Mikael Jakobsson conducts research at the intersection of game design and game culture. With a foundation in interaction design, he often approaches research questions through a combination of methods including design exploration, interaction criticism, and participatory design with the objective of strengthening the voices of underprivileged stakeholders. His research often involves collaboration with the game development community.

As Research Coordinator for the MIT Game Lab, he is responsible for leveraging the academic research components of all projects and collaborations, whether it involves traditional academic knowledge dissemination, educational efforts involving students and practitioners, or non-traditional efforts to influence and impact significant actors within the game industry or society in general. He also teaches classes in game studies, game design, and interaction design. He has twenty-five years of experience in teaching, course development, research project management, collaboration with external funders and stakeholders, and advising Master’s and PhD students.

Playing Oppression
The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games

By Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson

A provocative study that reconsiders our notion of play—and how its deceptively wholesome image has harmed and erased people of color.

Board games conjure up images of innocuously enriching entertainment: family game nights, childhood pastimes, cooperative board games centered around resource management and strategic play. Yet in Playing Oppression, Mary Flanagan and Mikael Jakobsson apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism.

Through this lens, the commercialized version of Snakes and Ladders takes shape as the British Empire’s distortion of Gyan Chaupar (an Indian game of spiritual knowledge), and early twentieth-century “trading games” that fêted French colonialism are exposed for how they conveniently sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery. These games’ most explicitly abhorrent features may no longer be visible, but their legacy still lingers in the contemporary Eurogame tendency to exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination.

An essential addition to any player’s bookshelf, Playing Oppression deftly analyzes this insidious violence and proposes a path forward with board games that challenge colonialist thinking and embrace a much broader cultural imagination.

Mary Flanagan, an award-winning game designer and artist, is Sherman Fairchild Distinguished Professor in Digital Humanities, Chair of Film and Media Studies, and director of the Tiltfactor game research lab at Dartmouth College. She is the author of seven books, including Critical Play (MIT Press).

Mikael Jakobsson plays, creates, teaches, and researches games at the MIT Game Lab and with the artist collective Popsicleta, where his work focuses on the border between game design and game culture. He contributed to Debugging Game History (MIT Press).

February 2023 | 7 x 9 in, 240 pp. | US $35.00 | 9780262047913
mitpress.mit.edu/9780262047913/playing-oppression/