Every teacher secretly wants that one moment when students stop looking at the clock and start arguing about ideas. Something to do with a board game, a die, and the ghost of Marshall McLuhan seems to be causing that moment to happen more often lately.
The MediuM card and board game is based on McLuhan’s Tetrad, which is also called the Laws of Media. Marshall McLuhan, a famous Canadian philosopher, came up with this framework and later formalized it with his son Eric McLuhan in their 1988 book Laws of Media: The New Science. The four laws ask what a medium or technology improves, what it replaces, what it brings back from the past, and what it turns back into when it’s pushed too far. This framework can feel vague and hard to understand when used by scholars. It changes into something else when it’s turned into a game.
Setting up is pretty easy. The players split up into groups. The Messenger is the person who draws a card and tries to get their teammates to guess what kind of medium it is. There is one catch: each clue has to be an answer to one of McLuhan’s four laws. A player trying to get their team to guess “the automobile” might say that it increases personal freedom, replaces the horse-drawn carriage, brings back the idea of personal travel from ancient foot journeys, and at its worst, it causes traffic jams and can’t be moved. It’s either clear to the team or not. In any case, they did some pretty serious media analysis and didn’t even realize it.
It’s hard not to think that design is rather clever. That’s exactly why the game works: it doesn’t say it’s educational. The goal of the game is to win, move the board, and get away from what is called the “Media Maelstrom.” The learning comes from the side.
The game can be used with any form of art, technology, or human creation, from the past or the present. A typewriter, a cell phone, electricity, and the internet. McLuhan famously thought that the medium itself has meaning separate from its content, and the game seems to follow that lead. It seems like the people who made it weren’t just trying to make something fun. They were trying to give people something to think about by making it look like fun.
The MediuM has some institutional weight because it was put together by the Estate of Marshall McLuhan and the McLuhan Foundation. Both McLuhan and Eric McLuhan died in 1980 and 2018, but their ideas have been brought back to life here. It’s still not clear if a thirty-minute game session can really replace long-term engagement with the ideas. Another question is whether the game fully captures the depth and sometimes difficulty of McLuhan’s thinking. But it does something that most textbooks don’t: it gives you a starting point for thinking about abstract ideas in a way that makes them real and worth arguing about.
For students aged 14 and up, the game looks like it will be both fun and educational. That mix doesn’t happen very often. It’s been sought after for a long time by classrooms.
