South Asian Games with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen

This episode features a discussion with Jacob Schmidt-Madsen about Game Studies and the history of South Asian board games. Jacob is a Postdoctoral Scholar at the Max Planck Institute for the History of Science in Berlin. He earned his PhD in Indology in 2019 from the University of Copenhagen, where he still remains an Affiliated External Researcher. His work focuses on the history, structure, and cultural significance of board games in South Asia, and his dissertation explored the Indian origins of the modern children’s game “Snakes and Ladders.” In Berlin, he is continuing this work as part of the research group Astral Sciences in Trans-Regional Asia (ASTRA), headed by Anuj Misra. His project within that group explores the cosmological and astrological dimensions to play and games in South Asia, specifically through the examination and translation of three encyclopedic texts. In the discussion, Jacob explains the ideological and cultural significance of games, exploring the importance of play both as a key domain of experience and as an object of academic study.