From treetops to tabletops: a preliminary investigation of how plants are represented in popular modern board games

Abstract

Societal Impact Statement Plants have been elements in games throughout history. In an era where “digital pushback” is becoming more common, the impressions that representations of plants in board games have on an audience is not to be overlooked. By acknowledging the importance, beauty and history of the botanic world and its considerable impact on the daily lives of human beings connected to it, modern board games may offer an entertainment route towards awareness as well as an educational resource to challenge plant blindness. Summary Plant blindness is the inability to appreciate plants in one's own environment, in the biosphere as a whole and their relationship to human affairs. Here, we discuss a community of interests in which we suggest that an appreciation of plants is vital for success: namely the world of modern board gaming. We present a classification system for the presentation of plants in the 500 most popular modern board games, where games are categorised based on their complexity, and representation and portrayal of plants. This initial mapping exercise defines a potential scope for the future analysis of how modern board games may offer a novel and interactive entertainment mechanism to challenge plant blindness and a framework for future analysis work in this area.

Plant blindness and sustainability

“…The changing face of human interaction with plants and the natural environment is reflected in the applied arts, as exemplified by trends in motion picture animation (Ebedes, 2018;Prévot-Julliard et al, 2015;Lima, 2016). Moreover games and role-playing have growing potential to capture student and public interest in plant life (for example Borsos, 2019;Friedersdorff et al, 2019;Van Nuland et al, 2019).…”

Plant awareness disparity among students of different educational levels in Spain

“…2. Studies have found that students' species (including plants) literacy, attitudes, and identification skills improved after specific activities aimed at increasing their interest in local flora (Nyberg & Sanders, 2014;Kaasinen, 2019); workshops (Nates et al , 2012), outdoor educational programs (Fančovičová & Prokop, 2011;Wyner & Doherty, 2021), use of living organisms in the classroom (Krosnick et al, 2018;Krell & Schmidt, 2020) , visits to botanical gardens (Kissi & Dreesmann, 2017), or board games (Friedersdorff et al, 2019) and mobile applications (Hartman et al, 2019), were some of the proposals investigated.…”

Identificación computacional de temáticas históricas en contextos de aprendizaje informal: el caso de los juegos de mesa

“…En cuanto a los dominios de conocimiento, al Aprendizaje Basado en Juegos ha sido explorado en campos tan diversos como son los idiomas (Wu et al, 2014), las matemáticas (Ramani et al, 2012), o la ecología (Friedersdorff et al, 2019); de entre todos estos campos destacan las temáticas vinculadas al pasado, que son muy populares tanto en número de juegos y jugadores como en estudios sobre dicho aprendizaje (Beavers, Sian M, 2020;Metzger & Paxton, 2016;Mozelius et al, 2017;Mugueta Moreno et al, 2022;Mz & Sy, 2008) aunque de nuevo la mayoría de trabajos se centran en el uso de videojuegos en entornos de educación formal.…”