Using real-life board games to bring Hungary’s youth together

The youth of today are becoming more and more disengaged and fragmented from each other and the society in which they live in. This is an international trend, and is also true for the youth of Hungary. Experts suggest that the youth need to focus more on activities that they can do as a group, instead of as an individual I order to foster group cohesion and a community conscience. The Hungarian youth could stand to benefit significantly from playing real-life board games in an attempt to come together as a united community.

As such, there has been an increasing emphasis on trying to encourage the youth to stop using their digital devices and instead, play classic board games that allow them to connect with their peers, such as Scrabble and bingo. However, there is the problem, that some of the youth who have exclusively grown up playing digital games, may not be familiar with some of the more classic board games. As a result, it may be difficult to create the buy in for the youth to be playing these games –especially if they do not even know how the game works or what the game’s rules are. In the case of the classic game, Bingo, for example, playing bingo online games is a good starting point and compromise for youth who may not want to dive head first into the classic game in its original format.

But it must be added, that ideally the youth should be playing these classic board games in the original board game format. Being able to play a game while physically sitting in the same room as your peers is a great experience and really fosters a sense of belonging and community among an ever increasingly divided youth population. While playing digital games online on the whole do not offer the same types of benefits as playing classic, traditional board games seems to have. The atmosphere of joy and community you feel when you play a board game as a group of people cannot readily be replicated in digital form, and while it may feel more convenient to some to play online, this element of human connection is lost in the process, unfortunately.

We are not condemning technology or digital media, but rather suggesting that the youth may be exclusively involved in their digital devices, to the detriment of their ability to spend time with other people and develop better social skills in the process. We do not want new generations of youth where people are more concerned with what is on their Instagram feed, and less about worldwide issues such as world hunger and global warming. A constantly disengaged youth means that they will be less engaged with issues that actually matter. It is a big problem, and hopefully the first step in the right direction will be encourage the youth to put down their mobile devices and do something together as a group.

Source: DNH PR