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.
