Orientalism and Abstraction in Eurogames

This essay argues that Eurogames, the German-influenced board game tradition emerging in the late twentieth century, contribute to Orientalist representations of the East through abstraction and the erasure of violence. Drawing on Edward Said's concept of Orientalism, the author contends that this effect arises less from explicit ideology than from the formal properties of the medium itself. The argument is developed through a close case study of Paolo Mori's Vasco da Gama (2009), a game about fifteenth-century Portuguese maritime trade, which the author reads as presenting European expansion in economic rather than militaristic terms while omitting the violence and disruption of indigenous and Muslim trading networks.

The essay traces the historical context of the Eurogame genre, which developed partly as a response to the dominance of American products such as Monopoly and Clue. Under the influence of the Spiel des Jahres award and a broader German cultural aversion to militarism, designers moved away from detailed wargaming toward games that minimize direct conflict and player elimination. The author observes that this shift has not removed colonialist narratives, but rather relocated them into systems of trade, building, and resource accumulation, where the violence underlying those processes goes unrepresented.

The analysis draws on historians and scholars including Enseng Ho, Stewart Woods, Ian Bogost, and Aaron Trammell, and examines the criteria used by the Spiel des Jahres judges, which contain no provision for political or historical fairness. The author also engages critically with Will Emigh's argument that distribution networks shape the political content of games, contending instead that design itself determines whether political debates are elided.

The essay concludes with cautious optimism, suggesting that the Eurogame form is not inherently incapable of non-Orientalist representation. It points to the work of designer Brenda Romero, whose politically informed games subvert conventional Eurogame principles, as a model for designers who wish to foreground the oppressive dimensions of history.