Senet: The Game of Afterlife

Amy Chang

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Blogpost 2: Board Games as Cultural Artifacts. Select one of the board games played in class. Based on your play experience, compare how it fits into the elements and cultural role of gameplay presented by Huizinga, Caillois and Suits in Game Design Reader.

Senet, an ancient Egyptian game, may be the oldest known board game, artifacts dating it back to 3500 BCE, durng the reign of King Tutankhamen. Senet's back story is based on the ancient Egyptian belief in one's journey into the afterlife.  Such cultural elements are reflected in Senet's simple gameplay of both chance and strategy; because of Senet's element of luck and the Egyptian belief in determinism, it was believed that a successful player was under the protection of the major gods. 

Senet is played by two people who must transport each of their five pieces into the "afterlife."  As such, the board itself can be interpreted as life itself as the pieces travel over the grid of thirty squares, which are arranged in three rows of ten.  The players' moves are determined by the roll of a die; after that, it is up to the player to formulate a strategy to figure out the best way to transport his or her pieces or block his or her opponent's pieces.  Obstacles are also determined by which squares the player lands on, but these can generally be avoided.  Instead, the game can be played defensively as one player can block or "punt" his or her opponent's pieces backwards.  However, the gameplay of Senet primarily emphasizes the deterministic element of luck, as each player's move is calculated by the roll of a die. 

According the Huizinga, cultural attitudes can be derived from the type or game or the game's gameplay.  Games, as systems of metaphor and abstraction, allow its gameplay to be determined on several levels.  For instance, the Senet board itself and the path one takes on it is easily interpreted as the road of life; furthermore the linear and limited player movement and its restriction to the die roll underlines once more the Egyptian belief in determinism.  Cultural values can also be determined from the game's system of rewards, motivation, and the meaning behind choices.  For example in Senet, even though strategy may emerge, the game primarily rewards a lucky roll; specifically, if one rolls an even number, he or she may roll again, and thus advance much more quickly in the game. 

The element of luck in Senet sheds light on not only the Egyptian culture that played it, but also the metaphysical properties behind the game mechanics.  Most obviously, the game of Senet is intrinsically intertwined with the story of the ancient Egyptian's lifelong journey to the afterlife. According to Caillois, in alea (games of chance), the player ends up depending on everything else but him or herself; this element arguably places all players on the same level, but foremost there is a "negation of the will," which corresponds with the deterministic mindset of the ancient Egyptians (134).  Yet, the "opposite and somewhat complementary attitudes" of the elements of agon (games of competition) and alea in Senet provide its players "conditions of pure equality denied them in real life.  For nothing in life is clear, since everything is confused from the very beginning, luck and merit too.  Play, whether agon or alea, is thus an attempt to substituted perfect situations for the normal confusion of contemporary life" (Caillois 135).  As a simulation of the ancient Egyptian's path to the afterlife, Senet illustrates a relationship between cultural ritual and gameplay.  For example, the Senet gameboard marks a spatial separation from ordinary life, yet ritual is indistinguishable from play, just as emotions and reactions elicited from certain traditions, such as a mask whose cultural tradition is to arouse fear.

However, the chance element of Senet gives the gameplay what Huizinga calls 'tension,' "an uncertainty, chanciness; a striving to decide the issue and so end it" (Huizinga 105).  Yet it is the aforementioned contrasting elements of random luck and the structure of game rules that give games of chance an interesting underlying sense of conflict.  Suits describes the purpose of such game rules as the following: "To play a game is to attempt to achieve a specific state of affairs [prelusory goal], using only means permitted by rules [lusory means], where the ruels prohibit use of more efficient in favour of less efficient means [constitutive rules], and where the rules are accepted just because they make possible such activity [lusory attitude]... playing a game is the voluntary attempt to overcome unnecessary obstacles" (190). 

Works Cited:

Essays from:

Salen, Katie and Eric Zimmerman. (2005). The Game Design Reader: A Rules of Play Anthology. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

Nature and Significance of Play as a Cultural Phenomenon (1955)/Johan Huizinga 96
The Definition of Play: The Classification of Games (1962)/Roger Caillois 122
Construction of a Definition (1990)/Bernard Suits 172