BGC Students Get in the Game

Jesse Merandy, director of Digital Humanities / Digital Exhibitions at Bard Graduate Center, has been a gamer his entire life, a passion that deeply informed the course he taught in fall 2023: Get in the Game. With the assistance of his colleagues, educational technologist Julie Fuller and associate curator of exhibitions Emma Cormack (MA ’18), he developed a syllabus that explored the material world of gaming from the nineteenth century to the present and the ways that museums and cultural institutions have used gaming experiences to engage their visitors.

Fortuitously, the New-York Historical Society (NYHS), just a few blocks from BGC, is home to the Liman Collection of antique games. This collection provides an important record of early game design, manufacturing, and marketing in nineteenth-century America. Adding to the good fortune, BGC alumna Rebecca Klassen (MA ’11), NYHS’s curator of material culture, oversees the Liman Collection and has organized exhibitions that explore diferent themes and genres of games.

“From our first conversation, [Klassen] was incredibly accommodating and generous with her time,” noted Merandy. She presented him with a list of games in the collection, which reflected cultural contexts impacting the aesthetic and conceptual trends in board games, including the emergence of the parlor in the mid-nineteenth century, the events of the Civil War, and an increasing interest in travel.

Merandy and Klassen planned a class visit to view the games, which are housed in NYHS’s storage facility in Jersey City. Klassen carefully unboxed each game, drawing attention to its historical context and materiality, as well as various design, mechanical, and artistic elements. Merandy emphasized, “These historic games have a lot in common with popular modern games, particularly the player’s physical interaction with miniatures and game pieces. Some of them were visually intricate and featured early examples of chromolithographic printing. There is an amazing juxtaposition of simple materials, like cardboard, and the complex worlds they create.”

Some favorites among the students were The Great Game of Pharaoh’s Frogs (1891), in which molded tin and wire frogs leap into a painted cardboard pond, and The Game of Basket Ball (1898), whose illustrations of Victorian girls playing basketball reflect the emergence of team sports at women’s colleges.

MA student Ev Christie reflected, “Seeing these games gave us a better sense of how people might have enjoyed playing them over a hundred years ago.” Visiting the storage facility was itself a valuable experience that allowed students to see how museums store and preserve these kinds of objects. The students were also inspired by the chance to spend time with Klassen, a BGC alumna who holds a curatorial position in a highly regarded New York City museum. In the future, Merandy hopes to help create an exhibition that features these historic board games and encourages visitors to engage with them using gaming principles.