Playing Monopoly is not such a trivial pursuit

Which came first to the designers of chess: the rules or the metaphor? It feels impossible to prise the system from the story: a military battle between two monarchs, each with perfectly symmetrical assets and equally balanced capabilities. Yet there have been dozens of ‘reskins’ of chess, swapping the kings and their minions for characters from, say, Lord of the Rings, or The Simpsons, or even, bewilderingly, M&M chocolates.

 Sometimes the new metaphor imbues the game with a socio-political frisson. A recent example pitches rockers – white men in leathers holding screaming guitars – against jazz musicians – black men in white suits nursing saxophones. Here chess is transformed into a mid-century fight for cultural dominance, a clash between old and new forms, with a rippling subtext of race and appropriation. Beneath the costumes, however, chess’s ancient mechanics remain unchanged, even while, to our minds, the game feels freshly pointed.

‘What is internally consistent within a game need not reflect anything about reality,’ writes Kelly Clancy, a neuro-scientist and the author of Playing with Reality, a poised and compelling history of games as an intellectual force, as well as a grave warning about their role in shaping the future. ‘Yet games have been increasingly adopted as models of the world.’ Clancy has a straightforward definition to help narrow the elastic term ‘game’: ‘A system furnished with a goal.’ For her, a carefully themed game can function as a tool to serve a dogma, rewarding players for ‘adopting its precepts’. Games are more than models of the world, she writes: ‘They’re models that reward us for believing in them.’

Games can be a particularly potent form of propaganda, not least because play is the primary way in which every human first tests and explores the world.