30/10/14
During today's session we watched and discussed the first part of a three part series, Games Britannia. A documentary on ancient and medieval games.
Historian Benjamin Wooley investigates the instinct to play games and discovers that it is as universal as language itself. He takes us from the 1st century to the Victorian era. He also looks at how religion is used in games through the ages. As the late Middle Ages came the spiritual element of games was being lost to the increase in amount of gambling in games.
This was the same era which Britain established the world's first commercial games industry, with classics like chess, ludo and snakes and ladders. Snakes and ladders, once represented the Hindu journey to enlightenment and was transformed into the popular game we all know today. Wooley see this as a perfect analogy for how the sacred energy of games is being drained away by commercialization.
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