Playing on the Map: An Educational Game from the Age of Revolutions

Abstract

he use of games as an instructional tool might seem characteristic of pedagogy today. Yet the years around 1800 actually offer important clues to understanding the emergence of play as part of an idealized education in the modern world. As a proto-example of today's "edutainment," our object lesson is at once remarkable and ordinary. The German geography board game The Journey from Prague to Vienna (Die Reise von Prag nach Wien) was produced sometime in the late eighteenth or early nineteenth century. Its spatial orientation, colorful narration, and, it turns out, gameplay itself reveal much about how middle-class German-speaking children were situated socially and politically in the world.Children playing The Journey from Prague to Vienna likely drew on their experience of other games. 1 Board games have existed in some fashion for thousands of years around the world, but during the late eighteenth century in Europe they began to be marketed for children's use in particular. 2 At the same time, geography emerged as the quintessential topic for board games. In 1752, John Jefferys released A Journey through Europe, or the Play of Geography, which, like The Journey from Prague to Vienna, took players on a tour of distinctive features such as might be noted in the long-standing genre of travel narratives. 3 But the form of a game may have more directly elicited players' desires, as Koca Mehmet Kentel argues: "Through playing those games, travelling to distant parts of the world, learning to look at 'things' of the world as legitimate objects to acquire . . . children were made to orient themselves within an imperial horizon, to take it as a mundane experience." 4 This fantasy of consumption fed the ideology of domesticity as much as it did imperial knowledge production.Since board game scholarship has often focused on England, our early German-language example is especially intriguing. 5 The very different political contexts of Britain and the shifting borders of Central Europe before German