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I know this advice is coming too late in the year to be helpful, but here's a gift idea for this coming Christmas: get the board game lover in your life the Royal Game of Ur, the oldest playable board game in the world.
This ancient Mesopotamian game of strategy and action is the first to have rules that have survived to the present day, thanks to a tablet written by a Babylonian astronomer in 177BC, and the painstaking work of reconstruction by the British Museum's Irving Finkel. (You can see pieces of the original game on display in the museum.)
Although the Royal Game of Ur is unlikely to replace Twilight Struggle in our household (the latter is a two-player cold war thriller that I prefer to play as the USSR, while my partner generally prefers Satan the Great), seeing the first pieces on display always gives me a thrill. They bring an unexpected sense of fellowship with the long dead, a shared sense of our common humanity in something as simple and mindless as playing a game.
Why do we play? Why am I going to spend so much of the holidays losing Twilight Struggle to my partner, participating in endless rounds of Monopoly Deal (an addictive, fast-paced card game that adds much-needed speed and verve to its boardroom ancestor), playing classic games on Nintendo Switch or modern on PlayStation? Why are antique digs full of backgammon sets and side pieces? Why do ancient urns show Achilles and Ajax bent over in focus in some kind of dice game?
I think there are two answers. The first is that the game is a lot of fun: whether you choose poker, Dungeons & Dragons, or FIFAAn evening with friends playing cooperatively – or competitively – with food and drink for an evening well spent. Whether it's now or as a break from the distant Trojan war, we all long to escape with joy.
But the second reason is that the game is not only fun: the game is always revealing. The kind, outgoing aunt becomes a mischievous, win-at-all-costs type whenever they play Scrabble or poker. An arch-cynic pointing out a potential three-word article to a younger relative. A friend who enjoys winning the game of Chameleon. Yes, games make us laugh but they also tell us truths about our characters that are often hidden.
Well, one important difference between us and the ancient Mesopotamians is that there are now many games that can be, and often are, played alone, thanks to the rise of home video games. Single-player games aren't new either — jigsaw puzzles have been played at least as far back as the 18th century, while versions of “choose-your-own-journey” novels (“to find the door, turn to page 24. To ignore the scream and go to sleep, turn to page 122”) go back at least in 1930.
Many modern games owe an understanding to both of these genres. Games from Tetris going to Wordle is part of a very old puzzle tradition. Different games like political thrillers Suzerain or a twisted love story Tell the Princess With more ideas and more complex choose-your-own-adventure novels.
But the important difference is that we have not previously been able to record exactly how much time we spend playing puzzles or flipping through these books. We had fun, we may have learned something about our choices, but we didn't learn much from each other. Today, thanks to the extensive data collected by various games, and digital distribution platforms such as Steam, we now know a great deal about the choices we make in games.
Some of them are not so interesting: I don't think they are decisions that people make about how to set up their team Football Manager reveal so much about the human condition.
But some are. Games do, I think, tell us something about ourselves when the choices we make in them are between good and bad. Take video games as I was a teenage Exocolonistor Baldur's Gate 3where you can choose between evil or bravery.
These two sports and their origins are very different: I was a teenage Exocolonist was created by a small studio run by a husband and wife, while Baldur's Gate 3 it is made by a company that operates in many countries. They have two things in common: the first is that they both work well in the afternoon. Second, and more important, is that in both games, many players seem to choose good over evil. About double, I believe, counting from the achievement of “good” endings rather than “bad” ones on Steam. In fact, the ranks of those who choose evil are often enriched by people (myself included) who have already played it once and want to see what happens when they make the evil choice instead.
In the real world, of course, history tells us that, in addition to our long-standing love of games, we are more than capable of choosing cruelty over kindness. But it still means something good, I think, if we ourselves are able to make good choices.