What the landscape tells us

Board Games and Landscape

Everyone has a relationship with the landscape. To geographers, landscape is a term to specify the sensitive aspects of the space around us: smell, sounds, architecture, natural features and other things are part of the landscape.

Landscape is a mix of cultural and natural aspects. In a dialectical relation, landscape influences  the inhabitants of the place at the same time it’s influenced by the people: in most of the countries, landscape is vital to national identity.

Many game designers chose to honor famous landscapes in her/his creations: Maracaibo, by Alexander Pfister, Luxor, by Rüdiger Dorn, and Marrakesh, by Stefan Feld, are successful board games with notorious places in the title.

These three games have another characteristic in common: they are about cities outside Europe, but the game designers are europeans.

Brazilian games, landscape and stereotypes

Many times inside Glyptodon Game Studio we chat about searching for Brazilian themes. We are a game studio outside the central places of industry, in a third world country in the middle of an economical and political crisis. Drawing the world’s attention to our work is a hard task and Brazilian Themes is a strategy to offer exotic products for European and North American companies.

Brazil Imperial, is an example of this logic: maybe the great artwork and well-balanced game design didn’t receive great attention if the game was about Napoleonic France or noble families in the Italian Renaissance.  

On the other hand, if we select only projects with “Brazilian themes” the menace of stereotypes arises on the horizon.

For example: if we create a game about BM&FBOVESPA, a World famous stock exchange located in São Paulo, many players around the world won’t associate the place with their idea about Brazilian culture. Another one: a game about the book The Devil to Pay in the Backlands, the most important Brazilian novel in the 20th century, won’t show tropical forests, beaches or samba, in other words, a landscape distant from the general stereotype about Brazil’s nature.

In face of this dilemma we’re trying to adopt a middle ground solution in our products: Luna Maris is about lunar mineration and presents an “universal” theme; Eletrika is about Hydroelectric Energy and shows lots of references about Brazilian landscape.  

Can a Brazilian make a game about Europe?

You can find successful Brazilian board games about European themes like Cartographers or Paper Dungeons, both set in medieval fantasy worlds, but we didn’t notice any Brazilian project about landscapes in Europe or North America.

The idea sounds odd and unoriginal for developers and CEO’s. If they like the mechanics, the game designer can receive free advice “choose a city in Brazil and we have a deal to publish the game… we need to be original”.

The idea of a Brazilian game designer dedicated to creating a game about Dublin or any city in Europe is far for now. Maybe we have a long way to go to establish Brazilian game design before publishing games about places in other continents and countries.

Last but not least, by way of provocation, I like to remember the wise words of Jorge Luis Borges, the famous argentinian writer, about the importance of national characteristics in his short stories and poems.  

In 1951 Borges wrote an essay titled “The Argentine Writer and Tradition.” Referring to the Islamic prophet Mohammed, the writer observed that “in the Arab book par excellence, the Koran, there are no camels,” for “[Mohammed] knew he could be an Arab without camels.” “What is truly native can and often does dispense with local color”