After reading the essay on Catan, it was really interesting to think about the values that games instill in players and the extent to which Catan promotes colonialist values. The author writes about how many early board games involved moving along a prescribed track and were designed to teach players about something. He mentions one board game, The Funny Game of Hit or Miss, which is clearly problematic because of the way that it portrays black people and the way it encourages players to be racist. On the other hand, he also writes that chess was originally a war simulation game used to develop battlefield strategies. Does this make chess problematic for encouraging violence and war? I personally feel like chess has become so abstract that it no longer really resembles any real-life system such as war.
The author writes about how Catan not only involves players playing as colonizers, but also involves an unplayable character called the “robber.” The robber is the only Catan native in the game and represents bandits that are forced through many involuntary migrations to different hexagons. Again, just like The Funny Game of Hit or Miss, Catan clearly embodies problematic values. But I wonder, has the game been designed abstractly enough that in the same way as chess, the mechanics of the game are pretty separated from the real-life systems they were initially intended to represent? Does the game actively encourage players to engage in behavior consistent with colonialism, similarly to how The Funny Game of Hit or Miss encourages racist behavior, or does it just encourage strategic behaviors that are unrelated to colonialism?
The mechanics of chess helps develop skills like memory, calculation, analysis, and pattern recognition. In any given position, you must be able to quickly understand which candidate moves to consider, draw a decision tree in your head for each move, and evaluate which future calculated positions are most favorable. In one study titled “Mechanisms and Neural Basis of Object and Pattern Recognition: A Study with Chess Experts” that compared the cognition of chess experts with chess novices, they found that as expected, the chess experts displayed superiority when performing chess-specific tasks but displayed no differences in control tasks unrelated to chess. The authors write that “the analysis of eye movements showed that experts immediately and exclusively focused on the relevant aspects in the chess task, whereas novices also examined irrelevant aspects.” In another example, scientists studied Timur Gareyev, a chess grandmaster who holds a world record for playing 48 blindfolded chess games simultaneously. Scientists had him perform standard memory tests and found that “he was not exceptional on any of these standard tests” and that they “didn’t find anything other than playing chess that he seems to be supremely gifted at.” This shows that while playing chess does help with developing certain skills, they are often very domain-specific. Therefore, it would be hard to believe that chess develops skills in people that would be applicable to things outside of chess like war and violence.
I think that Catan similarly develops skills like understanding of probability and geometric patterns that are relevant within Catan. Whether this actually develops the skills or desire to effectively and efficiently colonize other lands is questionable to me. However, Catan certainly diverges from chess by introducing social elements. In one of the games that I played, one of my opponents had access to a 3:1 port and freely let others use her port in good faith because she believed that they would remember her kindness and reciprocate later in the game if she was in need. She ended up doing very poorly in the game. On the other hand, I was very protective over my resources, shamelessly lied throughout the game, acted uncooperatively, and ruthlessly traded and conquered. I won the game, but I displayed every negative social trait that one could have while the opponent that displayed lots of positive social traits like being giving and cooperative did not do well. Do these bad social skills that are encouraged within Catan end up being confined just to the Catan domain, or do players end up enacting these “skills” in their real lives? I worry that unlike the skills developed in chess, which are generally not employable outside of chess, Catan may encourage social behavior that one could subconsciously start to believe will lead to greater success in their real life as well. It is one thing to interact with abstract pieces on a board, but interactions with other players can very much translate to our real-life social interactions.
