I am going to look at the terminology and terms I will rely upon throughout this podcast series. First things first, what do I mean by board game? Throughout their history, board games have been conventionally understood to be a game conducted on a flat surface that is segmented in some fashion, with pieces that can be moved around on this play area (Hofer, 2003; Donovan, 2016; O'Connell, 2019). The first known instance of the phrase “board game” being used in print was in 1854 (Merriam-Webster, 2020). Despite the relatively recent origin of the term, the use of board games has been an active cultural practice across the centuries and around the globe. Indeed, board gaming predates the written word (Donovan, 2017; Bell, 1979). Board games have been found as far back as the Bronze Age Jiroft civilization, based in what is now known as Iran (Madjidzadeh, 2003).
One of the oldest known board games, Senet, was found in tombs linked to the Predynastic and First Dynasty in Egypt in 3500 and 3100 BC respectively (Piccione, 1980). A hieroglyphic painting of Egyptian Queen Nefertari playing what appears to be Senet was found in her tomb (Piccione, 1980; Donovan, 2016). There are references to board gaming in Homer’s Iliad in the eighth-century BC (Brouwers, 2020). The game of Wei-Chi’I, otherwise known as Go (in Japanese), has been traced back to 625 BC in China, and is a popular area-control war game that is played to this day (Bell, 1979). A game called Patolli, involving rolling beans with white pips or white markings, with some beans having blank sides, was played by the Aztecs around 1300 AD. (Marler, 2017). The game of Mancala has origins that trace back to Africa in the seventh century AD. Today, there are 100 variants of the game played all around the world, with some literature suggesting that early followers of the Islamic prophet Muhammad carried player boards with them as they travelled the world (Ancient Games, 2019; Bell, 1979). A Mancala variant, Pallanguli, is played by Tamil women of south India; a version called Awari was played by diasporic West Africans, displaced by the slave trade, living in the Caribbean (Bell, 1979). Board games have been deeply interwoven into human history through the ages, and are deeply integrated into a diversity of cultures, both ancient and modern, the world over. I am offering these historical perspectives to plant the seeds that board games are truly for everyone. While board games have always been a part of human histories across cultures, contemporary gatekeeping and exclusionary practices such as those that are detailed in this work, should be cast in even starker relief.
This long history of board games has resulted in a cultural practice with seemingly infinite permutations and possibilities. The category of board games has been expanded to include a wide variety of cards and dice, storytelling and social deduction games; and often, these games are played with no board at all (Hofer, 2003). Even the label of tabletop games seems too limiting for the breadth and possibilities of what is contained within the category of board games. BoardGameGeek (BGG), a comprehensive online catalogue of games past and present, is catholic in its embrace of a full gamut of games across the spectrum of the Caillois (2001) categories of agōn or competitive games, alea or games of chance, mimicry or simulations, role playing or play acting, and ilinx or games involving vertigo. At last count, and at time of writing an update in 2022, there are more than 135,200 game entries and counting on BoardGameGeek (BGG) an increase of 13,200 in under a year.
For the purposes of this research endeavour, board games as a category will include those games that appear on BGG, a user-maintained and crowdsourced global repository reflective of the current cultural practices of board gaming. My rationale is this: BGG is actively curated, contested and updated by millions of users worldwide. The human participants of my various research methods, including the online survey and qualitative interviews, make little distinction between their games of Catan, Smash Up, King of Tokyo and their Dungeon and Dragons (D&D) campaigns. For that reason, some games might straddle the line between pure play activities or even encroach into pure role-playing games (RPG) categories without need for a tabletop surface upon which to play. This decision might rankle some gaming purists but, I believe, this decision to focus on games listed on BGG reflects the present realities of board games as lived cultural practices. The BGG listings, rapidly evolving every day, include everything from the Advanced Dungeons & Dragons Battlesystem (Second Edition) to the contortionist party game Twister (1966), where participants twist their bodies, with no table necessary at all, in order to place their hands and feet on randomly selected coloured dots on a square plastic floor mat, to the bizarre folk game called Eat Poop You Cat (1984), a game of broken telephone played with only a pencil and a piece of paper wherein each participant writes a sentence, which is then secretly shown, then ‘translated’ by the player on their left into a drawing, and so on. Contemporary board games, be they analog or digital, like their video game counterparts, are evolving to embed or integrate themselves into our increasingly chaotic and time-strapped lives, tracking along the same casual revolution trajectory observed by Juul (2010) in digital gaming. Like mobile app digital game design, analog game design is evolving to create casual micro or mini games that can be played on the fly or integrated into busy schedules. Examples include the Button Shy collection of games featuring designers such as Elizabeth Hargrave, creator of Tussie Mussie, a game with only 18 cards about the Victorian language of flowers that can be played without a table, even standing up or waiting in a line with game play lasting a scant five to seven minutes (Hargrave, 2019). The expansive universe of board games demonstrates the potentialities of analog gaming and gives us a glimpse of what board games could someday become.
How then does a board game differ from other gaming modalities? I will argue that board games, and games played on tablets, laptops, television screens, mobile and entertainment consoles, wearables or desktop computers, are in constant communication and sympathy with each other. Games, in their many instantiations, are forever informing each other. Board games and digital games can be understood as differentiated by the presence of the artificial intelligence of the computerized player and/or helper assisting the human player with the game. The foundation, the core or heart of these games and the game play experience, are similar. Both analog and digital gaming conform to the Caillois (2001) definition of games which is a “restricted, closed, protected universe” (p. 7); with players then engaging in a series of “formalized interactions” (Salen & Zimmerman (2004, p. 97). A game is a “miniature artificial system”, allowing players to escape reality to engage in safe, consequence-free, no-strings-attached, unproductive conflict, problem-solving, competition, and/or co-operation to solve a shared challenge (Zimmerman, 2009, p. 26). Both analog and digital games can offer an experience where the “context is defamiliarized just enough” to help the player separate from the everyday (Flanagan, 2009, p. 262). Both game states, analog and digital, share a play experience constrained by rules, formalized interactions, and boundaries.
Nicholson and Begy (2014), in their examination of digital tablet-based versions of board games, observe that one of the differences between the analog and digital versions of board games is how the “game state” is managed and maintained (n.p.). The management and enforcement of the rules, the game set up and tear down, are all managed by the software, or the artificial intelligence (AI) in the digital version of games. In the analog instantiation of the board games analyzed in Nicholson and Begy (2014), the authors note that the players (or player) maintain the conditions of the game, and are responsible for implementing and supporting the game state (Nicholson & Begy, 2014). The earliest computer games were, often, simply attempts to replicate board games and role-playing games, with the software and hardware acting as a rules lawyer, enforcing game standards and stipulations, the banker, doling out chits, funny money, and tabulating points (AlanTuring.Net, 2000). From Wolfgang von Kempelen’s “computerized” chess player in the form of the Mechanical Turk in 1769, to the 1951 Turochamp program created to play full games of chess, computer game designers (and con men like von Kempelen) have looked to board games for inspiration for their computerized game play (Schaffer, 1999; The Turing Digital Archive, 1953). In digital games, it is the AI, rather than human actors, which acts as dungeon master or storyteller, adding thematic context, atmosphere and colour to enhance the enjoyment of the players. The only difference between the game played digitally and a game played in an analog format, is whether a computerized agent joins you at the figurative table, assisting you with the maintenance of the game state (Nicholson & Begy, 2014). Analog board games and digital games share the same foundations, they are a mutual experience of a miniaturized system whereby players are constrained by rules, whether they are played in digital spaces, or in an analog format in the meatspace of face-to-face play.
Drawing on the Toronto School of communication theory’s concept of hot and cool media, I further argue that board games, a cool media, simply require greater and more active imaginative and physical participation from the human players to both maintain the game state (Nicholson and Begy, 2014; McLuhan, 1964). The individual needs to bring more of themselves to the cold medium to heighten and immerse themselves in the experience. Listeners to early radio plays had to create their own mental pictures of the action. By contrast, a ticket holder of a D-BOX movie experience is inundated with sensory input, their chair shaking, water misting on their faces, air jets flowing over them while experiencing immersive high-resolution visuals and audio. The same comparison might be made of analog and digital games. For example, when I play a game of Go, the ancient abstract game of area control, I can (and do) imagine myself as a resplendent empress conquering territories, even as the still black and white stones on an etched piece of board offer no such thematic prompts. In my games of Go, I must exert all the powers of my imagination to apply this fantasy framework to this highly abstract game. So too, as I painstakingly set up a game of Agricola, with all of its tiny wooden animals and fence lines, I have to situate my bustling little acreage in my mind’s eye, seeing more than the little cardstock tiles, naive livestock-shaped wooden pieces. On the other hand, the video games jam multi-sensory input into every receptor, leaving little room for my own imaginings. In this case, the digital game is the hot medium; the analog game is the cool one. The analog game asks more of me and my fellow players both in the maintenance of the game state and requires more of my imaginative investment in enhancing the cool media of this kind of play.
With this in mind, the definition of board games used in this dissertation embraces both single-player, and face-to-face or player-to-player interaction across a wide variety of board, card, dice, tabletop role-playing (TTRPG), social deduction and party games. The definition of board game that I will rely upon throughout the dissertation includes all of these varied tabletop game types, and also embraces the digital or online instantiation of the tabletop experience in simulators such as Tabletop Simulator, Board Game Arena and Tabletopia. These online platforms replicate, with varying degrees of success, the analog elements of cards, dice, tiles, game pieces, turn-taking, and even the tabletops themselves as in Tabletop Simulator where you can flip the entire table to demonstrate your frustration if you lose (Tabletop Simulator, 2015). While there is a growing market for solo board games, and an increasing number of hobby board games that include a solo variant (Castle, 2020), the majority of board games necessarily involve an element of human interaction as part of the game play, which typically features social negotiation, and close interaction with, and observation of your fellow players (Donovan, 2017; Arnaudo, 2017).
Analog play, therefore, is primarily a form of gaming whereby you gather with other players to play in competition or cooperation, employing analog elements such as dice, cards, miniatures, and other tactile game pieces, be they real or virtual. I will be making the distinction between digital board games and analog board games as necessary, as there is a burgeoning market for digital versions for these pieces-laden cardboard versions. It is this genre-sprawling, hybridized, and ever-evolving definition of board games, upon which I will rely throughout this dissertation. The participants of this research endeavour are, like BGG's ever-expanding list of games, just as catholic in their embrace of what board games are; and I echo their expansive and evolving understanding of board games in this research. This section is meant to signal the potentialities and possibilities inherent in board games and allows us to imagine what might happen if constraints and gatekeeping efforts, both explicit and implicit, were entirely removed.
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