‘As in games, so also in society’: Economic Games as Metaphor and Cultural Practice in the Postsocialist Transformation of East-Central Europe
Economic games are an overlooked yet surprisingly rich source for studying the neoliberal transformation. Czech, Polish, and Slovak board games of the 1980s and 1990s provided an opportunity to learn about the mechanisms and concepts of the market, from the general principles of running a business to the specifics of the privatisation process in the given country. They also cultivated the players’ ideas of the new economic agents, simulating what it was like to be a broker, a businessperson, or a manager. The rules, objects and characters of board games thus naturalised the possibilities and constraints of neoliberalism in people’s everyday lives.
This talk explores board games with economic themes, including privatisation, investment, and entrepreneurship, created during the transformation of state socialism, extending the study of emerging “free-market” subjectivities to the realm of material culture. It approaches these objects not merely as leisure activities but as cultural practices through which people adapted to the new market order. In an attempt to bridge the gap between cultural and intellectual history, the talk links the game rules and mechanics to the use of game metaphors in neoliberal theory and the discourse of local reformers.
Martin Babička is a postdoctoral researcher at the Institute of Contemporary History of the Czech Academy of Sciences. He earned his doctorate in History from the University of Oxford in 2024. His research interests include the history of neoliberalism, environmental history, and the postsocialist transformation.