The Game of Life and neoliberalism : An analysis of neoliberal characteristics and ideology in The Game of Life rule book versions 1999 and 2021

Games are ubiquitously blended into various aspects in society applied them as tools beyond leisure time, such as education with game-based learning, employee training with gamified learning, and strategic marketing with gamification. As games can be perceived as media to convey messages from designers (senders) to players (receivers) through gameplay, this thesis aims to examine messages that could be conveyed by the game, specifically in the rule book of board games where players must read to understand how the game is played. Due to the potential in conveying messages through games for purposes, this thesis focuses on neoliberalism in The Game of Life board game rule book versions 1999 and 2021, aiming to locate neoliberal characteristics and its ideologies. This thesis also aims to locate the differences in characteristics and ideologies between the two rule books to examine how neoliberalism has changed in 22 years. The Game of Life rule books are the selected data to examine since the game potentially contains neoliberal ideas of American lives in contemporary society. The game presents a life path as game mechanics in which players play from being students towards retirement, passing through many life aspects - career, family, and financial matters. The research is conducted by two methods: deductive thematic analysis and discourse analysis. The deductive thematic analysis is the approach to locate neoliberal characteristics in both rule books with respect to definitions of neoliberalism. Themes are pre-created to analyze written texts in rule books with the results of 30 and 34 passages (chunks of sentences) in versions 1999 and 2021, respectively. Discourse analysis, additionally, is applied to passages to locate neoliberal ideologies. Four main activities - education, family, retirement, and financial matters - are selected to locate ideologies in rule books. The results reveal five neoliberal characteristics and two neoliberal ideologies located in The Game of Life rule books. The rule book version 1999 contains four different characteristics: Humans as economic beings, Money-related, A decrease in public expenditure and an increase in privatization, and Inequality in society, whereas the rule book version 2021 consists of five different characteristics - four themes with the same as version 1999 and Individual freedom. Due to neoliberal ideologies, two ideologies are found for both versions: The freedom to choose and Meritocracy. The primary key between both rule books that make neoliberalism differently located is player’s freedom. Players are compellingly forced to follow the instructed pathway of life regardless of wealth in version 1999. As a result, individual freedom - a neoliberal characteristic - is not located in the game leading to an increase in a number of passages containing characteristics of Money, Privatization, and Inequality. Furthermore, two neoliberal ideologies are not found during the gameplay but in the final state, where players can decide whether to live in the city or the countryside with individual merits from their assets. In contrast, players independently decide gameplay pathway in which restrictions and compulsion are dramatically reduced from the game mechanics in version 2021. Therefore, a new characteristic - Individual freedom - is embedded in the rule book with the reduction number of passages containing characteristics of Privatization and Inequality. Additionally, The freedom to choose and Meritocracy are located during the whole game in which players can independently decide paths and earn rewards that are worth their efforts.