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Reem HiluWashington University in St. Louis
Reem Hilu is an assistant professor of film and media studies at Washington University in St. Louis. She is working on a book that explores the forms of intimacy and interrelating that emerged with the spread of computing into domestic space and family life in the 1970s and 1980s. She is also developing a project on the use of games and gaming metaphors in psychotherapeutic practice.
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Abstract
Board games have historically served as important tools to mediate interpersonal interactions in the home and have often engaged with changing ideals of intimacy and sociability circulating in US culture more broadly. This essay discusses the way that two therapeutic board games, Group Therapy (1969) and the Ungame (1972), translated emerging ideas about the importance of open and authentic communication arising in therapeutic culture and circulating in popular and countercultural settings at the time and adapted them for use by families and groups playing together in their homes. These games offered tools to facilitate less inhibited and more connected approaches to relating, but they did not extend beyond the goal of improved communication and interpersonal interactions, leaving larger social structures untouched. The therapeutic games analyzed in this essay demonstrate the potentials and limitations involved in attempts to utilize games to imagine better forms of relating.