. In this globalised world it seems increasingly difficult to keep apace with the plethora of technology-inspired subcultures.
One emerging group, however, promises to keep us grounded this winter with traditional forms of social interaction. These are the so-called ‘boardgamers’ – a generic term encompassing teenagers, pensioners, collectors, role-players, war history enthusiasts, neo-luddites, the ultra-competitive and the obsessive-complusive.
On beer soaked floorboards of pubs in Sydney, Melbourne and even Canberra, they coalesce with battered and dog-eared versions of their much-loved scrabble, monopoly or diplomacy board game. Forget hours surfing the net or texting friends, board games are back, and with them, meaningful social interaction.
Many of us have experienced a chess freak in full flight, recalling with great enthusiasm a spellbinding move to e5 in the Najdorf variation of the Sicilian Defence. Scrabble players too possess their own lingua franca. Rack management, feinting, floaters, board architecture and endgames – this so-called scrabble babble can be just as baffling for the uninitiated.
The famous spelling game was invented in 1948 by an American, Alfred Butts. While it has long been popular, it now enjoys the status of a serious competitive sport and is attracting something of a cult following among younger generations. In Australia, scrabble clubs exist in each state and territory, including in the ACT, where national championships were recently held.
Scrabble subculture covers a wide age range – at the recent championships an 11 year old faced off against a 90 year old great grandmother. Guys and girls in their late 20s or early 30s are rediscovering childhoods when board games offered good competition as a rainy-day activity to the clunky and low-tech ATARI computer games on the market.
According to Kerry Constable of the Canberra Scrabble Club (which meets at the Southern Cross Club each Wednesday night at 7.30pm), scrabble is a major lifestyle choice. “People might travel from tournament to tournament each weekend. The sorts of people that take it seriously will be thinking through possible anagrams while on the treadmill at the gym,” she said.
Constable agrees that, at the very competitive level, scrabble can attract competitive and obsessive personalities – the kind of people that are happy to rote learn all the possible permutations of two and three letters. Watch as they reveal that a moa is an extinct flightless New Zealand bird, lay down nis and explain its origin in Scandinavian folklore, or recall that a labour camp inmate in the former Soviet Union is a zek. And it seems there are few combinations of letters that are truly off limits. A committed scrabble player will display little reluctance in laying down the most inappropriate combination of letters in the hunt for points. One local player recalls placing down the ‘f’ word with mild embarrassment, before an opponent capitalised on the move by adding an ‘e r’ extension for serious points.
Scrabble websites and strategy guides are full of tips on how to extract the most from those seven little tiles. While most of us would be aware of the importance of preventing an opponent from accessing the red triple-word squares, serious tactics run much deeper. These include: tile tracking – the ability to count which tiles have been used and those left in your opponent’s rack; body language – reading the opponent’s gestures and posture for signs of good or bad letters; and interpreting your opponent’s moves (eg if they play a single tile, it might mean that are lining up for a bonus play on the next move).
A more debatable tactic is so-called coffeehousing, which involves whistling, humming or talking to your opponents with a view to distracting them from the game. It is frowned upon at the higher levels of competition, however. That said, serious matches can be very tense and competitive affairs. Stefan Fatis’s book Word Freak reveals the underbelly of this interesting subculture, while the documentary film Scrabylon features fierce players like Marty Gabriel who takes pleasure in intimidating opponents by drinking vinegar straight from bottles during games. The game seems to generates such colour that the Director of LA Confidential has purchased the movie rights to Fatis’s book. You could almost imagine Russell Crowe throwing his weight around at a scrabble tournament.
At the Slovenian-Australian Association in Phillip one Friday each month, you’ll also discover a group of Canberrans trying to carve up Europe through a set of secret negotiations. Based on the map of Europe prior to the first world war, Diplomacy is another board game which boasts a loyal local following. Invented in the 1950s, each player commands the armies and navies of their empire (Russia, Austria, Germany, France, Italy, Turkey and England) through a series of shifting alliances to control Europe.
It is a game that depends on high diplomacy, alliances, secrets and lies. It too boasts its only language and body of analysis – you’ll find detailed annotation of possible opening moves (eg The Baltic opening, The Austrian Hedgehog or The Russian Revolution) to rival chess. An engaging battle could take an entire day, but it can be so intense and gripping that the time will seem to slip by. So addictive is this game that one should be wary of its consequences for relationships. An American player once told me the story of a couple that were playing on different teams in a game of social diplomacy. The engagement was called off when the fiancee was discovered locked in the bathroom in tears – her husband, despite an earlier pact, having betrayed her by invading Russia through the far north of Norway.
Diplomacy and scrabble are just two elements of much wider boardgame culture in Canberra. The popularity of board games in the national capital probably reflects the inland location, cold winters, high disposable income and the appeal of intellectual games to the educated Canberra market. Scratch below the surface and you will discover a local club for just about every board or card game on the market.
Glen Doyle, Manager of The Logic Shop in Civic, has watched the evolution of the board game player in Canberra. “It starts with young kids playing monopoly or scrabble at home. When they grow older they start playing collectible card games like pokemon. At 12-15, they might change the way they think and discover sport or the other sex. At about 20, however, we see them coming back to play role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons. In their mid-30s, however, they prefer to play simpler board or party games after a dinner party with wine and friends. They tend to be busy due to work and prefer games that can be learnt quickly,” he said.
While traditional board games like monopoly and scrabble remain very popular in the national capital, local games suppliers are selling newer European board games like Carcassone, Settlers of Catan and Puerto Rico in equal numbers. European games are easy to learn, involve about an hour of play, but appeal to varying levels of strategic ability.
Board games play a varied social role. They offer opportunities for social discourse and interaction in a world dominated by technology. “This socialising role is very important – our aim is to get those playing on computer screens to look at the strategic board games. Plenty of parents would like their children to be playing with the family, and we like to encourage that,” Doyle said.
Games can also be very important in the formation of social identity. People in their 20s, for example, tend to be drawn to role playing games like Dungeons and Dragons or war-based games which involve painting armies and collecting. The specialised knowledge and language required to play such games place people into a very specific social environment. This can reinforce identity or provide an avenue for exploring personality.
For that very reason, role-playing games also attract wider social scrutiny. Dungeons and Dragons, in particular, is the subject of considerable research into alleged links with social withdrawal or abnormal psychological tendencies. The results, however, are fairly equivocal. D&D players see it as simply unjustified criticism of a marginal and misunderstood segment of society.
A more interesting topic of research for coming winter might be the social consequences of pulling the plug on the plethora of electronic games that now dominate weekends and even meal times in some contemporary families. So lock up the playstations, x-boxes and gameboys – board games are alive and well and offer plenty of family-friendly options for the coming Canberra winter.