Games Britannia Part 2 of 3: Monopolies and Mergers

Following on from the previous episode, here Benjamin Woolley shows us the influences of board games over the last 200 years on British society and how they have developed into game that can become a moral teaching for many people.

One of the games that stood out for me in the programme was a game titled The landlords game, it was a board game invented and patented by Elizabeth Magie in 1904. The game was supposedly designed to explain to people how the 'land grabbing' and renting system worked. It was also used to provoke children to gain an awareness over unfairness, hopefully taking this new awareness into adulthood. This game was first published in Great Britain in 1913 with the title Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit, this game later was the major influence that then created the most popular board game in history - Monopoly. The similarities can easily be seen, but the versatility of this game was that each place on the board can be changed by naming them differently, a feature that has made the current monopoly so successful. Depending on the place of sale, the board can have specific place names that are popular to the place of sale.

After this point, family board games were being produced to bring families through the Great depression, Cluedo and scrabble became a popular family game during this time, these them started to form the biggest game companies at the time, some even are around now, producing the same games.

But since then not much has changed in the content of board game, but they are just not as poular as they used to be. New board games such as War on Terror by Trrorbull games have similarities to Brer Fox an' Brer Rabbit as they both contain content in which relates to the current world, it was designed to give people the chance to see why countrys do what they do to acquire countries and land, and how much cheaper it is to fund terrorism. This is mainly just a play on satire, but the game company are finding it hard to find suppliers that will stock such a sensitive game.

The final part of this series, Woolley will be looking at the 'Joystick generation' and viewing how videogames have affected us as Britains.