Modern adaptations of the game are much less rigorous in the messages they try to impart. In a popular American version, moral lessons are illustrated as comically simple drawings that anyone born in the ‘80s will recognize — a boy rescues a cat and makes a new friend at the top of the ladder, a girl eats too many chocolates which, as shown at the bottom of the connected chute, makes her ill (confusingly, at the top of another ladder, a girl is apparently preparing to eat an entire cake as her reward for baking it). There’s no apparent plan in the arrangement of these messages, their relationships to one another, or their correspondence with the number of squares a given ladder or chute advances a player or sets them back.
Imperial Britain is largely responsible for any of us in the west being exposed to this game. It was imported to Victorian England and soon caught on, even keeping the Indian iconography in its boards until around the 1930s. The virtues and vices became more generalized, endorsing grace and success under the ladders with warnings of poverty and disgrace adorning the snakes. Pregnant religious inscriptions were replaced by the two-part cartoon dramas, separated by a ladder or a serpent (and eventually a chute), as the snake to ladder ratio was generally evened out.
“It was probably thought that US infants would be frightened by all those snakes,” says Topfield. “Perhaps this might reflect some deeper cultural predisposition, going back to when the first West-bound settlers had to watch out for rattlesnakes.”
Modern adaptations of the game are much less rigorous in the messages they try to impart. In a popular American version, moral lessons are illustrated as comically simple drawings that anyone born in the ‘80s will recognize — a boy rescues a cat and makes a new friend at the top of the ladder, a girl eats too many chocolates which, as shown at the bottom of the connected chute, makes her ill (confusingly, at the top of another ladder, a girl is apparently preparing to eat an entire cake as her reward for baking it). There’s no apparent plan in the arrangement of these messages, their relationships to one another, or their correspondence with the number of squares a given ladder or chute advances a player or sets them back.Imperial Britain is largely responsible for any of us in the west being exposed to this game. It was imported to Victorian England and soon caught on, even keeping the Indian iconography in its boards until around the 1930s. The virtues and vices became more generalized, endorsing grace and success under the ladders with warnings of poverty and disgrace adorning the snakes. Pregnant religious inscriptions were replaced by the two-part cartoon dramas, separated by a ladder or a serpent (and eventually a chute), as the snake to ladder ratio was generally evened out.“It was probably thought that US infants would be frightened by all those snakes,” says Topfield. “Perhaps this might reflect some deeper cultural predisposition, going back to when the first West-bound settlers had to watch out for rattlesnakes.”
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