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Samuel Pizelo
Samuel Pizelo is a scholar, game designer, and programmer completing his PhD at the University of California Davis. He researches at the intersection of game studies, media studies, and science and technology studies. His dissertation, “Modeling Revolution: A Global History of Games as Model Systems,” examines longer histories of games to articulate their function as model systems around the globe. His research has appeared in Digital Humanities Quarterly and is forthcoming in Representations. For more information, see www.samuelpizelo.com.
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Abstract
Using a mixture of media archaeology and discourse analysis, I argue that the two most popular board games in ancient Greece, Five Lines (Pente Grammai) and City-State (Polis), had direct precursors in dynastic Egypt. I note that Plato's two speculative city-building dialogues—the Republic and the Laws—both engage in a "serious game" (in Plato's words) of imagining an ideal city, and each one mentions a different game as their referent (City-State is referenced in the Republic, and Pente Grammai is mentioned in the Laws). Through this comparison and references to other Greek literature modeled on games, I describe the central importance of games as models in early Greece. I argue that this understanding of games as models necessitates a reappraisal of game origins and patterns of transformation and that it reaffirms the necessity of game studies across disciplines.