Around the world in several questions

My reading this week included Simon Ryan's article "Inscribing the Emptiness" and Megan A. Norcia's "Puzzling Empire." I've also been editing an article about the spatiality of board games, so that Norcia's article (which I cite there!) felt particularly relevant. Because I work on children's culture, I'm especially interested in the link between education and play; how the carrying out of actions to (in the case of a jigsaw/dissected map) or on (in the case of many board games) a map for pleasure works to produce knowledge about the spaces depicted on that map. 

I was not a Victorian child, but I did have a very large "world map" jigsaw puzzle when I was younger. In addition to teaching me some geography (it was the first place I encountered the international date line!) it also had large pictures of animals on the areas which they came from. (Ryan's article quotes a Jonathan Swift poem in which Swift makes fun of "Geographers" whose maps of Africa " o’er uninhabitable Downs/ Place elephants for want of towns".) I'd planned to find it and analyse its depiction of space this week, but I think we gave it away at some point. Instead, I found something I'd completely forgotten about: a board game from 1989. 

Around the World in 80 Days is based on a travel series, which was also broadcast in 1989 on the BBC--which is the UK's state broadcaster. I have only vague memories of the series, but I know it was popular, and Palin went on to do several more travel shows. The original show draws its general structure from the 1873 Jules Verne novel after which it's named, in which Phileas Fogg takes a bet that he can circumnavigate the world in the stipulated time. Due to various mishaps on the way it seems that he will fail in his quest, but in the final pages of the novel he realises he has miscalculated the days (again, the international date line makes its presence felt!) and so he is able to win the money and marry the beautiful Indian princess whom he rescued from a forced death by sati in Bombay.

Verne's novel makes use of obvious colonial tropes. Fogg is a cosmopolitan European gentleman of the sort Mary Louise Pratt describes in Imperial Eyes, whose "circumnavigation" of the globe (technically, he never crosses the equator, so I don't think it counts) constitutes a sort of benevolent appropriation of the world under an imperial gaze. On the way he's able to have all sorts of colonialist adventures, including rescuing non-white women from repressive cultural practices, being attacked by native Americans, and so forth. It's a tremendously entertaining book, but the choice of it as a model for a 1980s TV series is rather a fraught one.

The object of this tie-in board game is to complete the journey around the world before the 80 days are up (symbolised by a giant red plastic date line that is moved across the board--but I seem to have lost that piece!), moving through a combination of dice and answering questions. There are also little "postcards" from different cities, and failing to post them can get you penalised within the game. The postcards are fascinating in themselves, just for the choices they make in which cities are included and what images are chosen to depict them. Here's a representative sample:

To me, what's most interesting about this game is the movement across the map and the sorts of knowledge that are produced by it. It's a big map, to the extent that the board can't quite contain it and spaces on the borders are frequently cut off--the game has done away the tip of South America, a bit of Greenland, a bit of New Zealand and all of Antarctica. Maybe that's inevitable, but as we've discussed, when the area depicted is a sphere, the choice of what becomes the centre of the map and what becomes its periphery is inherently ideological. As in the nineteenth century games described by Norcia, the journey here begins at the Prime Meridian. As in Verne's novel, the journey takes place primarily or wholly in the northern hemisphere.

But even more than the journey represented by the map, the questions make for fascinating reading. These are provided on 100 separate cards, each with 6 questions, and are a mix of facts from the TV programme (perhaps incentivising players to pay their TV licences and watch the show) and "general knowledge" about different parts of the world. As one might expect from any knowledge produced about other parts of the world, especially by the former colonial power, these questions are sometimes frustrating, sometimes a bit comical; there's lots to analyse about the ideological functions this knowledge serves.Consider the phrasing of "At the time of the Suez crisis, which turned the canal into one huge war museum, who was Britain's Prime Minister?"--what's the function of that parenthetical comment in a question about an incident that marked the decline of British imperial power? (The PM at the time was Anthony Eden, in case you're curious.) Compare that to the terseness of a question on the next card: "What is the currency of India?" But then, a couple of cards later, "Indian hair, often shaved in penance, is highly prized for wigs in which other country?" (The answer was Japan.) Again, the parenthesis is doing ideological work in reinforcing a connection between the country and religious penance. Combined with the postcards, above, the questions work to enforce a kind of master narrative of the countries visited, giving the player of the game not only a particular perspective on the space, but of which aspects of the space are "important" or "interesting". That is, the map doesn't superimpose pictures of elephants in Kenya or camels in Egypt, but it will represent Nairobi with a postcard of elephants, and remind you that camels in Egypt have funny "Western" names like "Michael Jackson" for the amusement of tourists. 

While writing this, I discovered the existence of 80 Days, a game written by Meg Jayanth, illustrated by Jaume and published by Inkle, which responds to Verne's novel by creating a steampunk, anti-colonial adventure across the world. Maybe it is possible to adapt this story (and this genre) in ways that don't reinforce these cartographical inequalities; I'm not convinced yet, but 80 Days does look extremely cool.

Works Referenced:

Norcia, Megan A. “Puzzling Empire: Early Puzzles and Dissected Maps as Imperial Heuristics.” Children’s Literature 37 (2009): 1–32.

Pratt, Mary Louise. Imperial Eyes: Travel Writing and Transculturation. Routledge, 1992.

Ryan, Simon. “Inscribing the Emptiness: Cartography, Exploration and the Construction of Australia.” De-Scribing Empire: Post-Colonialism and Textuality. Ed. Chris Tiffin and Alan Lawson. Routledge, 1994. 115–130.