Flip through the latest issue of Gulf Weekly.
We want to believe it, but is it true? Traditional board games are fighting back against the video game beast.
Instead of shooting Martians or fighting our way to the centre of the labyrinth or doing whatever sick activity is featured in the latest brain-dead computer fad, we are engaging with our fellows in creative play and making imaginative words.
In other words, having good, old-fashioned, brain-teasing family fun.
The evidence? At the moment, mainly straws in the wind. The most substantial is the unquestioned boom in Scrabble.
At the recent celebrated Festival of the Mind, held at the Crown Plaza, Manama, scores of scrabble enthusiasts turned out to compete and top players in the Gulf also competed in the Gulf Air Pre-World Scrabble Championship tournament at Yateem Centre.
Bahrain has a flourishing Scrabble league with members aged from seven to 70. The league meets twice a week and its members compete in competitions throughout the Gulf, and, for the last 10 years have competed in the World Scrabble Championships.
Roy Kietzman, chairman of the Bahrain Scrabble League and president of the Bahrain Scrabble Committee, said: “A lot of people enjoy the game in the living room and are what we call recreational players.
“Crossing the threshold from living room to club is a big step for many but one finds many like-minded people.”
Many are also crossing the threshold from ‘online’ scrabble forums to clubs. Online playing of the game – notably on the Facebook website, where an application called Scrabulous has attracted a reported 200,000 users, and through the Internet Scrabble Club (www.isc.ro) – has reportedly produced a surge in the numbers attending Scrabble clubs.
“Younger people have been getting to know the game playing online and got hooked playing in real time against players around the world,” said Allan Simmons, chairman of the World English Scrabble Players’ Association, three times British matchplay champion, holder of the UK Masters title and a man who once scored 834 in a single game.
“Our new player events are for those who are making the transition from playing in the comfort of their own home. People have learned to play online and are now coming to play competitively, and they’re very enthusiastic and very good.”
Mr Kietzman added: “I’d guess that most of our competitive players in the Gulf are online Scrabble players. Playing online means that a person can get his Scrabble fix anytime and there’s the opportunity to play some really top-level competitors.
“Some of our outstanding players – Akshay Bhandarkar, Naween Fernando, Mario Ranasuriya, Mohammed Zafar – have become national champions, sometimes going on to be Gulf titleholders and ending up at the World Scrabble Championships (WMC).
“One of our players landed in eighth place, much to the surprise of word whizzes from other continents.”
This year Bahrain has two seats in the WMC filled by Nestor Javier and Bahrain champion Mohammed Zafar.
In Bahrain, Scrabble is taken seriously and attracts numerous sponsors.
“We’re very grateful for sponsorship we receive from major corporations and modest companies. It’s a great encouragement to our Scrabble league and, of course, to the players. We’ve been privileged to have a lot of bluechip angels among our sponsorship corps,” said Mr Kietzman.
In countries like France, Italy and the Czech Republic, board games are also treated with deference, and large, publicly-backed mind games and events are held.
The Germans are obsessive games players, specialising in new board games, which are introduced each year at a big trade fair in Essen.
The German “game of the year” is guaranteed large sales. The classic games like Scrabble can’t rest on their laurels; there are new contenders emerging all the time.
World Cluedo champion and Scottish Monopoly champion, 62-year-old accountant, Jospef Kollar said: “Board games let you escape your humdrum life. For a brief moment you own all the property in Mayfair, or in the case of Cluedo you’re playing out the role of detective. It’s a wonderful fantasy.”
Mr Kollar, who also plays poker, cribbage and Scrabble, is convinced traditional games are fighting back. “They did decline for a period in the late 70s and 80s when computers were becoming the new thing,” he says, “but now people have got used to computers and are going back to board games.”
Retailers of traditional games report steady, if not spectacular, sales.
“We have a lot of demand from parents who want to interact in a constructive way with their children,” says Robert Toogood at Compendia Traditional Games. “Grandparents, too, want to play games with their grandchildren, not just watch them on the computer. Board games are healthier than computer games.”
James Masters, who runs online retailer Masters Games, also believes board games are holding their own. “People think videogames wiped out board games,” he says, “but they didn’t. People still play this stuff. Parents worry about children’s sociability and buy games to play with them.”
Mr Kietzman emphasises the positive effects of playing traditional games. He said: “I’ve seen youngsters with computer games and I was shocked at the violence involved.
“Many board games, like Scrabble, require well-honed analytical skills, a sort of mastering of the board, learning mental strategies and techniques.
“We’ve had children as young as six playing Scrabble, and some of youngsters are able to finally win against adults. In board games, it’s usually a one-on-one encounter as opposed to team activities in other areas. A certain discipline is required.”
But is there a downside to games? Some chess players are known for being a touch myopic. If they struggle with the real world, the 64 squares become their comfort zone, with rules much more regularised than those that apply in life. Maybe the fantasy world takes over from reality.
Organiser of the recent Mind Sports Olympiad in London, Tony Corfe, accepts that is true of some games players.
“There are some very lonely people who come here,” he said, “and some very eccentric ones, too.”
Alain Dekker, a South African who appears to play everything and was the overall Olympiad champion in 2005, also accepts that some games players can be a little crazed, but says they are the exceptions.
“People like Bobby Fischer, who did live on the 64 squares of a chess board, are a very small percentage of those who play games, but they get a disproportionate amount of media attention.”
Mr Dekker, a computer programmer, was himself a capable chess player who discovered the delights of other games on a visit to an Olympiad. He now knows the rules of more than 100 games and plays a dozen to a high standard.
“You go through your life and all you hear in the background noise is football,” he says. “Occasionally you hear chess, but here and at games clubs you suddenly get into a community of other games players and you meet these wonderful, friendly people.”
He believes games playing – and especially family games such as Scrabble, Monopoly and the themed games emerging from Germany – is important in a society marked by increasing social isolation and family fragmentation.
“Games playing is healthy,” he says. “It makes you participate and interact with people. It’s quite cool to play games, too. Someone like Garry Kasparov is successful in chess and in life. Wouldn’t it be great if chess and backgammon columns outnumbered the Big Brother and football pages in the newspapers?”
The unanswered question is whether a new generation of games aficionados will be satisfied with online play or, following the Scrabble example, will seek out opportunities to play face to face.
What is clear is that, despite the videogame revolution and their almost subterranean existence, classic games refuse to die.
“I’m fascinated by traditional games and how they’ve become part of the culture in so many different countries,” says Paul Smith, the British Go Association’s representative on the Mind Sports Council. “So many people play them, they’ve been around for a long time, the sets for playing them are often very beautiful, yet they’re things you don’t hear about every day. These games must all have some deep appeal to have lasted for so long.”
Will Quake and Grand Theft Auto still be around a thousand years from now? Hope not.
By Stephen Moss and
-RdS-
