Além dos dados : uma análise das representações coloniais nos jogos de tabuleiro brasileiros

Abstract

Board games have expanded their presence in Brazil in recent years and have come to circulate not only as a leisure activity, but also as cultural objects traversed by disputes over memory, identity, and representation. Starting from this context, this research investigates how Brazilian board games linked to national culture represent colonialism in their texts and manuals. The work begins with the understanding that games also organize meanings about the past and, therefore, can participate in the production of images about Brazil, its historical subjects, and its power relations. To examine this problem, the research used Ludopedia as an initial basis and carried out a manual survey of 348 items in the category "Brazilian culture." After a stage of thematic marking and filtering, 27 items linked to colonialism were identified. With the application of the methodological criteria defined in the study, the final corpus was reduced to seven complete, non-narrative games, with manuals, descriptions, and official releases. The selected manuals were organized into a textual corpus and processed in IRaMuTeQ through similarity analysis, with interpretive reading supported by content analysis. The results indicate that, in the games analyzed, colonialism tends to appear less as a historical experience marked by invasion, enslavement, expropriation, and resistance, and more as a process of territorial administration, resource exploitation, circulation of goods, productive expansion, and relationship with imperial power. Thus, the research concludes that the games studied reorganize Brazilian colonial memory based on a logic that centralizes colonial agents, elites, and power structures, while colonized peoples appear, in many cases, in a lateral, functional, or subordinate way.