… the peoples whom Europeans encountered in the Americas were skilled and inventive combatants who often put white men to flight (or worse) despite their enormous disadvantage in technology and (ultimately) manpower. In many cases, First Nations (as we now call them in Canada) fought fiercely with one another, too, and had well-developed military traditions that Europeans variously feared, admired and adopted. And they would make fitting protagonists for any modern boardgame designer willing to reject the current fashion of presenting indigenous peoples as holy elves of the forest.
What would such a game look like? A good example comes to us in the form of GMT Games’ 2019 release, Gandhi: The Decolonization of British India. This is the latest entry in GMT’s COIN series, which is designed to model guerrilla wars and other unconventional conflicts through the use of cards that represent historical events. As in other games of the genre, such as Fire in the Lake (Vietnam), People Power (Insurgency in the Philippines, 1983-1986) and Colonial Twilight (The French-Algerian War, 1954-62), the game doesn’t present a simple narrative of good versus evil, but a more complex narrative in which all sides have at least some ulterior motives that are at odds with their official propaganda. In Gandhi, there are four players, one each controlling the Raj, the Indian National Congress, the Muslim League and the “Revolutionaries.” The latter three all share the goal of some kind of national independence, but each pursues its own (often mutually antagonistic) methods, with the Revolutionaries using violence to undercut the more pacifistic Congress, and the Muslim League playing off Congress, the Revolutionaries and the Raj in order to protect the interests of the country’s Islamic minority. (Historians of Canada would note that diplomacy and warfare with and among First Nations often was similarly complex.)
The game is unpredictable and complex, since each player will pursue different strategies in the country’s many different zones, making and breaking de facto partnerships depending on the circumstances. Amid all of this gaming chaos, the moral logic of decolonization remains a central theme of the game. But by the end of things, you realize that the ejection of the British from India was a big and messy project, as history typically is. While Spirit Island was created with the goal of mainlining anti-colonialism directly into the boardgame experience, Gandhi gets to the same theme obliquely by way of amoral realism, doing a better job pedagogically in the process.
A key aspect of Gandhi is that the Raj has agency: It is not reduced to the status of automaton-villain, as in Spirit Island. But there are limitations to the imaginative ecosystem that players inhabit: Every one of the four players has to take on their assigned role without questioning their underlying, game-dictated objective — including the Raj player, who must, start to finish, exert himself in defence of a colonial project that now is widely viewed as being on the wrong side of history. The other three factions likewise remain prisoners of their parochial regional, religious and doctrinal differences, which, historically, would contribute to millions of deaths in the chaos that accompanied the British exit.
Which brings me to the fourth and final colonialism-themed game I will discuss: the acclaimed 2017 release John Company, by Indiana-based designer Cole Wehrle. In theory, John Company is also a game about British colonialism in India. But here’s the rub: The players all act as competing factions within the commercial innards of John Company (a nickname for the British East India Company). On one hand, the players have a co-operative goal — to keep the company afloat as it manages the enormous expense of creating and operating a colonial apparatus on the subcontinent. But I can attest that far more of players’ mental energy goes into fighting each other for the spoils of war and trade. Indeed, much of the game consists of exchanging favours and bribes among players, as each attempts to leverage positions of power within the company to extract revenues, plunder and positions of influence.
As the game progresses, you notice, almost as an afterthought, that great things are afoot within India: New trade routes are created, military battles are fought, whole regions go into revolt and are pacified, with many (fictional) lives hanging in the balance. But as a player, you barely notice any of this — except to the narrow extent these events can be exploited as a source of wealth, since the way you win the game is by accumulating enough cash and baubles to retire your functionaries into gilded clubs and country houses back in England.
And what of the actual Indians who lived and died under the Raj? They don’t appear at all in the game, for John Company‘s real play arc exists within the corrupt solipsism of intra-corporate deal-making. Which sounds horrifyingly amoral. But when the game’s over, you realize: That’s the whole point. The colonialists who ran India — like those who came to North America and every other place on the map, from South America to the Belgian Congo to China — typically weren’t motivated by a desire to destroy and subjugate. They were out to make a buck, either as lone freelancers in a canoe, or bureaucrats pulling levers within some gigantic corporate behemoth. The horrifying, often genocidal murder and mayhem was a by-product of greed. Which doesn’t make it better. But it does make the narrative more comprehensible in regard to governing our future behaviour as human societies — since we all are vulnerable to spasms of greed, while true evil for its own sake is a rare thing.
Games teach you about the forces of history not by listing a set of facts for you to memorize, but by creating a rules system that effectively pushes you to act in a certain way — whether as a colonialist, revolutionary or deity. If the game is well-designed, then those actions make a certain kind of internal sense. That dark logic is what stays with you — as an explanation of why people acted a certain way at a certain time. It’s always easy to judge historical figures. It’s harder, but ultimately more interesting and valuable, to understand them.
