Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America ed. by Ann R. Hawkins et al

Abstract

Reviewed by: Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America ed. by Ann R. Hawkins et al Douglas A. Guerra (bio) Ann R. Hawkins, Erin Bistline, Catherine S. Blackwell, and Maura Ives, eds., Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America (Albany: SUNY Press, 2021), pp. xv + 383, $95/£68.43 cloth. Play always has an experimental hue: testing something out (“I’m just playing around with this”), using something in atypical ways (“Stop playing with your food”), or youthfully initiating an improvisational social scene [End Page 305] (“Wanna play?”). By establishing baselines, games offer a control on these experiments; playing the same game means limiting the scope of agency in the same way, using the same materials, and adopting the same conditions of success or failure. For the scholars collected in Playing Games in Nineteenth-Century Britain and America, assaying how variabilities are ruled out or ruled in—in both game play and game design—can be a measure of significant experimental and emergent energies in history. Battle simulation games changed approaches to war, matching card games like Authors reinforced Anglo-transatlantic celebrity, and the controlled violence of fox hunts and boxing shaped discourses about the body. Ann R. Hawkins and her coeditors put it plainly: “The role of games is so significant that any claim to analyze or understand a people, a culture, or an age without considering games is bound to create distortion. Games reveal the intricate relationships among large cultural, political, and social phenomena and the immediate lived experience of individuals and communities” (28). Despite this, critical work on historical games, particularly close examinations of specific games in the context of mass media expansion and attendant social changes in the long nineteenth century, is surprisingly scarce. The volume’s editors sketch the edges of existing scholarship before placing the rise of new game media within the frame of industrial and imperialist capital accumulation—economic changes that precipitated new consumer markets and new orientations of class and gender identity within the white middle class. Playing Games leverages “a convergence of scholarly methods and approaches” while wending toward the methodologies of book history (tracing networks of production, transmission, and reception) to introduce some of the period’s most significant games (21). Periodicals and newspapers are mobilized to especially useful effect, helping the authors traverse the circuits of advertising, review, and more sidelong documentation that aid in understanding the role played by game media. The ephemerality of play makes games inherently challenging objects of analysis; instructions give only a fraction of the story. The rest requires well-anchored but ultimately, as Catherine S. Blackwell argues, “speculative analytical leaps” (147). Indeed, the games discussed here offer rich access to entanglements of material affordance, narrative and visual trends, behavioral staging, and inferred performances that bend, break, and reinforce social norms. And though some essays linger on material description or anecdotal illustration, the best contributions undertake the speculative work promised by the title: “playing games” rather than using or looking at games. Blackwell’s “Seeing Victorian Culture through Croquet’s ‘Treacherous Wire Portal,’” for instance, follows a fascinating trajectory through representations of croquet in periodicals, graphic satires, [End Page 306] and novels to visualize how the croquet field became a space to nudge gender expectations through fashion, flirtation, and sprawling gatherings that “circumvented rigid period gender roles by allowing the sexes to compete directly against one another” (130). Similarly, Heather Fitzsimmons Frey uses 1873 accounts from a night of “acting charades” (parlor theatricals hinging on visual puns) to explore the balancing acts attendant to expectations of women’s domestic leadership as these large-scale guessing games challenged prescriptive social performance even while they crystalized the circumscription of gendered labor (154). On a smaller scale, Megan A. Norcia examines the complex rationalization, reflection, and sometimes critique of the British Empire’s conversion of land and human culture to resource and commodity in games produced after the Great Exhibition. Norcia attends to the representational content of games like William Spooner’s A Comic Game of the Great Exhibition of 1851 without getting lost in the congested color lithography. She then thoughtfully links these considerations to operational ironies like the lopsided number of “Pay” spaces...