Simple, Not Easy
Gaming Welsh Politics and the Return to Reality
From Planet 250
by Ted Parry
Sixty years after the 1963 Trefechan Bridge protest, Ted Parry reflects on the telling complexities of creating a ‘simple’ board game based on Welsh politics. Despite its political success as a tool of power, why has simulation gaming never taken off for the left?
Viewed as a whole, the reproduction of a linguistic Welsh nationalism [in the 1960s] cannot be fully appreciated without understanding its complex place-based and scalar politics.
(Rhys Jones and Carwyn Fowler on the events founding contemporary linguistic nationalism in Wales, from Placing the Nation: Aberystwyth and the Reproduction of Welsh Nationalism.)
E = mc2
(Einstein’s explanation of the essential forces of the universe.)
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In 2001, I assisted in a schools ‘crisis game’ run by University of Wales Aberystwyth’s International Politics department; a recruitment exercise in which A-level students role-played as EU statespeople, lobbyists and political journalists. Us doctoral students also role-played, as ‘special advisors’.
Sign in to read moreAbout the author
Ted Parry has studied politics, informally and formally, on the street, at Coleg Glan Hafren, Ruskin College and the University of Wales. He’s currently dividing his time between tree planting and researching a novel of the Miners’ Strike and its aftermaths.
