SOCIAL INEQUALITY SNAKES AND LADDERS
Professor-Student Project Q&A:
Q: The Basics of the game, if a player lands on an event tile, the player will read the contents out loud; however, if the player lands on a snake or ladder, the contents will be read privately. Provide an explanation for this move, beyond claims of politeness and sensitivity, by considering the tensions and overlaps between individual/communal, personal/social.
A: When a player lands on an event tile, the contents of it are public. This mirrors when events happen to you in real life — and how they are easily observable, or sharable to the people around you. I’m sure we’ve all told our friends or coworkers, bosses that we’ve fallen ill, or shared our love lives with friends. In this way, it is easy for events to be social.
On the other hand, the contents of a snake or ladder represent a privilege that a person may or may not possess. And privilege, or lack thereof, is often something you are born with, but don’t necessarily share with others. It is personal. In the game as well, we don’t see what privilege someone possesses or not, but we see the effects of that privilege or disprivilege. Based on that, we can only infer how privileged or disprivileged someone is based on what is observable to us, while not truly being sure. Indeed, oftentimes we are impervious to the true nature of someone’s privilege — in their socio-economic circumstance, or their religious or racial group belonging should they choose not to share it.
On the other hand, the contents of a snake or ladder represent a privilege that a person may or may not possess. And privilege, or lack thereof, is often something you are born with, but don’t necessarily share with others. It is personal. In the game as well, we don’t see what privilege someone possesses or not, but we see the effects of that privilege or disprivilege. Based on that, we can only infer how privileged or disprivileged someone is based on what is observable to us, while not truly being sure. Indeed, oftentimes we are impervious to the true nature of someone’s privilege — in their socio-economic circumstance, or their religious or racial group belonging should they choose not to share it.
It is interesting to consider the reasons why someone might want to hide their privilege, or disprivilege. Consider someone in the upper class who makes an effort not to display their wealth, or someone from a minority race who tries to pass off as a member of the majority race. What might compel them to present their privilege differently in social situations, when their personal situation isn’t so?
Increasingly, it is easy for us to see such a phenomenon on social media — where we only perceive what a person decides to present to us, while the true nature of their circumstances is unbeknownst to us.
Q: Luck and chance are great levellers of inequality. With reference to your game, to what extent do you agree with this statement?
A: Luck and chance do serve as levellers of inequality, but I cannot agree to the extent that they are great levellers of inequality.
In Social Inequality Snakes and Ladders, Luck and Chance are built into the game via the dice-rolling mechanism, accompanied by the placement of different events, ladders and snakes all around the board on different numerical tiles. In its most simple form, big numbers could help you progress faster and small numbers slower. It also determines where you land — be it an empty tile, an event tile, or the foot of a ladder or head of a snake. Before you roll the die, you can never know your fate in that round.
As for the rest of the board, there are an equal number of snakes and ladders, and an equal number of positive and negative event tiles — save for the lottery tile; which I will talk about later.
In this game, all players play on the same board, and all players roll the same die. Off the bat, you might think that this puts everyone on a level playing field — everyone has an equal chance of stepping on an event tile, and everyone has an equal chance of stepping on a snake or ladder, right?
This is where I argue that luck and chance work in favour of those more privileged. To illustrate this, I’ll quote an example from the game that we played last week. By luck, Cheryl made it to tile 24, where she then had to slide down the snake back to tile 5 due to lack of privilege. By luck, she progressed up the board again, up to tile 24, where she, again — had to slide back to tile 5. This happened a few more times, keeping her at the bottom of the board while the other players progressed ahead. Now, you may realise that if Cheryl never had to slide down that snake, she never would have been exposed to the same snake again. In a contrasting example, Cera kept landing on tile 87 — a hospitalisation event which sent her backward 3 spaces to tile 84. However, due to privilege, she never had to slide down the snake. Even though bad luck saw her rolling a 3 and facing the same fate thrice in a row, this instance of bad luck did not set her back as much as Cheryl’s instance of bad luck. Here, we see a demonstration of how privilege alleviates the effect of bad luck — and how lack of privilege exacerbates risk.
We also have the event tiles, which yes, you may arrive at due to luck. But the outcome of landing on these tiles are definite and absolute. The game is designed so that you’ll move forward to a ladder, or backward to a snake. Based on your privilege or lack thereof, whether or not you’ll need to slide down a snake or move up a ladder is definite and absolute as well.
There is one event tile that could propel you forward in the game dramatically. This is the lottery tile — which would send you to tile 80 immediately. Set on tile number 3, technically, the chances of landing on it are fairly high. Either you roll a 2 off the bat or you roll the number 1 twice. I’ve calculated the probability to be about 19.4%, almost one in five. But this is a game, and I think we all know in real life, the probability of striking the lottery is much lower. Indeed, striking the lottery can improve someone’s situation dramatically in real life as well; but given such low chances of this happening, it is unrealistic to say that it is a great leveller of inequality.
Q: Intersectionality as a social theory introduces friction into the slippery and sometimes effortless accompaniments of privilege. Using the metaphor of snakes and ladders, comment on how in intersectionality laying bare the conditions under which one gains an advantage, the problematic nature of social inequality is thereby exposed.
A: Intersectionality as a social theory posits that privilege exists in the dimensions of race, religion, class, ability, sexual/gender identity and physical appearance. With the ideas of intersectionality as applied to this game of snakes and ladders — which race, religion, class and so on are afforded privilege, and which aren’t — are identified clearly. In Social Inequality Snakes and Ladders, we know this when a player lands on a snake or a ladder — and whether it causes them to slide down or climb up.
The problematic nature of social inequality is exposed when we realise just how easy it is for those who are already privileged, to keep progressing — and how easy it is for those with lack of privilege to keep sliding backward. To put it in perspective in the concept of my game — as readily available ladders are for the privileged to climb upward, it is just as easy for the underprivileged to be sabotaged by snakes. The effect is doubled when we consider how the converse is also true — just as access to ladders is unavailable to the underprivileged, the privileged players are also protected from snakes.
Here, we see just how inequality is exacerbated by the workings of intersectionality and privilege. To put it simply — as easy as it is for the already privileged to progress, it is just as easy for the less privileged to slide back.
Special thanks to Prof. Cera Tan for her guidance through her module UTC2113: Gaming Life, and this project.
Gaming Life Module Description: Games are a fundamental aspect of our everyday lives — they permeate disparate fields of knowledge; involve, and are involved in, the creation of cultural practices; are part of ways of seeing and being in the world; might well be integral to relationships between peoples and the worlds they are a part of. This seminar attempts to meditate on the idea of games to develop an appreciation of gaming in life — with an accent on gaming life. Games, including specific games, are explored in theoretical and practical ways to develop questions involving — interrelating — tekhnē, technologies, cultures, epistemologies, and human communities. Further explorations potentially lead us to gaming cultures, including strategies, tactics, entanglements, addictions, pleasures, desires, délices, jouissances — exploring them in domains such as ‘political’, ‘social’, ‘familial’, ‘academic’, games, amongst many others — with play and praxis being echoes resounding through this seminar. Seminarians will engage in the construction, critique, and creation of games —imagining, and bringing forth, concepts in relation to the worlds in which we live.
