Why I Like Board Games

The other day my husband asked me why I like board games so much. He plays both board games and video games, but I’ll take a board game over a video game any day. Part of the reason is that I’m a tactile person. If there’s a button, I’m going to push it, and if something looks like it might be soft, I’m going to touch it. I like picking things up and moving pieces around the board, it’s just my nature. However, there is a deeper, more philosophical reason I prefer board games to video games. 

It all has to do with books. Books, and the difference between books and movies. And quantum mechanics, but we’ll get to that later. 

One of the things I love about books is that, while the author’s words set the stage for the experience, your imagination creates the world in which the book takes place, and for every person that reads the same book a different world is created in their minds. Everyone reading a book has a different idea of what the characters look and sound like, how the buildings in cities look, what a watch the character wears looks like, etc. 

Sure, the author might give specifics – perhaps the character wears a vintage Mickey Mouse watch that has a scratch on the face, gold trim, and a brown, leather armband – but it’s up to the reader to imagine the rest. In this case, how thick is the armband? How big is the face of the watch? How wide and deep is the scratch? Does the scratch interfere with the ability to tell time? Is it a normal watch with regular hands, or do Mickey’s eyes or arms act as the minute and second hands? Is it so old Mickey is black and white, or is he in color? 

A movie, on the other hand, establishes all of this for you. The way an actor portrays a character determines what the character sounds like and her mannerisms. The costume designer chooses how she dresses, and the exact watch she’s wearing. And the director and set designers control what the world looks like and how it’s portrayed. By the time you see the movie all of these decisions have been made for you by someone else, and everyone in the audience is experiencing the same thing. 

It's kind of like quantum mechanics, you see.

In one theory of quantum mechanics, all things exist in all possible states until they’re observed (or measured). Once observed, these possibilities collapse into a single reality and the other states no longer exist. An example of this is the famous Schrodinger’s Cat thought experiment. In short, there’s a cat in a box that has a 50/50 chance of being dead, but there’s no way to tell if it’s dead or alive until you open the box. If someone hands you this box how do you know if the cat is dead or alive? The theory is that it exists in both states until you open the box, in which case both states collapse into a single state (alive or dead). 

And that’s exactly what a movie does to books. An individual book creates one possible world in the reader’s mind, and for each person that reads this same book a different world is created. If infinite people were to read the book, then infinite, different worlds would exist in people's minds. These are the quantum possibilities. However, once someone makes a movie these possibilities collapse into a single world that the makers of the movie created, and all people who see the movie observe this same quantum state. If you try to read a book after you’ve seen the movie, it’s hard to imagine it any different. 

So what does all this have to do with board games and video games? Board games are like books, and the pieces in the game are like the words on a page. They set the stage and explain things, sometimes even in great detail, but when you play the game you build the world and events that happen in the game in your own mind. When someone creates a video game, they create this singular world for you. 

For instance, let’s say you’re playing a game and someone draws a card that says “Cave in! The walls shake and the ceiling crumbles, burying you in rubble.” Even if this card has a picture of the cave in, you get to imagine what that cave in sounded like, whether there was a scream, how bad the player is injured, etc. In a video game, you’d walk into a room and the walls would shake and the ceiling would crumble, perhaps a pipe on the wall bursts, but every time you play this game it will always look and sound the same. There’s no other way to imagine it because someone else has already created the entire cave in experience for you and you’re simply observing it. 

And that’s why I like board games more, I get to imagine how it all goes down and create my own world as I play. Board games are full of quantum possibilities.  While I enjoy the amazing artwork in many video games, I find them a passive experience where I’m in the back seat, simply along for the ride. In board games, I get to drive.