If we put one of this year's blockbuster videogames into a time capsule, what would the people playing it 100 years later think about us?

Videogame developer Julia Keren-Detar wants to get us thinking about this before it happens. In March, she will present the session 'History-Shaping Design: Tales Told by Early American Board Games' at the Game Developers Conference in San Francisco. We're still many decades away from the 100th anniversary of videogames, but Keren-Detar will argue that our reactions to the board games of the past can give us a clue to how people will view games like Super Smash Bros., Far Cry 4 or Titanfall.

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She says the history and culture of a country have a big impact on the gameplay mechanics of the games made and played in that country, and that today's game developers should bear that in mind—consciously or not, the games we make today tell a story of who we are. 'As designers, we need to be aware of how culture does play a role in our decisions,' Keren-Detar says. 'We share the same history as board games in terms of mechanics and inspiration and play.'

Keren-Detar plans to examine four board games, some familiar, some not: Monopoly, Mansion of Happiness, Candy Land, and The Checkered Game of Life.

The Checkered Game of Life, released in 1860 by Milton Bradley, eventually became our modern-day game Life, but the original version was significantly different. Instead of becoming hair stylists or police officers and poking plastic peg-shaped children into candy-colored SUVs, players of the original game landed on spaces marked with 'virtues' and 'vices.'

Spaces like 'honesty' and 'truth' sprung you forward; spaces like 'gambling' and 'disgrace' slowed your progress.

“I think religion really affected how games were made,” Keren-Detar says. “In Europe, there were more excuses to play, whereas in the US, we didn’t have an established aristocracy. So the idea of playing was very negative, or thought of as lazy and idle and sinful. These games had morphed themselves into being entertaining, but also educational, so you wouldn’t get in trouble for playing a game on a Sunday if it’s based on how to become a better Christian.”

The pre-Civil War game Mansion of Happiness was even more righteous, Keren-Detar says. Some of its illustrated squares showed characters suffering for their sins with consequences like whipping posts or pillories.

Neither Mansion of Happiness nor The Checkered Game of Life featured dice, probably because dice were still strongly associated with gambling and sin. Checkered Game of Life used a spinning number wheel instead, a feature that survives to this day.

The shift in the narrative of Life over the centuries, Keren-Detar says, suggests a shift in American values.

“The narrative wasn’t dying and going to heaven—it was trying to go to college and be productive and get money,” Keren-Detar says of the version of Life we're most familiar with. “A lot of games that came out around that time changed from being religious to being industrious.”

The designers of these board games weren't trying to create a time capsule of their cultural belief systems, but they did so anyway. Keren-Detar, who runs the independent game studio Untame with her husband in Brooklyn, describes her upcoming game Mushroom 11 as 'more about the mechanic and fun,' without a 'heavy-handed' cultural message.

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But it's still 'a little bit about the environment,' she says, 'and fear of what’s going on in terms of climate change.'

'Setting it in a post-apocalyptic world might be pretty cliché, but it’s not cliché because there are no humans,' she says. 'You’re just this green blob. When we think of ourselves in a post-apocalyptic world, we think we're going to still survive. But there are other organisms on this earth that don't care whether we survive or not.”

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So, 100 years later, players of Mushroom 11 (assuming they can find a PC that runs it) will get a glimpse at early 21st century Americans' anxiety over climate change and global apocalypse—whether its designers consciously put it there, or not. What will they learn about us when they play Assassin's Creed in the year 2114? What about Pong?

What do we want them to think about us?

'We’re analyzing these games and learning about the 1800s,” Keren-Detar says. 'What will people think about the games we're playing in 2014? If that’s not in the back of our heads, we're going to get called out on it.'