Dr. Arjen Dijkstra and Hans van der Heijde about board and card games

The 24th Board Game Studies Colloquium (BGSC) is a four day long conference which will take place both on site, and online. The theme for this edition is ‘Ludus in Academia’. The conference is organized by Tresoar.

By courtesy of the Campus Fryslân, as part of the congress two free lectures are offered to all students and those interested. The official language is English.

Tuesday 17 May 2022 - Campus Fryslân (Wirdumerdijk 34, 8911 CE Leeuwarden)

19.30 p.m. Dr. Arjen Dijkstra

Games and game playing in universities in the North of the Netherlands

Universities have long been places where people got bored. Fortunately enough they were also places where people found ways out of this boredom. By writing some of the best books, studies and poetry in the history of mankind. And also by conducting research, by teaching and of course by playing games.

The universities in the North of the Netherlands are no exception. In the eighteenth century the oldest known chess game to have been written out in the Netherlands, was played and recorded at the university of Franeker. In the nineteenth century Fritz Zernike, who would go on to win a Nobel Prize in Physics, claimed fame as a young student with his own board game. Daniël Bernoulli was born in Groningen in 1700 as the son of a mathematics professor. He would lay some of the groundwork for game theory. Adriaan de Groot took his PhD with Thought and choice in chess - the seminal work which revolutionized the field of psychologie spent his last years as a professor at Groningen University.

There are numerous links, stories and developments that can help us gain insight in the role of games in academia. In this talk I will discuss examples from the universities of Groningen (1614-present) and Franeker (1585-1843) and show how they helped shape our understanding of the homo ludens.

Arjen Dijkstra (1979) is director of the University Museum Groningen. He studied at the Noordelijke Hogeschool Leeuwarden, the University of Groningen and obtained his PhD at the University of Twente (2012). Dijkstra specializes in the history of books, mathematics and universities.

In his research he mainly focuses on the practice of science in the Northern Netherlands. In 2021 he published the well-received De Hemelbouwer. Een biografie van Eise Eisinga. In addition, together with Mark Hektor, he published It Himelbouwerke (2021) and De Jonge Filosoof (2022), two children's books in which the development of science is made understandable for a young audience.

20.30-20.45 p.m. Coffeebreak

20:45 p.m. Hans van der Heijde

No Trump!

Bridge is a card game far too complex to explain in one lecture. Which leads immediately to the question: why for god’s sake is it so complex? In this lecture I will try to answer that question from a sociological perspective, taking you through the twentieth and twenty-first century history of the game, focusing on its social history.

Is the future of games like bridge, chess and checkers bleak? Will they fade away, because they no longer attract young people? Without pretending to have a clear cut answer, I will address that question at the end of this lecture.

Hans van der Heijde (1954), MA political science UvA (1981) taught until his retirement in 2020 at the teacher’s education college, departments of social studies and history, of NHLStenden. Between 2000 and 2015, he was editor/chief editor of Maatschappij & Politiek.

As a writer of fiction he published two novels, a collection of short stories and a play.

For the Leeuwarder Courant and Dagblad van het Noorden he weekly writes book reviews. Both these newspapers published his weekly bridge column for more than thirty years.

Hans van der Heijde lives with his wife in Leeuwarden.

As a bridge player he describes himself as: solid, no genius, stoic.