Before Parker Brothers turned Monopoly\u00a0into a fun and capitalism-fetishizing\u00a0way\u00a0to spend\u00a0hours arguing with friends and family over who gets the race car, the game from which it evolved\u00a0was called The Landlord\u2019s Game.\u00a0Its anti-monopolist inventor, Elizabeth Magie,\u00a0wanted\u00a0to teach the values of market socialism espoused by 19th century\u00a0economist Henry George. It\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0the last board game with radical politics.<\/p>\n
London progressives\u00a0at the beginning of the 20th\u00a0century designed Suffragetto\u00a0to simulate a\u00a0battle\u00a0between women suffragists and police defending the House of Commons. During the 1970s, Class Struggle\u00a0was a brief fad in America\u2014about, you guessed it, class struggle. Progressive politics also have invaded video game consoles. The designer of Sonic the Hedgehog calls the franchise an\u00a0allegory about the dangers of pollution and industralization.<\/p>\n
From this tradition now emerges Rise Up, the latest game from the Toolbox for Education and Social Action,\u00a0a Chicago-based alternative education collective. This is the same crew\u00a0behind\u00a0Co-opoly, a board game about starting a co-op that was played at Occupy Wall Street. TESA\u2019s latest offers players the ability to collectively fight \u201cthe system\u201d by building various\u00a0social movements, chosen at the beginning of each game, while\u00a0fending off obstacles like surveillance and smear campaigns.<\/p>\n
Rise Up\u2019s creators, including Brian Van Slyke,\u00a0hope the game (which is currently raising funds on Kickstarter)\u00a0will breed the next\u00a0generation of organizers and activists\u00a0while also providing fun gameplay. Van Slyke rejects the label of\u00a0\u201ceducational game,\u201d saying TESA prioritizes entertainment. Like Co-opoly, Rise Up also is\u00a0designed as an instrument for affecting players\u2019 behavior in the real world, similar\u00a0to the board games about home energy consumption created at Northwestern University.<\/p>\n
GOOD spoke with Van Slyke about the current\u00a0state of activism, Rise Up\u2019s inspiration, and board games as\u00a0political tools.<\/p>\n
I really got into board games and board games on social issues when I was volunteer teaching at this learning center for teens who had either dropped out of school, or been kicked out. … I tried to start doing some classes on things like controversies in U.S. history. No one was showing up to the classes. One day I decided, you know what, I’m gonna just try to spice it up and try to get some students to come by making a board game.<\/p>\n
I’d always played board games. I enjoyed them. It just felt like a fun teaching tool and it would be something that would be different to get kids to come. And it did. Once I announced there was gonna be a board game to learn about U.S. history, a bunch of people came. After that, [in] most classes I ran, I used a game of some kind.<\/p>\n
Almost exactly five years ago, we brought a prototype of Co-opoly to New York City. Some people had invited us to play it with them at their conference. Then we got an invitation from people who were doing this protest to bring Co-opoly over to the protest and play it with them. It was, at the time, a little-known protest called Occupy Wall Street, which then got much bigger. We brought Co-opoly to Occupy Wall Street.<\/p>\n
Then very shortly after we left, there was one of the first big raids on Occupy Wall Street. People came back after that raid. It was right after we had left. We were just sort of like, \u2018Wow.\u2019 Just watching this. We were like, why not build a board game that celebrates people building movements and then resisting some of the retaliation that they have to face? So the idea for it, we first had five years ago.<\/p>\n
Why not build a board game that celebrates people building movements?<\/p>\n
Over the last year, we really decided to make the game because of all these other movements that have sprung up and really galvanized social justice folks, from Black Lives Matter to Fight For 15 to stopping the oil pipeline. We live in a really interesting time of people building movements. It’s really amazing to see. Obviously it’s really heartbreaking, the injustices for why these movements have to be made and built.<\/p>\n
You’re never too young or too old to become an activist. I think that a lot of people definitely don’t understand how movement-building works. I do have to caution that Rise Up isn’t a simulation\u00a0\u2026 it’s a board game. And it’s more about activating people’s imaginations and getting them to think about: How can I be someone who’s involved in movement building? What would I want to fight for?<\/p>\n
I think the idea of movement building is becoming much more normalized in the sense that people feel much more comfortable being like, I totally support that. But because there are\u00a0so many more movements and they’re really pushing against these systems of injustices, there are a lot of people who want to fight back against these movements that are being built.<\/p>\n
You’re never too young or too old to become an activist.<\/p>\n
One of the things we really have to do on the left is try to build our imagination and get people to think about movement building in ways outside of articles and powerpoint presentations\u2014which is all fine, I do all of those things. But we also have to get people excited through play and participation.<\/p>\n
We designed the game so that it could be appealing to both groups of people. You don’t have to be an activist to play this game. But I think it hits folks on a different level. I think people who are into this, and do organizing, and play this game, they’re like, \u2018That’s so funny. That’s exactly the type of thing that’s happened.\u2019 There’s a card that the system can play that means you get into an argument over something insignificant for two weeks. When activists draw that card they laugh.<\/p>\n
With people that aren’t activists that play the game\u2014but obviously are somewhat sympathetic to the concept\u2014I think it allows them to approach the subject in a fun, engaging way. \u2026 [One woman] said, ‘As someone with no experience in social organizing, Rise Up enabled me to connect and discuss strategies and experiences with my teammates who have a lot more experience in social action. Rise Up created a conduit for conversation that was open and not intimidating.’ That’s exactly what we’re going for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Before Parker Brothers turned Monopoly\u00a0into a fun and capitalism-fetishizing\u00a0way\u00a0to spend\u00a0hours arguing with friends and family over who gets the race car, the game from which it evolved\u00a0was called The Landlord\u2019s Game.\u00a0Its anti-monopolist inventor, Elizabeth Magie,\u00a0wanted\u00a0to teach the values of market socialism espoused by 19th century\u00a0economist Henry George. It\u00a0wasn\u2019t\u00a0the last board game with radical politics. London…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1362","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1362"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1362\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1362"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1362"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/googmn.com\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1362"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}