Changing objects: aesthetic qualities of mancala boards

Journal of Board Game Studies 2:104–114, 1999

Board Game Studies Journal, 18, 2024

Excavations in Israel of Byzantine and early Islamic sites have yielded some interesting gaming boards that are not always understood by the archaeologists who found them. Because they are organised in parallel rows of 'holes', most are presented as 'mancala' gameboards-which some may be, indeed; however, boards offering three or four rows of squares or depressions cannot reasonably be mancalas, nor can they be held as 'senet', the Egyptian game. So, what are they? Reviewing the relevant literature, this article will try in this article to disentangle these finds, the more so as they are often well dated to periods which have rarely been looked into.

2014

During the 2013 fieldwork of the French archaeological mission along the shores of the Arabian Sea, mancala games were discovered on the seashore of Salalah at the site of Ad-Dahariz. They are cup-hole carvings made directly into rock slabs and distributed in six distinct zones of the site. They usually consist of fourteen cup-holes aligned in two lines of seven, two supplementary holes being sometimes present on each side. They are the first of their kind in South Arabia and can be compared to similar configurations of carved games elsewhere in Arabia, such as at Jebel al-Jassasiya, Qatar. This paper presents the potential origins of this game in the region, as well as a plausible dating of their use.

April 15 to 18, 2015 at the Swiss Museum of Games, La Tour-de-Peilz. For further information see http://www.museedujeu.ch/fr/specialistes/boardgamstudies or contact boardgamestudies2015@gmail.com

As much as many of us would like to deny it, the art/artifact dichotomy is still with us, and denies many objects comfortable homes in art, anthropology, or natural history museums. Moreover, it runs the risk of alienating the individual viewer within a mass of academic debris, simultaneously blurring aesthetic appreciation and proper contextualization. The small exhibit discussed in this short article took a group of hand-made instruments that had previously been displayed only in art galleries or played in musical communities (such as exhibits in the Tyler Art Gallery, Oswego, NY;

Holocaust and Genocide Studies, 2023

A game of war, chess was made, played, and pictured in a time of war by men and women, professional artists and amateur craftsmen, Jews and non-Jews−all victims of National Socialist persecution−in hiding, in the ghettos and even behind barbed wire in camps across Nazi-occupied Europe. Instead of “throwing the game” and giving up, they invented. With DIY techniques and tools, they fashioned chess sets out of found materials and detritus: they carved them out of wood, folded them out of paper, etched them into tin, and modeled them out of bread. Where and when chess was not permitted, they devised ingenious ways to hide, camouflage and transport their sets. And they took up pen and ink and gouache and drew chess games−both real and imagined. Based on archival chess sets as well as paintings and drawings preserved in Holocaust collections around the world, this article argues that both material artifacts and works of art, chess sets and their representation, are communication devices that inform each other−as well as our knowledge of the Holocaust as it was both experienced and conceptualized.

2010

This thesis examines the exhibition of videogames in major cultural institutions. The focus is on the curatorial narratives presented by differing exhibitions, specifically the context in which the works are ‘framed’. Of particular interest is the extent to which context supports the interpretation of videogames as cultural artefacts. It will consider how differing approaches to display can construct videogames as activities and/or as artefacts. This analysis provides an understanding of the narratives that are currently being generated from the display of games in these institutional environments. Through their displays, museums and galleries organise collections into narratives, into recognisable histories and into doctrines, mediating the relationship between visitor and objects. These narratives have historically been embraced as culturally legitimising and authenticating. What can it mean to exhibit videogames in the museum? What can the museum learn from exhibiting videogames?

Arcade games are increasingly being presented in museum spaces for both contemplation and play. By placing arcades into the museum, curators are creating narratives about the history of games, about the cultural value of these artifacts, and increasingly, about the artistic merit of computer games. However, when arcades enter the museum space, a tension arises between the critical distance demanded by museums-a distance needed to contemplate the curatorial vision of an object-and the closeness and irreverence demanded by play. To this tension, I argue museum spaces bring together these contemporary objects as part of a discourse concerning a postmodern anxiety of vanishing culture. To this, arcades in the museum act to create and sustain a sense of collective nostalgia that intimately links computer games to childhood regardless of the historical record. Ultimately, what I find in considering the arcade in the museum is the prevalence and preservation of play within the resignification of museum spaces.

2017

Videogames are the most successful entertainment industry today, but before they entered the “mainstream”, they were targeted at children and addressed by the traditional media as a bad influence. During the early 2000s, we started to see a growing acceptance of videogames as a cultural product and not merely as a toy. Academic journals started to explore videogames, and preservation efforts, previously restricted to fan initiatives, began to be undertaken in institutions such as the Computerspielemuseum in Germany and The Strong in the USA. Today, game studies are established as a discipline in universities, and new institutions and projects have joined the preservation efforts. Nevertheless, the nature of videogames as a primarily commercial product has presented some issues to museums, particularly if the aim is to preserve the game in playable form. Publishers and developers are afraid to share their work with institutions, and for that reason, alternatives to traditional techniques have been developed, such as emulation and migration. This dissertation will study the videogame as a museum object, the initiatives being taken to preserve it, and the challenges inherent in doing so.