PHYSOGS: The Novel Card Game
A rare complete boxed set of this 20th century physiognomic board game and teaching tool, with far-reaching influence on policing theory and practice.
Overall very good plus.
Price: $800.00
PHYSOGS: The Novel Card Game
"—DETERMINED—<br />NOSE: Full, well-shaped nose with muscular appearance."
A game of faces, popularizing spurious pseudoscientific techniques developed by Jacques Penry, 'facial topography' theorist and monomanical entrepreneur. Penry's theories of physiognomy were eagerly taken up not only by board-game manufacturers and the general public, but also by the British police at the beginning of the 1970s, a decade when Penry was still actively publishing on the alleged connection between facial feature and personality some 30 years after this game's release. Even as modern scholars have thoroughly contextualized Penry's theories and dismantled their origins and underpinnings, many forensics manuals and homicide textbooks continue to praise his work in bland and benign terms as recently as this century.
The game itself first appeared at the outset of the Second World War. The PHYSOGS rulebook cites Penry's 1939 work, CHARACTER FROM THE FACE, published by Hutchinson; Waddy Productions was itself also part of the Hutchinson group. The gameplay activity is essentially a simplified version of Penry's later Photo-FIT facial composite system, adopted by UK police: into the outline of a human head, a player arranges three feature-strips (eyes, mouth, and nose) to form a whole, matching the personality gestalt suggested by a given character card and gender. The clever student of the human face will therefore correctly select a drooping nose for the CRAFTY-SELF-CENTRED type; a bulging eyeball for the CREDULOUS; and so on.
In later decades Penry's system dropped the game's strict gender distinctions between 'types', and never used overtly racialized definitions for facial feature types, departing in some ways from his constructed norm. This was, however, only a result of taking his examples from exclusively white subjects, and his facial-topography systems grew out of the same pre- or proto-psychological 19th-century physiognomy theory that skull-measurers like Lombroso and his spiritual descendants loved so well to apply to criminal psychology, and whose pernicious influence is still at work behind the facial-recognition algorithms and suspect descriptions of today's law enforcement.
A pleasant diversion, scarce historical curiosity, and dire exposé of the flimsy foundation much "scientific" policing is still based on. Additionally, a player can make a face with three rows of eyeballs, which is a good time in any decade and not dystopian at all.
Read more: Paul Lawrence, "Policing, 'Science', and the Curious Case of Photo-FIT"; Tscherny, Changing Faces.
The Object
London: Waddy Productions [Hutchinson], [circa 1939]. 10.5'' x 16.5''. Original red and gilt game-box, containing the complete gameplay set of 52 numbered cards (in four sets of 13), four frames, and two instruction booklets with fold-out printed text. Box good, with lid split at corners and generally edgeworn. Gamepieces lightly toned with some minor corner creasing; key booklet shows a few small tears at folding creases.
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