Games Britannia M&M

Games Britannia

Monopolies and Mergers

Hey it’s Games Britannia! So we’re back with Benjamin Woolley as he traces games back through time and this time we’re looking back over the last 200 years and how games have changed before they gave in completely to commercialism. As I stated before, I’m not really into board games and this episode was chock full of them so forgive me if I doze off here and there.

Anyway, so throughout the history of board games Britain always made sure that their games were aiming to promote something. This was for the most part religious exploits or logical exploits, or whatever was needed for the games to be considered “British”, thus forsaking their origins. Of course, when the Americans got their versions of the game they too changed things to promote their beliefs (something about Land of the Free and Successfulness to all or something).

So from here we get a look at our headline feature; the origins of Monopoly. Woolley explored how games went on to become more and more popular during the wartime years, due to them being compact and requiring no electricity to run like the radio and later on the television did. This was the time period when the board games ruled, with the likes of Cluedo, Scrabble and of course Monopoly becoming household names and used in most households throughout the world. Even the period after WWII allowed board games to thrive and it wasn’t until the 1960s that the board game really started to lose its power over the household family.

This was of course the time when the television started to become popular, and then the final nail in the coffin was during the early 80s when videogames started to become “mainstream”. Granted, Board games were far from dead and buried, though from what I could tell American’s got the better designed ones (such as D&D) and games like it which helped keep the board game keep some power over its video cousin.

From there Benjamin started to go into the information age, showing what games would become and showing us that games have too caught up with the times. And then it ended.