The Historical Significance of Games: From Ancient Board Games to the Digital Future

Jacob Schmidt-Madsen holds an MA in Indology from the University of Copenhagen and a PhD in traditional South Asian games from the same institution. His work explores how formal game systems are invested with meaning and used for purposes of ritual, divination, education, and other playful yet serious practices. He recently moved to Berlin to take up a position as a postdoctoral scholar in the Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA) research group at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science (MPIWG).

Jacob Schmidt-Madsen | Foto: Arne Sattler

1. You are known as a board game historian. What exactly is behind this designation?

I actually prefer the broader term game scholar, but when I use it people think that I study digital or modern analog games. That is why I started calling myself a historian of board games instead. I wanted to stress that I mostly study games from before the modern era of proprietary games which began sometime around the mid-19th century. And though my work is not exclusively focused on board games, but also encompasses card, dice, and other types of games, the most widely used umbrella term for the study of analog games is “board game studies”.

2. What sparked your interest in studying games – especially South Asian games?

I have been playing, designing, and thinking about games for as long as I can remember. For a while I even worked professionally as a game designer and game writer on a wide range of projects from analogue educational games to online fantasy roleplaying games. However, it was only when I discovered that South Asia is a veritable treasure trove of traditional games that I decided to turn my hobby into a field of academic study. The idea that I could use the tools of Indology to unlock the history of games and gaming in South Asia immediately spoke to me. Not least because it meant that now I could spend my time thinking about games without feeling that I really ought to be doing something else.

3. For many people, games are mainly a leisure activity. How would you explain to a layperson why games are so important in history and culture?

Play and games are universal categories that go back to the earliest times. The Dutch game historian Johan Huizinga even saw them as a major civilizing force in human history. Evidence for board games first enters the archaeological record in the major urban Bronze Age centers of Egypt, Mesopotamia, and the Indus Valley. While they were always primarily played for leisure, they served various other purposes in educational, ritual, and divinatory settings. Ancient Egyptian priests used the game of Senet in funerary rites as a metaphor for the journey of the soul through the underworld, and the earliest known set of rules written on a clay tablet in cuneiform script in the 2nd century BCE describes a game of astrological divination. The study of games is not only the study of the games themselves, but also the sociocultural contexts in which they are played and the many different uses to which they are put.

4. What fascinates you personally about games and gaming?

I love that games are little worlds unto themselves. Entering into a game is like entering into an alternative reality governed by its own unique set of rules. And since rules do not carry any inherent meaning, they allow us to invest meaning in them ourselves, whether as designers or players. A formal game system can represent whatever we want it to represent and can therefore be used to model existing realities or create our own imaginary worlds. Uniquely, we can even step inside those world and explore them in a participatory mode. This I have always found and continue to find deeply fascinating.

5. You have worked intensively on the history of “Snakes & Ladders”. Can you briefly summarize why this game is so interesting and what cultural significance it has?

The modern children’s game Snakes & Ladders originates in a South Asian game known as the Game of Knowledge. The Game of Knowledge represents the journey of souls through existence toward liberation and was used for purposes of entertainment, education, divination, and self-reflection in 18th and 19th-century India. When the British brought it to Europe in the late 19th century, they stripped it of its original content and repurposed it as a tool for teaching heavy-handed Victorian morals to children. Soon even that fell away and today it is a purely abstract game widely known among children and their parents across the globe. Ironically, this includes India where Snakes & Ladders have long since replaced the original Game of Knowledge.

6. You are working on the translation of three encyclopedic game texts from 19th century India. What challenges have you faced in translating these historical texts?

Historical game texts are inherently difficult to read and translate as they rarely provide us with a full picture of what is going on. Since the authors and their audience already knew how to make and play the games, the descriptions of them rely heavily on tacit knowledge and leave a lot of things unexplained. Even today when writing rules has become its own craft and every game includes a manual explaining how to play it, people often argue over how the rules should be interpreted and complain that they do not cover all the situations that may arise during play. And, of course, figuring out the formal rules of a game does not tell us anything about how they are actually engaged with. As I discovered during recent fieldwork in India, a traditional game that was formally designed for two players turned out to be played exclusively in large family groups of up to twenty people.

7. Your project “Rolling the Plantes, Moving the Heavens” is part of the research group “Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia” at the MPIWG led by Anuj Misra. How does your research on games as cosmological models fit into ASTRA’s larger goal of exploring the history of astral knowledge in Asia? To what extent do games, particularly in South Asian contexts, offer insights into the “transcreation” of astral knowledge as studied by ASTRA?

The astral sciences in South Asia are generally separated into three main categories dealing with mathematical astronomy, horoscopic astrology, and omens and divination. The subject of games belongs to the last category because of the close association between chance and destiny. Additionally, games are often interpreted as cosmological models as in the case of the Game of Knowledge mentioned above. And because interpretations are not inherent to the games being interpreted, they tend to change when games travel between regions and cultures. While the underlying system of the Game of Knowledge is the same everywhere, the religious worldview the game represents changes according to the community by which it is adopted, resulting in the transcreation of the game as Buddhist, Jain, Vaishnava, Sufi, and so on.

8. Can you give concrete examples of how the movements and transformations of astral practices that ASTRA explores are also reflected in the games and playful traditions you are involved with?

One of the projects I am working on at the moment deals with the interface between astrological and ludic practices. In the Greco-Roman world, astrologers would place planetary figures on zodiacal boards as a visual aid to mapping out horoscopes for clients and understanding the often complex interactions between planets and signs. A later family of games originating in West Asia would adopt similar methods and recast them in the form of game mechanics. Instead of mapping out specific horoscopes, players would compete to move planets into auspicious constellations and win stakes from their opponents. This is just one example of how games model and mimic existing systems and practices, relegating the often posed question of whether something is a game or, say, an astral divination tool to a question of context and framing.

9. How does your work on the playful aspects of cosmological models contribute to the exploration of the intersections between science, religion and culture that are central to the ASTRA project?

Models can be defined as simplified systems simulating key characteristics of more complex systems. This is exactly what happens when a game reduces the complexities of karmic destiny to a throw of the dice or renders planetary retrogradation as counter-clockwise movement on a gameboard. While some might consider it a poor substitute for the real thing, it conveys a message that can be easily grasped by the uninitiated and thus help popularize and propagate knowledge systems even if their intricacies are not fully understood. Games are highly adaptive vehicles of ideas and concepts that manage to keep the attention of their audience even when their thematic content is not properly understood or simply ignored.

10. Do you see parallels between the trade routes through which astral knowledge spread in Asia and the ways in which games and playful traditions were transmitted?

Absolutely. Except that games tend to travel much faster. This is not only because you find them with a more diverse cast of characters, including merchants, soldiers, explorers, missionaries, and others, but also because they are abstract in nature and can be transmitted without literacy or even the requirement of a shared language. In fact, games that are inscribed, illustrated, or otherwise culturally branded only travel with difficulty. Returning to the Game of Knowledge, it only traveled between religious communities which shared similar concepts of spiritual liberation, and only traveled outside those communities after the British stripped it of its thematic content and turned it into a purely abstract game.

11. How do you see the future of cultural games research, especially with regard to the influence of digital technologies on traditional games?

Recent years have seen increased interaction between digital and analog game researchers. One of the most significant contributions to the field of traditional board game studies was made by the ERC-funded Digital Ludeme Project headed by Cameron Browne at the University of Maastricht from 2018 to 2023. It broke down more than a thousand games into their constituent ludemes, or game elements, creating a much-needed analytical framework for understanding the origin, development, and transmission of traditional games. The GameTable COST Action established in 2023 is a network of some two-hundred digital and analog game researchers from more than fifty different countries exploring the interfaces between their various disciplines. The results are yet to be seen, but everything points to a bright future for the study of games regardless of the medium through which they are experienced.