Politics, climate change, the menstrual cycle – board games use the power of play to build understanding of real-world issues
- Thomas Wong, a Hong Kong social worker, designed a board game about global warming. Designers in the city and in India built games around politics
- Games with social themes can reveal uncomfortable truths, Wong says. It’s difficult to gain attention or funding for them, though, and many rely on crowdfunding
When Thomas Wong Chang-hung began his career as a social worker in Hong Kong in 2000, he saw how rarely families spent time playing together. After a hard day at work, parents had little energy left to play with their children. Kids, in turn, were increasingly addicted to mobile and electronic devices.
One evening in 2009, as an experiment, Wong now 43, took several board games to a community centre in Tung Chung, a new town on Lantau Island near Hong Kong’s international airport, to play with the youngsters. Their excitement was heartening, he says.
“The kids brought their friends, taught them how to play games and even borrowed board games to take home to play with their parents,” says Wong, a self-described avid reader and history buff.
His successful experiment motivated him to apply for government funding so community centres could stock more board games, but his request was rejected.
In April 2012, Wong founded People on Board (POB), a social enterprise intended to use the power of play to bring people together. POB encourages local designers to create games with historical, cultural and environmental messages.
In recent years, after seeing parents struggle to explain complicated environmental concepts such as the greenhouse effect to their children, and inspired by his two daughters and their passion for board games, Wong designed a game called Earth Rescue, which recently won a special mention in the 2021 German Design Awards.
