Do Board Games Make People Smarter?: Two Initial Exploratory Studies

Introduction

In “The play of animals” Gross (1898) described some interesting animal behaviours. The wild peacocks, for every day. In turn, two of them at a time enter the circle and a real battle begins. If one of them leaves the circle, the fight stops. This bizarre behaviour, just like so many others described by Gross, can be traced back to just one thing: the game. Like the animals, we also play, and in fact we are “Homo-Ludens” (Huizinga, 1967). The poet Friedrich Schiller said that man is entirely man only when he plays. Lorenz “believed” that “both art and the yearning of man for knowledge are nothing more than outward signs of the great game in which nothing is predefined, except for the rules of the game itself.” (Lorenz, 1983, p. 64). Game is innate in our nature, curiosity is game, knowledge and art are game. In this contribution game is framed as a tool through which different situations can be “simulated” or “experienced,” so that learning can be structured and lead to the educational success.