Did you know chess was imperialist and racist?

The Massachusetts Institute of Technology recommended summer reading list of recent works from faculty and staff features subjects like “imperialism” in board games, neoliberalism, “queer black womanhood,” and climate change.

One of the suggested books was Playing Oppression: The Legacy of Conquest and Empire in Colonialist Board Games, which analyzes board games’ use of “imperialist reasoning.” According to its description, the book’s authors, including MIT lecturer Mikael Jakobsson, “apply the incisive frameworks of postcolonial theory to a broad historical survey of board games to show how these seemingly benign entertainments reinforce the logic of imperialism.”

Playing Oppression also argues that modern-day versions of games such as Snakes and Ladders stem from “trading games” that praised French colonialism and “sanitized its brutality while also relying on crudely racist imagery.” It also asserts that such games have underlying themes that “exalt (and incentivize) cycles of exploration, expansion, exploitation, and extermination.”