"Divan" Board Game; A Media to Transmit the Culture of Iranian Legends and Recreate Their Characters

Game is a means of learning and transmitting culture and accordingly, can be accounted as a kind of interactive media. "Diwaan", the game studied in this research, is one of the few Iranian board games that has been able to recreate the legendary Iranian characters with attractive themes by following the gameplay of one of the most famous games in the world, namely Mafia. The research goal is the analysis of the benefits and harms of using the characters of Iranian legends in Diwaan board game and the quality of recreating them in the game’s story. The method of this research is descriptive-analytical, during which the library data were collected, the characters in the Iranian folk literature and legends were observed and studied, and then the analysis was performed. The findings show that Iranian legends, despite being narrated, can be made applicable. In addition, the designers of this board game have completely mastered the background of various characters from the pre-effect -that is, Iranian legends used in the process of recreating the board game- and have not limited themselves to a single effect that belongs to a specific time period. 15 different characters have been extracted out of the legendary and folk stories and, while maintaining their main nature, gained a new life in the thoughts and minds of the players and presented a semantic continuity in different cultural forms by accepting new roles based on the gameplay of Diwaan in a way that the board game has been redefined as a media to transmit the culture of the Iranian legends.