I tripped over the term NPC, quite literally, on my way to an event the other night. Rushing to get there, I fell right in front of the venue. Embarrassed by how many people had just watched me eat concrete, I texted my friend Claire.

“They’re just NPCs,” she wrote back instantly. “Who cares what they think?”

NPC, the acronym for “non-player character,” is a gamer concept that’s been around for 50 years now. Often thought of as a background character—a villager, a barkeep, a shop owner—who helps to flesh out the world around the protagonist, it can refer to anyone in a game who is not controllable by a human player.

But the way Claire used it speaks to a modern trend: referring to real-life people as NPCs.

It’s no surprise that the concept has taken off today. At a time when chatbots are doing everything from helping you buy a pair of jeans online to answering insurance questions, the idea of interacting with someone who turns out not to be, well, human, is no longer the stuff of science fiction. It’s likely one of the reasons that NPC has been gaining prominence, with “non-player character” even making it into the Merriam-Webster dictionary last year.

As the term enters our everyday speech, though, it’s worth asking what we’re actually saying when we call someone an NPC. Already people have weaponized the concept, seized on the NPC label as a means of distinguishing “free thinkers” (themselves) from people whose thoughts and actions are, supposedly, pre-programmed (pretty much everyone else).

But to understand the history of the term NPC is to recognize that this kind of dehumanizing discourse hijacks its original conceit.

Born out of early tabletop role-playing games (RPGs), NPCs were never intended to erase anyone’s personhood or to imply actual humans were mindless automatons. Rather game-builders developed NPCs to do the very opposite: help RPG moderators build a world of possibilities for players.

The term NPC was first popularized by Dungeons & Dragons, created by E. Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson in 1974. The genre-defining collaborative storytelling game allowed you to play as your alter ego in an imaginary world brimming with adventure. You could be a fighter, magic-user, cleric, or chief; a human, dwarf, half-elf, or hobbit; as well as lawful, neutral, or chaotic. A designated Dungeon Master (DM) facilitated the game, developing and fleshing out the campaigns you embarked on, and serving as referee and judge when necessary.

Anything (really, anything, the game stressed) could happen. That’s how non-player characters took off; DMs leaned on NPCs to broaden and further story arcs. The original D&D rulebook even included a section dedicated to the “non-player character,” which touched on basic rules of engagement, like what happens when you hire the services of an NPC (they could help if they “receive their pay regularly, are treated fairly, and are not continually exposed to extra-hazardous duty, and receive bonuses when they are taking part in some dangerous venture”).

Signifying the importance of NPCs, the original publisher of Dungeons & Dragons released “Non-Player Character Records” in 1979. The booklet of blank character sheets helped formalize the concept, allowing DMs to keep track of the abilities, combat skills, descriptions, possessions, and backgrounds of the characters. “No longer will the DM need to worry about lack of continuity or lost records on non-player characters, for these sheets provide the DM with easy-to-store records of the many non-player personalities which populate his or her campaign,” the introductory text promised.

D&D is generally credited by game scholars as the first commercial tabletop RPG. As the genre grew in the late 1970s and ’80s and from there started expanding beyond kitchen tables onto computers and video games, conventions from D&D, including NPCs, followed suit. On screen, these characters could be especially comical, limited by computer programs’ rudimentary movement algorithms and scripted responses. That’s how NPCs gained a reputation for being goofy and robotic. Think of the tavern owner in a video game who never moves from behind the bar, or the stranger on a road who can only repeat canned lines, like, “Hello, fellow traveler, have you heard about the werewolf destroying the crops?”

People have had fun with these characters over the years, dressing up as them and channeling their jerky movements and clunky expressions. Today there’s enough of a niche audience for this kind of content that influencers even imitate NPCs for money.

An anonymous poster on 4chan was likely drawing on this clunky version of the NPC concept in 2016, when they shared a “theory” about a fixed number of souls on Earth, designating non-player characters as “the soulless extra walking flesh piles around us.” Pro-Trump supporters seized on this depiction of the NPC as a means of denigrating liberal activists.

What makes the slur more loaded than, say, “sheeple”—surprisingly not internet-speak but a term that dates back to at least the 1940s—was that NPC implies that the person you’re in ideological disagreement with is not just wrong, but incapable of independent thought and action. This distinction meant that a “mass outcry against, say, serial harassers, racial injustice, or Trumpian ideas,” could be “dismissed as not just inherently uncritical but prima facie evidence of a lack of human consciousness,” wrote journalist Cecilia D’Anastasio in 2018, as an NPC meme featuring Wojak (a blank-faced cartoon character recycled from an earlier 2010 meme) gained prominence.

Far-right watchers have since characterized NPC as a fascist “dog whistle” and a way to dehumanize people. They’ve noted that it’s part of a broader kind of rhetoric that’s leading to extremist violence around the world.

This use of NPC could have a natural expiration date IRL, as the in-game characters themselves evolve. A longtime goal of game designers and programmers has been to make NPCs more believable, and they’re getting closer. Take the simulation game Animal Crossing, which took off during COVID lockdowns; its anthropomorphic villagers are capable of doing most of the same things that playable characters can, and even are assigned specific personality types, like lazy, cranky, sisterly, and smug. While we’re still far from seeing the kind of NPC character promised by “Project Milo,” the graveyarded Microsoft Xbox 360 venture that claimed to have invented an “emotional AI” more than a decade ago, new technological advancements promise to continue to stretch the idea of what an NPC can look like.

Maybe in time, this will push the concept of NPCs in the culture, too, returning it closer to its foundational definition—not someone without free will, but a player like any other in this world we build together. One who, I’d hope, still wouldn’t care about an errant sidewalk stumble.

The post Who You Calling ‘NPC’? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Most kids are obsessed with things—fantasies, foods, films—that they eventually outgrow.

It’s only natural. Our taste ages as we do.

But for me, it’s been 15 years since my parents got me my very first video game, Pokémon Platinum. I’m 22 years old now, and I’m as obsessed as I’ve ever been with the elemental creatures that I first met on a Nintendo DS screen in second grade.

Since then, the franchise has provided me with a place to go to find stability when my life has felt most chaotic—whether that happened to be an uprooting transnational move or just navigating adolescence.

Pokémon was created by Japanese game designer Satoshi Tajiri. Growing up, Tajiri enjoyed being in nature, catching insects and tadpoles, and as an adult, he wanted to modernize this hobby for a new generation of kids. This culminated in 1996 with the launch of the Red and Green versions of a role-playing game, which featured elementally powered, animal-like creatures called Pokémon. (Red and Green were released only in Japan; Red and Blue, which included updates and glitch fixes, were the first to debut in North America.)

The premise behind Tajiri’s brainchild was simple: You play a young Pokémon trainer striving to be the very best (like no one ever was). Your goal? To catch Pokémon who live in various environments and regions, bond with your team, battle them against other Pokémon, defeat evil organizations, and complete the League Challenge—which consists of taking on eight gym leaders (who act as checkpoints to test your battling skills as a trainer as you progress through the game), an Elite Four (the toughest in their regional leagues), and a champion (the final boss of the game). Throughout your journey, you can meet other trainers, obtain gym badges, and level up your Pokémon. By gaining experience points, each Pokémon can potentially reach the prestigious Level 100.

Red and Blue created a cultural frenzy. I wasn’t born yet to experience the full force of “PokéMania,” but a Washington Post article from 2000 captures just how insane it got. Topeka, Kansas, renamed itself “ToPikachu” for a day; fans made The Official Pokémon Handbook a USA Today bestseller, and Time magazine even put Pokémon on its front cover.

By the time I got into Pokémon in 2008, Pokémania had subsided some, but the fandom was still going strong. Already, the franchise was on its fourth generation of games, which included Pokémon Diamond, Pearl, Platinum, HeartGold, and SoulSilver.

My memory is a bit foggy as to how I first started playing (if only I had a Pokémon that knew Defog—a move in the game that gets rid of fog!). But from what I can remember, after a kid at school showed me his game, I probably did what kids do best: nag my parents until they caved and bought me my own copy to play.

This was San Jose, California, in the late 2000s. YouTube or Twitch playthroughs didn’t exist yet; all I had to rely on was my own brain power to try and figure out the game (my parents were not shelling out to buy me a pricey official handbook). I remember getting frustrated when I came across obstacles, like figuring out how to obtain running shoes for my character to make the game move faster. But as I pushed on, I discovered how much I enjoyed the challenge that the Pokémon world offered.

Soon, I immersed myself in the world. I watched the Pokémon TV show. I begged and pleaded with my parents to buy me posters and plushies. I even tried collecting the trading cards. (I gave up on those once I realized how complicated the rules were. To this day, I still cannot play them.)

Then my family moved.

In 2011, when I was in sixth grade, we uprooted our lives, selling our house and car in San Jose, and booking a one-way plane ticket to Karnataka, India. My brother, an oblivious 6-year-old at the time, seemed unbothered. But I, at 11—only a few years away from the angstiest years of my life—was angry.

I felt like I had to start over from scratch, make new friends, and form a new identity in a country that I’d never lived in before. To make matters worse, our new home was in a small city called Mysore, which had no video game store or McDonald’s at the time. In other words, it was every American kid’s worst nightmare.

I found myself clinging to the one thing I could control: Pokémon.

These cute virtual creatures—which I could still trade with my friends back in California—became my safe haven. I found PDFs of the Pokémon manga, and also used fan sites like Serebii.net and Bulbapedia to find hidden battles or items in the game that were out of the way.

Playing Pókemon also introduced me to new people through the community of fans online. I joined YouTube, Twitter, and Facebook groups where all we talked about was raising, training, and battling Pokémon.

Playing Pokémon didn’t just give me a virtual community, it also helped me bond with my family in real life. Because my younger brother liked Pokémon (I assume he just picked it up from me because he loves to copy me), we were able to bridge our age gap by talking about what to do in the game, battling to test our skills, and even getting corresponding versions of each game so we could trade game-exclusive Pokémon. 

Whenever I had a rough day dealing with classmates in a new country, culture shock, and general pre-teen angst, I knew I could come home and open my 3DS (the updated version of the DS that I’d guilt-tripped my parents into buying for me because of the move). Seeing my Pokémon team always made me feel invincible. I raised them! So what if I felt alienated from my peers and was struggling with my schoolwork? In this world, I was a champion.

My Pokémon collection grew. Now, I had whole generations of games. The arrival of a Nintendo e-shop meant I could even download games to stay up to date on the latest and greatest. My favorites in my roster were HeartGold, Black/White, X/Y, Ultra Sun, and Omega Ruby. At this time, I’d gone from the six Pokémon that everyone starts off with, to collecting hundreds across all these games. I took comfort in knowing that I could put in any game cartridge (or start up any digital download) in my 3DS and travel to any Pokémon region I wanted: Alola in Sun and Moon (the game’s version of Hawaiʻi), Kalos in X and Y (France), or Unova in Black and White (New York). As a Pokémon trainer, I was a world traveler, fighting in the most exquisite, historic, and beautiful places—by choice.

In 2018, I graduated high school and moved back to the States (to the toaster oven that is Arizona, specifically), which is where I’ve lived for the past five years. Now at age 22, Pokémon no longer feels like my lifeline, like it did during that first big intercontinental move, but I’m glad that it remains a huge part of my life. My go-to username continues to be @pokefanrithwik, a moniker I coined at age 13, and refuse to change. And I still catch up regularly with the games and follow the anime. Not to mention, my apartment is littered with figurines and plushies (that I don’t have to ask my parents’ permission to buy anymore!).

Feeling sentimental, the other day, I dusted off my old, trusty Nintendo 3DS that’s been with me since 2011. I put in my original Pokémon Platinum game cartridge from San Jose, and found that I had saved the game right before facing the final champion character: Cynthia.

Sitting in my Phoenix apartment, I enter the battle room to face her. There Cynthia is, decked out in all black with pixelated blond hair. “Together, you and your Pokémon overcame all the challenges you faced, however difficult. It means that you’ve triumphed over any personal weaknesses, too. Let’s get on with why you’re here,” she says. “I, Cynthia, accept your challenge as the Pokémon League Champion! There won’t be any letup from me!”

I’ve beaten Cynthia before, but I like running through different battles in the game so that my Pokémon can gain experience and reach that coveted Level 100. My six Pokémon this time are Sharpedo, Lucario, Electivire, Infernape, Togekiss, and Garchomp—a pretty balanced lineup, if I do say so myself.

When I finally defeat the last Pokémon in Cynthia’s own team of six, her static character model slides across the screen. The game lights up with futuristic blue light strips and white cube-like decorations. Once again, I’ve done it: My Pokémon have officially made it to the Hall of Fame.

“Remember,” a defeated Cynthia says. “Your Pokémon are partners that grew with you through many challenging battles. Together, you and your Pokémon can overcome any challenge that may come your way.”

Exactly, Cynthia.

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The rumble of shuffling mahjong tiles filled the air in Chinatowns across the United States in the 1920s. Before even seeing the game, you could hear it being played in apartment buildings, association halls, and back rooms of general stores. You might assume that most Chinese Americans were already familiar with mahjong long before the colorful, complex tile game hooked the broader American public, but the opposite is true: Before the early 20th century, mahjong was not a widespread part of Chinese culture, particularly in the regions from which most immigrants to the U.S. hailed.

Many Chinese Americans began playing the game in the 1920s, swept up in an enormous international fad. But the game fast became a fixture in their communities—a versatile pastime that, through the sounds and the language of gameplay, and through its visual presence in public places and in private homes, helped create spaces for a new, shared Chinese American experience.

Courtesans and their clients play mahjong in Shanghai, likely on a river “flower boat” at the turn of the 20th century, when both mahjong and courtesan culture had become increasingly pervasive in the city. Image from R. Barz, Sketches of Present-Day Shanghai.

Mahjong first evolved as a gambling game in the area around Shanghai in the mid-to-late 1800s. By the turn of the century, it was played mostly by men for both high and low stakes in Shanghai’s courtesan halls, before it swept the Empress Dowager Cixi’s Beijing court in the last years of her reign. After World War I, mahjong became popular in Shanghai’s social clubs thanks to a rising class of Chinese intermediaries and the growing number of Americans who frequented these clubs. The rhythms of the game, its mix of luck and strategy, and the satisfaction of the tiles’ heft and feel propelled its spread. Mahjong tables were settings for forging friendships, building community, or demonstrating power moves of posturing and strategy. A number of these players—most famously a Standard Oil representative named Joseph Park Babcock who brought mahjong to California in 1922—marketed the game in the U.S., promoting it as an exciting and “exotic” new pastime. It took off like wildfire. Soon the most elite Americans, from President and First Lady Harding to Hollywood celebrities, were playing mahjong, as were throngs of fans in Europe, Japan, Australia, elsewhere in China, and beyond. It was never only a game for the wealthy, however, as players from across the social spectrum—and across lines of gender, race, and region—embraced the game.

Mahjong came to be known as “the national game of China,” both in China and abroad, in the context of the global fad, which advertised the game as an exclusive pastime of the ancient Chinese court. In Chinatowns, many people knew that wasn’t the case; if Chinese immigrants had heard of mahjong at all, they tended to associate it with women of ill repute. But, as its image changed in China and as American society adopted the game, respectable and relatively well-off merchant families began to welcome mahjong into their homes. As white Americans engaged with the game for its glamorous appeal, Chinese Americans began to consider mahjong as a tie to their heritage, even if it was not yet rooted in family traditions or homeland memories of most players.

When mahjong’s worldwide heyday came to an end at the close of the 1920s, people continued playing in Chinatowns, where communities were undergoing significant change. At the time, Chinese immigrants and second-generation Chinese Americans were finding a tenuous sort of acceptance in the United States as anti-Asian discourse shifted its focus to Japanese Americans and China was seen as an increasingly sympathetic and struggling nation. But Chinese Americans did not achieve equality. Seen as perpetual foreigners, they remained barred from most forms of employment and routes to upward mobility, even after many in the second generation earned high school diplomas and college degrees. Struggling during the Great Depression, Chinese American merchants sought to make money by attracting tourists to their neighborhoods. They erected commercial facades that featured now-iconic curving pagoda rooflines, bright colors, and neon “chop suey” signs—all designed to appeal to outsiders.

A gambling hall in Locke, a historic Chinatown in the Sacramento Delta, featured games of chance for a mostly male clientele. In a more social area in the back of the hall, a square table situated mahjong in a crossover space where mahjong could be played for high or low stakes.
Image courtesy of Annelise Heinz.

But behind their flashy exteriors, Chinatowns functioned as economic and cultural hubs that drew Chinese immigrants and Chinese Americans from surrounding regions. And within Chinatowns’ private and civic spaces—homes, shops, gambling halls, and association halls—mahjong helped Chinese Americans further community. For the men, mahjong games provided relaxation, fraternal bonding, or the addictive escapism of gambling. Women and younger people played mahjong too, in different places and different ways. Women played primarily in low-stakes gatherings, where mahjong provided a vital thread of connection. Because many older immigrant women retained traditional standards of respectability by staying indoors much of the time, many played mahjong with relatives or other women in shared home spaces. Women who worked in garment factories sometimes paused to play onsite after the machines stopped at the end of a long day. Meanwhile, Chinese American young people played the game with their friends in university Chinese student associations.

Mahjong became a rare intergenerational activity in Chinese American communities. Chinese American families of the time experienced a great deal of generational conflict, an outgrowth of the broader youth rebellions in America and China, and also the result of a demographic shift shaped by immigration policy. Among Chinese Americans, older Chinese-born residents had long outnumbered American-born young adults, but by 1920 the balance had flipped, because of exclusion laws that prevented most immigration from China (and later other Asian countries as well). Many of this American-born generation, especially 1920s young adults, felt pressured to choose between being Chinese or being American. Mahjong, however, could be both. It was generationally specific (the kind of activity shared with college friends) and at the same time, offered a bridge between generations (a game to play when visiting grandparents). During Chinese New Year, a time of homecoming when gambling is traditionally seen as bringing good luck, mahjong fit right in as a game that could be played among family members for very low stakes.

Mahjong defined cultural space when it crossed outside Chinatown boundaries, too. In her memoir Sweet Bamboo, the path-breaking Chinese American reporter Louise Leung Larson wrote of the time during the 1920s when her father—a successful Los Angeles herbalist—brought a mahjong set to a family outing on the beach. Louise was an avid mahjong player, but she recalled that she didn’t want to play that day because she realized the game highlighted her Chinese American otherness, reinforcing a sense of difference and exclusion. “We got stared at enough, without playing mahjong in public,” she later explained. Indeed, in 1923, the Chicago Tribune featured a story of “real Chinese actually playing Mahjong,” spotted outside of Chinatown.

Inside Chinatowns, though, the click of the tiles created a particularly resonant sense of a Chinese—and a Chinese American—space. When players shuffled the tiles, the clattering rumble could echo down alleyways. Walking along Chinatown’s sidewalks, one observer noted, a visitor could hear “mahjong pieces click crisply and the voluble conversation of the excited players” through open windows.

Chinese American communities have transformed since immigration reform in the mid-1960s ended the categorical exclusion of Asian immigrants. As the game has continued to evolve and change across Asia, fostering unique Filipino, Japanese, and Vietnamese mahjong cultures in addition to regional Chinese variations, Asian American mahjong cultures have deepened and diversified. Lunar New Year remains a time when families play together, and community centers host regular games among retirees. When the 2018 blockbuster film Crazy Rich Asians featured a pivotal mahjong scene, it helped reinvigorate a younger generation’s interest in the game and attached it once again to cosmopolitan glamor. A century after mahjong catapulted to global fame, its status as a game that could be both American and Chinese, and its unusual ability to bridge multiple kinds of social spaces across gender and generational divides, still serves a unique purpose in creating a larger sense of Chinese American—and now Asian American—ethnicity.

The post How Mahjong Laid Tiles for Chinese America appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Created by a software engineer in Brooklyn for his partner in October 2021, the online word puzzle game gives you six tries to correctly guess a five-letter word each day. Its no-frills design, once-daily refresh, and spoiler-free way to share results on social media has turned it into an overnight success.

But the game’s swift pop culture ascendancy, which led to it getting acquired by the New York Times for upward of $1 million in January, isn’t unprecedented. In fact, 100 years before Wordle entered the scene, an even bigger word puzzle craze swept the nation.

I’m referring, of course, to the “cross-word mania” of the 1920s.

The modern “word-cross” appeared for the first time in print in the December 21, 1913 edition of New York World’s FUN Supplement. Section editor Arthur Wynne, trying to fill the Christmas insert, drew inspiration from his native England, where Victorian newspapers and magazines regularly published word squares, acrostic puzzles where the same words can be read both across and down.

Building on this prototype, Wynne debuted FUN’s Word-Cross Puzzle. The game looks different than what we’re accustomed to today—it’s shaped like a diamond, with 72 white squares clustered around a blank center. But the instructions are familiar: “fill the small squares with words which agree with the following definitions.”

The word-cross—which eventually became cross-word, likely due to a type-setting accident, and later dropped the hyphen to become, simply, the crossword—wasn’t supposed to be a regular feature in the weekly supplement. Wynne found the prep work tedious, and typographers resented setting up the puzzle shape for print. But players were hooked; when the word game didn’t appear one Sunday, they demanded to know where it had gone, helping ensure that game stayed on as a regular feature for FUN.

Readers weren’t just doing the crossword, they were also actively sending in construction submissions for consideration. Wynne bemoaned the boxes of submissions that started filling up his office. “The editor of FUN receives an average of twenty-five cross-words every day from readers,” he wrote in 1915, adding drolly that “the puzzle editor has kindly figured out that the present supply will last until the second week in December, 2100.”

By 1921, Wynne had had enough, handing over the reins to Margaret Petherbridge, an aspiring reporter who was languishing as secretary to the paper’s Sunday editor. At first, Petherbridge viewed the task much as Wynne had—a Siberia assignment—and like him, she rubber-stamped submissions for publication. Because of this, early crosswords regularly went to print untested and riddled with spelling errors, misnumbered definitions, and incorrect clues. But this changed after famed columnist—and noted crossword fan—Franklin Pierce Adams joined the World. Recognizing the game’s high-profile fan base, Petherbridge realized that she could make a name for herself if she really took ownership of the game. In turn, she and her colleagues, F. Gregory Hartswick and Prosper Buranelli, began setting the puzzles a full week ahead, proofing them for errors and establishing uniform standards, like only using dictionary words for game play.

The crossword was coming into its own, but it would take another year for it to truly go viral. Anecdotally, Richard Simon’s aunt, a fan of the game, is to thank for this: as the story goes, she inspired Simon and his partner Max Schuster to publish the world’s first crossword book as a launching pad for their new book publishing house. The $1.35 book —which came with an attached pencil (a cross-promotion with the Venus Pencil Company)—proved to be a smash success, laying the foundation for Simon & Schuster to become one of America’s biggest publishing houses.

The crossword started appearing everywhere. Families used them to announce engagements, including the pending union of Miss Katherine Langley and James G. Bentley of Pennsylvania. The Baltimore & Ohio Railroad announced it would put dictionaries on trains to “come to the aid of traveling cross-word puzzle enthusiasts.” One speaker at the Amateur Athletic Union’s annual meeting took the time to bemoan how much the hobby had bled into practice time. “The fascination of the puzzles is keeping the athletes of the country away from their training,” he alleged. “They put on their running or bathing suits and then stay in the locker rooms asking each other for words that fill in the white spaces of the puzzles.”

“Crosswords were the Beatles of 1924,” Petherbridge, who would go on to become the New York Times’ inaugural crossword editor under her married name, Margaret Farrar, later remarked.

By 1925, even Queen Mary (along with “lesser members of the royal family”) had taken up the pastime. But with all the buzz—including an original Broadway musical Puzzles of 1925 and a pop song—came pushback.

A crossword fanatic ringing up a doctor in the middle of the night to find the answer to a clue. Reproduction of a drawing after D.L. Ghilchilp, 1925. CC BY 4.0

Just as Wordle has its share of detractors (a phenomenon only magnified by social media), a look back at newspaper reports from the 1920s shows that the crossword faced its own number of critics.

Some of these complaints against the crossword feel quaint. For instance, the president of the British Optical Association blamed the crossword for eye strain: “Qualified opticians,” he said, “could perform valuable service to the public in warning them against over indulgence in the pastime under wrong conditions.” Other accusations, however, that sought to dismiss the game’s worth, read more like contemporary Twitter screeds. Take one pastor who used his sermon to declare that “the working of cross-word puzzles is the mark of childish mentality.” He continued, “there is no use for persons to pretend that working one of the puzzles carries any intellectual value with it.”

A literary debate around puzzling also raged: Should the crossword be taken seriously? The Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh, for one, “answered in the negative” when it reported it had no crossword books on file, and no plans to acquire any. “[T]he city’s money should be spent for more serious purposes,” one icy statement read.

Combing through coverage of crossword puzzles in the 1920s, I’m struck by how convinced its detractors were that the game wouldn’t have long-term relevance. But of course, we know now that the crossword wasn’t going anywhere. Currently more than 50 million Americans do them, and the crossword appears in every major daily newspaper.

Those who want to write Wordle off as a fad today would, in turn, do well to heed the advice of the Chicago Department of Health of 1924, which prescribed the crossword for “general health and happiness.” The slim bulletin, titled “Crossworditis,” asserted that “part of our lives and much energy must be put into amusement, to satisfy the play instinct within us.”

Wordle and the veritable cottage industry of derivatives that have already sprung up in its wake—from Heardle, which uses audio clues to popular songs, to the NSFW Lewdle, to the Taylor Swift-themed Taylordle—may be more contemporary in tone and tech than the crossword of the 1920s, but they continue to fulfill that same need for a new generation of fans.

After all, as one reporter observed when the crossword was just taking off, puzzling itself—“despite its furious vogue at the moment”—was nothing new: “Through the ages it runs,” the article noted, “with each age setting for itself its own brand of riddle.”

The post Before Wordle, There Was Cross-Word Mania appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The creation story is laced with persistence, creative brilliance, and an almost patriotic presentation of work ethic.

The problem is—it isn’t exactly true. What’s more, Monopoly’s origin story teaches us that innovation can be a complicated affair and that the “lightbulb” moment of how things get made is, in fact, sometimes a myth. (The scale of Thomas Edison’s own contributions to the invention so associated with his name, fittingly, is now debated.) In the case of Monopoly, the journey of American invention was less a linear path and more a messy room shared by several people. The game was, in fact, created in 1903—long before Darrow’s mythical basement revelation—by Elizabeth Magie, the daughter of an abolitionist who was herself a staunch anti-capitalist crusader. Magie created “Landlord’s Game,” the forerunner to Monopoly, not as a celebration of wealth but as a protest against the evil monopolies of the time.

Three decades before Parker Brothers and Darrow took credit for it, her game was embraced by a constellation of notable left-wing Americans of the time, as well as on various college campuses in the Northeast. ACLU chairman Ernest Angell played it, and so did Scott Nearing, a radical professor at Wharton, champion of academic freedom, and a father of the “green” movement. It flourished in Arden, Delaware, a tiny, utopian village founded by followers of popular political economist Henry George’s “single tax” theory, a belief system Magie was passionate about. Among the residents of Arden who embraced the game was Upton Sinclair, author of The Jungle, who corresponded with, and possibly met, Magie.

Magie’s Landlord’s Game, the forerunner to Monopoly. Image courtesy of Tom Forsyth.

In the 1920s, homemade copies of Magie’s game found their way to what was then a flourishing Quaker community in Atlantic City. Quaker teachers in Atlantic City incorporated it into their teaching—with some modifications. Dice, associated with gambling, were discordant with their religious beliefs. The Quakers, practitioners of silence, also did away with the loud auctioning associated with the game, added fixed prices to the board, and modified it to be more child-friendly.

It was a version of this game—Magie’s Landlord’s Game with some of the Atlantic City Quaker modifications—that a friend taught Darrow to play. Darrow then sold it to Parker Brothers.

Darrow and Parker Brothers made millions for “creating” Monopoly whereas Magie’s income from the game was reported to be a mere $500. She died in 1948, having outlived her husband, with no children and few knowing of her role as the true originator of the game that became Monopoly. She had worked in Washington, D.C. in relative obscurity as a secretary and her income as a maker of games, according to the 1940 U.S. Census, was “0.”

Rendition of Darrow’s version of Monopoly. Image courtesy of Tom Forsyth.

Magie’s story would have been lost if not for Ralph Anspach, an economics professor at the University of San Francisco whose legal battle over his own Anti-Monopoly board game in the 1970s unearthed the whole scandal. Anspach, today in his nineties and retired from teaching, and still selling his game, became a tireless detective of Monopoly’s origin story and spent a decade fighting for the right to talk freely about what he’d discovered. Although Magie and Anspach never met—Anspach was a child refugee of Danzig at the time Magie was close to dying—their fates became linked together unexpectedly. Anspach’s fate partially hinged on proving Magie was the inventor; Magie’s story would not have been told without a digger and advocate like him.

Over the five years it took me to research The Monopolists and in the two years since its publication, I’ve seen many a jaw drop as I told the tale of Monopoly’s lost inventor and her unlikely exhumation. The most common question is, “How did this happen?”

In Magie’s time, it was far too easy to suppress the voices of marginalized groups, including women. At the time she patented her game, she didn’t have the right to vote. The head of the U.S. Patent Office was actively discouraging women from applying for patents. Job opportunities were extremely limited and it was common in the press to talk about how “weak,” “delicate,” and “smaller-brained” women were.

The greater astonishment maybe isn’t just that Magie lived a life of a game designer and political thinker far before her time, but that any shreds of her story survived at all. In my research, I stitched together enough of Magie’s trail—newspaper articles, Census records, her own writings, photographs—to get a sense of who Magie was and what she was trying to say to the world. But it’s hard not to think of her peers in her time who left far less behind, including female branches of my own family tree. Their contributions were large, but often silent, an untold quantity of labor that helped build this country. History is full of Lizzie Magies, Quaker teachers, friends who share ideas, the kinds of people who help shape our world and go largely unnoticed for doing so.

Cover of an earlier version of Monopoly.

The “light bulb” idea, and the Darrow myth, persist, in part because we want them to. On some level we all fantasize about a lightning bolt of brilliance hitting us. The instantaneous nature of that seems particularly American: fast food, fast cars, fast road to becoming an innovative—and wealthy—genius.

Part of the reason today’s incarnation of Monopoly is so fun to play is that it was tweaked from Magie’s original design for better play. The core of the game is Magie’s, but the Atlantic City properties, the fixed prices, and the graphics all helped make it better. In today’s era of selfies, being one’s own publicist on social media, and the egotism wrapped around one’s Twitter follower count, perhaps Monopoly’s creation story reminds us that together and connected, we are better. The “light bulb” narrative of invention, by definition, largely omits much chance for collaboration, a force that can be as vital for creation as the air we breathe.

Perhaps it’s always been more than a game, after all.

The post The Anti-Capitalist Woman Who Created Monopoly—Before Others Cashed In appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Pokemon Go also should put to rest the stereotypical image of the “gamer” as glazed-over teenage boy, solitary and antisocial, blasting away in a first-person shooter game in his darkened bedroom.

For some time, the game industry has recognized that the average video game player is nothing like that stereotype. In 2016, the average U.S. player is 35 years old, and 41 percent of gamers are female. Over half of the “most frequent gamers” report in surveys that they play games with others and use games to stay connected with their friends and spend time with family. These days a gamer is as likely to be a professional woman keeping up with college buddies by playing Words with Friends, or a family playing Pokemon Go together out in their neighborhood, as a teenage boy in his bedroom.

So exactly how do games encourage human connection? Expertly designed games invite us to act in ways that otherwise might make us feel self-conscious or awkward. The experience can lead us to bond with others in unexpected ways. When we play games, we step willingly into an alternate space, a magic circle in which we become more open to trying out new experiences. After all, it’s only a game.

This summer, I’ve been playing Pokemon Go with my daughter, and hearing from people who are doing the same. More than 40 percent of adults who have downloaded the game are over 25, and one in three is a woman.

The game has a simple premise. Players need to find and collect creatures, then skill them up over time to compete with other creatures. Players use a simple map interface on their smartphones to hunt for creatures. The game takes advantage of magical seeming AR technology to show creatures layered onto reality. When you look into your phone and spot a Pokemon, you see it as if it’s sitting right in front of you—on your desk, in a tree, at a local landmark. To gather a lot of the creatures, you need to go find Pokestops (places where many creatures can be found—often public sites of interest, like monuments) out in the world. You can’t play well by just sitting in your own home. You’re forced to get out, often to points of interest in your community. Thus, when people download the game, they quickly find themselves exploring their neighborhoods, learning about their environment, and noticing things they may not have observed before.

Players can recognize each other easily. They cluster near known Pokestops with their phones out. Because all nearby players can capture the same creature at a particular spot, players have incentive to help each other find creatures together, sharing the reward. As one New Yorker said, “I can honestly say I interacted with more total strangers today than I think I ever have before in New York City. On a day when it was easy to walk outside and feel so divided with the world, I felt even more connected to it.”

Contributing to the connection between players is a phenomenon called physical synchrony. Walking toward the same locations, then trying to capture creatures in the same ways, means players move in similar ways at the same time. Research has demonstrated that synchronous movement can enhance trust between people. Game designers have been exploring the power of moving together for quite some time. In my lab, we create games (like the award-winning Yamove!) that get people dancing and moving together.

Augmented reality technology isn’t required to get people moving together in play and camaraderie. Scholars have long recognized the power of traditional, non-digital games to encourage and enable this sort of positive human connection. Bernie DeKoven, author of The Well-Played Game and a longtime “fun theorist,” has an extensive list of “OtherGames” expressly designed to create deep social fun that don’t require computers at all. For example, in the Lap Game, players form a circle, turn and face one way, grasp one another’s hips, then slowly sit so that each rests on the knees of the person behind them. The game literally brings people off balance, requiring mutual action and trust, and creating a powerful, shared, fun experience.

Well-crafted multiplayer games, whether digital or not, can create the same sorts of positive feelings and connection that you might recognize from playing sports, or from an impromptu adventure, such as helping someone stuck in a snowstorm get their car moving again.

As a games and technology researcher, I believe techniques like AR can heighten the kinds of playful shared experiences that we already seek out in everyday life and in non-digital games and sports. The tremendous popularity of Pokemon Go has opened a vibrant possibility space for game designers, who are now more likely to get funding and support to create experiences that let us play together.

The post Will Pokemon Go Put an End to Gamer Stereotypes? appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

My brother and I taught ourselves to play the game
no one else would’ve shown two kids:

how to lean forward under the counter,
under our mother’s billowing apron

and imagine a darker shadow,
a more complete darkness rising

before and after the small spheres of light
we knew our lives were. And then, with a little effort,

I could, for a single breath,
almost taste it, what it would mean

to not be anywhere, to never have been.
Darkness filled the space

and left its pale fingerprint on my heart.
And the lesson of our game, one I still can’t fully grasp,

one that my brother and I would stare
into each other, trying to articulate, was this:

that it would have been okay if we’d never lived.
That we were glad, relieved, we did,

but that it would have been okay.

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