Flanagan notes in Playing Oppression that games of Goose didn’t vary much over the past several hundred years. The mechanics of the games included some basic parts.
63 spaces, dice, and the game was a race to the end, winner-take-all format. What about everyone else? And where does this ultimately lead? It’s just a game tho.
The Goose game had several key spaces that continued throughout renditions and echoed through adaptations.
I’m looking at this as a template because it’s been overlaid on geographical areas, peoples’, homes of individuals, and delicately balanced ecosystems, including all non-human life residing in these areas.
Categories: Printable Board Games. Original image credit: patricia m on flickr. Permission: Free for personal, educational, editorial and commercial use. This work is in Public domain. Attribution is not required but welcomed.
What strikes me about this particular rendition of the Goose Game is the depiction of people in the game spaces—casting as it is called in game design and mechanics. The farmers and laborers are where the player starts. Life looks like quite a bit of work. Age is something to dread, especially for women. Sure, there are some simple pleasures. Somehow, a goose is a prize… maybe they are tasty, may be they have powerful symbolic meaning… I seem to recall something about a Christmas Goose being significant in childhood stories.
Lots of beautiful women are waiting for the players to pass. None named, no significance other than their position on the game path in relation to the action space they accompany. I ask myself here “who is she in this space”?
Le Jeu de l’Oie
Vintage Board Game
Rules of the game :
This game uses two dice. Each player must have a separate mark to clearly mark the place where the points obtained have brought him. The players set the fines to be paid for the various accidents and place a bet.
Each throws the dice in turn, then counts, on the board, as many squares as points brought and places his mark on the last of these points.
The first to reach number 63 wins the game and collects the amount of stakes and fines. If you exceed this number, you double the point by retracing your steps.
Any player whose dice land on one of the geese placed 9 by 9, doubles his point until he encounters no more.
If from the first throw of the dice, we roll 9, by 6 and 3 we will place ourselves at n° 26, or by 5 and 4 at 53. If from the first throw of the dice, we bring 6, where there is a bridge, we will be placed at number 12.
Accidents – Whoever gets to No. 19, Inn, pays the fine and stays there until the other players have each played twice.
Whoever arrives at number 31, where there is a well, pays the fine and stays there until another player, arriving at the same number, takes him out: he then takes the place that this player just quit.
Whoever arrives at No. 42, labyrinth, pays the fine and returns to No. 30.
Anyone who arrives at number 52, the prison, pays the fine and stays there until someone else takes him out; he then takes the place occupied by the latter player.
Whoever gets to death at number 58 pays the fine and restarts the game.
Any player met by another pays the fine and takes the place that the latter has just left.
St Brigid's Well, Cullion, County Westmeath
First, I’m looking hard at the Well — and referencing some writings of Carl Gustav Jung — a collection of his writings titled The Earth Has a Soul. Jung’s exploration of the living consciousness of Earth. I don’t agree with some of his terminology, as it came to his observations and references to Indigenous peoples, or what everyone’s ancestors’ collective lifestyles were like before the stages of “civilization.”
That noted, I read his work with a hunting sort of fascination, looking for points that resonate with me.
It seemed he frequently found himself at the edges of the foundations of the consciousness from which he operated, pointing out the separations and fissures, the imbalances that sprung forth from them, and their connection to collective illness brought about by dissonance - the disconnection of our day-to-day existence with our living physical world. He would couch these thought processes abruptly - moments of observation in settling on what was lost, what was primitive, what remains largely unknown. He would note that our civilizing has brought us to the other side of things and limited us, our evolution as humans. As I interpret some of his writings, we (European cultures and those descended from these) have gone too far. Devolving to dependence on our thoughts and written words alone, and noting the limitation there.
In one of Jung’s writings, he revisited the histories of sacred springs or Holy Wells all over Europe, Ireland, England, Rome, etc. And references the laying of stones fit with pipes in those sacred springs, and the erecting of churches near them. Where the springs then only served to cleanse those who sought it, possible baptismal fonts, perhaps the Holy Water as declared by a denomination who’d dominated the space. He refers to the spirits of those springs being displaced from them, but not destroyed, because energy cannot be destroyed. And he carried that thought to the other spirits of forests, of mountains, of places disturbed, developed, changed.
I’ll settle on the point that wells were sacred to peoples all over Europe.
Yet in the goose game, they are a prison of sorts. “ Whoever arrives at number 31, where there is a well, pays the fine and stays there until another player, arriving at the same number, takes him out: he then takes the place that this player just quit.”
Good ladies
Flannigan notes that many games were used as a means of enculturation, which Merriam Webster defines as “the process by which an individual learns the traditional content of a culture and assimilates its practices and values.”
Then of course the prison space. “Anyone who arrives at number 52, the prison, pays the fine and stays there until someone else takes him out; he then takes the place occupied by the latter player.” There are many facts and outrageous truths that relate to the current prison system at work in the U.S. So far, in New SUM play, players are given additional points if they have studies and findings to share with the players at the table.
These are just two spaces in the race game that’s been leading people to outcomes that benefit a few and require the unequal distribution of resources, opportunities, and increasingly the rights to live lives free of serious impacts, environmental hazards being one that is at play in our region. I will assert that this trajectory feels like a Zero SUM outcome.
In my winter reading about cultures I’m descended from, I try to look for the strength in my lineage. Ancestral study is an act of conscious decolonization because it’s probably impossible to find a line of European family that isn’t somehow set in a place of advancement and benefit once landed on American soil and lumped together in the cultural category of White.
With this reflection, I am considering the bridge space. A roll of the dice lands a player on space “6, where there is a bridge, we (the players) will be placed (or moved ahead to) number 12.” Maybe in the gameplay, it could feel like a lucky set of circumstances. But stepping back from a generational standpoint, any ancestor that was deemed White not only benefited from some sets of cultural benefits in the early establishment of the Americas.
“Despite some similarities to enslavement, indentured servants ultimately attained their freedom once they completed their contract, while enslaved people were permanently denied their freedom unless they could obtain the means to purchase themselves or successfully escape.” - New World Labor Systems: European Indentured Servants | Low Country Digital History Archive
Many benefits of this “jump ahead” are still playing themselves out. Why the racial wealth gap persists, more than 150 years after emancipation. - Washington Post. This article provides some good understanding—and an opportunity to gain some points in this New SUM game as it continues development.
The bridge could become a different game dynamic that plays itself out along egalitarian terms— that all people are equal and deserve equal rights and opportunities — according to the Oxford Languages definition. Leaving it with the Oxford definition feels incomplete, even inappropriate—pinning that lovely set of words for now, and planning the study-hunt for tangible examples of truth.
Is hoping for egalitarianism jumping ahead conceptually?
Backtracking a bit to decolonization through ancestral study… there’s both strength in lineage and awareness. A bit of this is made available for discovery above. Deeper dives into one’s direct family history will uncover other details.
Reparative Geneology is a term that lines up with this trajectory, it is “the act of researching our heritage, acknowledging our connections to slavery, and daylighting the history of those our ancestors ...”
This next thing may be a warning to proceed with care, compassion, and consideration of possible risks - courage involves proceeding tho we know there is a sort of danger. I think this is a wall of fire that needs walking through to get to true egalitarianism. I have not explored my family history to this extent or explicitly along these lines — partly due to the payment gateway involved in the most prominent resource I’ve been aware of, and partly because most of the collected material records my matrilineal grandmother carefully assembled have been closed off to me. From what I understand, from a person I abstractedly know in their 60s doing this work, the process brings a certain amount of deep awareness building, which they don’t feel comfortable sharing with their kin.
In the winter, between gardening seasons, I study what I can find about times my ancestors regarded the land with as high a degree of respect as I understand Indigenous Peoples still do. In my study-hunt, I find pieces, parts, and heavily edited re-tellings. There are broken threads left of the archetypal women, woven into texts that serve as the basis for the myths-turned-fairy tales, appropriated saints, martyrs, scapegoats, and truly fearsome examples of how not-to-be. The fact they exist at all in some of these story-places, when they are named, speaks to just how firmly the people held them to their hearts.
Bad Lady? AKA Sheela-na-gig AKA Freyja, by the local people
“Although Eddic poems and the sagas have relatively little to say about […] goddesses, English researchers found evidence that Freyja had been venerated in a Viking settlement in Wiltshire. In the mid-12th century, this community still spoke Norse and used runes, “even for ecclesiastical inscriptions,””… - Max Dashu, Witches and Pagans | Women in European Folk Religion, 700-100. Völuspá chapter.
William Morris illustration of Chaucer’s Womanly Noblesse, a page in his “pocket cathedral,” created 1891-1896.
How does all of this apply to this game development as an art piece?
For me, the gameplay and analysis are providing a way to collectively contend with patterns that seem common in places this template of enculturation is overlaid. From a visual arts standpoint, I feel it helps to put it together in a way that we can interact with it in the “it’s just a game” approach as these games have been presented to generations of people the world over—while gaining understandings that resonate on multiple levels. Now with a built-in rewards system for active self-reflection and sharing.
Serendipitously ready to publish this post on #InternationalWomensDay #2024