Games as cultural, political, persuasive products. Board games are embedded with “not-so-subtle, ideological, moral or national ideals as the object of the game” (Andriesse, 2018). Like any other socially constructed technology or product, games are “saturated with racialized, gendered, sexualized and national meaning” (Leonard, 2006). Board games, like any other cultural practice, are steeped in the values and beliefs of their creators (Andriesse, 2018; Pilon 2016; Flanagan, 2014, Donovan, 2017). Magie, the original creator of what later became the mass market, consumer game, Monopoly, had a set of ideas to share. For her, the game was an essay, a polemic, and a means to educate the populace. Magie devised The Landlord’s Game to argue for a new system of taxation by instilling in players a sense of unfairness that is inherent in a system of property ownership that enriched wealthy property owners, many of them owning entire neighbourhoods, and penalized renters (Pilon, 2015, 2016).
In some cases, board games have been created for overt religious or political purposes. The mainstream game staple, Snakes and Ladders, was originally derived from the Indian game Moksha Patam, a game designed to teach Jain and Hindu religious and moral beliefs (Donovan, 2017; Cooper, 1943). Le Jeu de la Révolution française, created by members of France’s revolutionary forces and printed in 1791, was designed to share the history of the French Revolution (Andriesse, 2018). The Game of Life was based on The Mansion of Happiness (1800), a Christian morality game that included lines such as “whoever becomes a Sabbath Breaker must be taken to the Whipping Post and whipt” (Donovan, 2017, p. 53). The Soviet Union issued a series of board games — The Abandoned, a game about rounding up homeless children with the goal of bringing them to an orphanage to be cared for; Tuberculosis: A Proletarian Disease, and Look After Your Health! The New Hygiene — designed ostensibly to teach newly-urbanized rural citizens about health and safety (Starks, 2017; Andriesse, 2018). Another Soviet game, created in 1926, Healthy Living, was designed to educate the citizenry about the dangers of alcoholism, sexually transmitted diseases, and folk healers: players who consulted with a folk healer or fraternized with an unfamiliar woman would wind up in the cemetery or catching syphilis, respectively (Andriesse, 2018). The U.S. Central Intelligence Agency (CIA) created board games designed to train agents to deal with global crises (Machkovech, 2017). SXSW: Collection, designed by CIA analyst David Clopper, was designed to train agents in intelligence collection and provide exposure to the challenge of juggling multiple problems, before each global challenge “boils over” (Machkovech, 2017). As such, board games have a long tradition of being used as instructive, persuasive and ideological tools to teach morality, health and hygiene, religious concepts, social graces, political beliefs, historical accounts, essentially becoming vehicles for designers to share their values, beliefs, ideas and biases (Andriesse, 2018; Donovan, 2016; Pilon, 2016; Flanagan, 2014).
Like the fine arts and literature, games are a means for designers to express “joys, anger, fears, confusion, affection, and hope” (Bogost, 2007, p. 339). Like digital games, board games too are instances of procedural rhetoric, allowing the player to get to “the heart of things by mounting arguments about the processes inherent in them”; designers, through the mechanics of play, and a repetition of actions and behaviours, are giving players an experience (Bogost, 2007, p. 339). Designers influence player behaviour, and procedural rhetoric helps to deepen the designer’s message; providing an interactive journey that can make the player feel boredom, frustration, delight, fear, or outage. The choice of game mechanics, themes, the ludologies and narratologies of the game are, in themselves, all acts of persuasion (Bogost, 2007; Flanagan, 2009; Anthropy 2012; Andriesse, 2018). The designer’s selection of the processes and systems in a game is an editorial, and therefore, the game designer has the power to create powerful affective and cognitive experiences for a player. Board game designers are, in a very real sense, programming the formalized interactions of their human players, and they are inculcating players with values and ideas (Bogost, 2007; Flanagan, 2014). Thus, a research exercise that examines who designs and who gets to design board games is a critical cultural and scholarly exercise. This discussion helps us understand what is lost and what is at stake when exclusion happens to a given business, hobbyist and cultural pursuit.
Seat at the Table: Why Play Board Games?
Why are games important? Some are quick to dismiss games as a serious area of study. It is just a game!: these discourses often fill board game fora. Board games are so much more than idle, meaningless pastimes. The ability to access board games and board gaming play has critical importance to society. I now turn to discussing why game play is important for communities and individuals, and the critical role board gaming plays and can play in creating literacies in certain publics. What are the affordances of board game play? Why is this specific form of play, board gaming, important? Answers to this question range from the health benefits of direct human interaction to board gaming’s overall ability to teach 21st-century competencies (Keep, 2019; Richard & Gray-Denson, 2018). What do board games do for us? How does board game play help society and enrich human lives? For the purposes of this research endeavour, what is lost when certain publics can’t (or don’t) have access to or the ability to play and create board games? Speaking about digital game experiences, Richard & Gray-Denson (2018) argue that gaming holds “promise for learning and socialization” (p. 1). Games have been called “specialized tool-mediated” forms “of intelligent human action” and are therefore indispensable for “human flourishing” (de Castell & Jenson, 2007, p. 2).
In general, games and gaming, both analog and digital, have been correlated to improved learning outcomes (Gee, 2005; Keogh, 2018; Squire, 2011; Abt, 1970; Flanagan, 2009, 2014). Game and game play offer affordances that include opportunities for learners to participate in experiential, active learning, experience embodied or situated cognition, and engage in consequence-free experimentation and free play, a freedom from the everyday which is often called the ‘magic circle’ of games (Gee, 2005; Huizinga, 1955; Zimmerman, 2009; Flanagan, 2009, 2014; Bogost, 2007)). Games and game play are also helpful ways to encourage identity creation and exploration, and promote social cohesion, closeness, and improve overall individual wellbeing including the release of stress (McLuhan, 1964; Arnaudo, 2017; Emigh, 2014). Games-literate learners can learn dynamically about complex systems, problem solve in simulated environments, and apply information to experiences effectively (Gee, 2005; Squire, 2011; Bogost, 2007; Zimmerman, 2009). Richard and Gray-Denson (2018) link games and gaming with key 21-century skills such as “situated learning, collaboration, distributed cognition, critical thinking, problem solving, increased motivation, system thinking and adaptive reasoning” (p. 8).
Enhanced learning
In game-based literacies, there is the semiotic layer of symbols and programmed player behaviour that one must decode in much the same way as one might when learning a foreign language or picking up upon the customs of a new community (Gee, 2005). Games literacies developed through the gestural and procedural language of games allow the player to progress; however, without that understanding, players cannot journey into the heart of the game. Without a patient guide or a human community of supportive helpers, some games are destined to only be played and enjoyed by closed affinity groups, available only to those with the capacity to ‘read’ the game. These affinity groups often share intersectional, social, cultural, economic commonalities and other literacies common to that social group (Gee, 2005). The semiotic, linguistic and procedural signifiers required to unlock the secrets of games are often significant hurdles to overcome for those who have not yet attained this literacy (Gee, 2005, p. 14; Mäyrä, 2008). In board gaming, this is significantly more of a challenge than digital gaming, as a group of fellow gamers are required to play the game.
This same design grammar, and the structure, rhythms, norms and semiotic meanings within board games and other types of games, are required literacies for the knowledge economy (Gee, 2005). Learning and knowledge production is not, Gee (2007) suggests, simply storing some disconnected facts in one’s head and applying abstract rules to dynamic human situations. Learning happens in a wider context, embodied and situated in reality, acting and reacting and garnering more information from feedback. Games-based learning provides a dynamic, situated, deeply contextual learning helps to create learners who can more effectively respond to the complexity of our rapidly changing world (Gee, 2007). There is a complex and layered understanding that is required to master games, so much so, that gaming literacy has been called a “multiplicity of literacies” (Gee, 2005, p. 14). As game-based learning increases in popularity in our educational institutions and in corporate training contexts, there is growing research that suggests that learning and academic outcomes were better for learners who had previous, extensive experience with games (Jenson, de Castell & Fisher 2007; Martey, Stromer-Galley, Shaw, McKernan, Saulnier, Mclaren & Strzalkowski, 2017; 2016). It has been argued that games-based learning can provide students with the next level of literacy required to contend with, and understand the multi-modal digital and cultural content we are confronted with daily (Gee, 2005; Keogh, 2018; Squire, 2011; Abt, 1970; Flanagan, 2009, 2014).
Identity creation
Games of all kinds have played a key role in the creation of identity through the creative, liminal spaces that games allow players to carve out in their lives; players can enjoy, through the affordances of games, transformative acts of identity creation, trying on new personas, and allowing gamers to have new experiences in the low-penalty, experimental game state (Nakamura, 2000; Keogh, 2018; Montola, Stenros & Waern, 2009). Nakamura (2000) has called video games and cyberspace play a kind of “identity tourism” (p. 3). Board and video games become simulations of “worlds or problem spaces'' for the accomplishment of desired outcomes that might be outside of our own specific perspectives and worldviews (Gee, 2007, p. 326). Players can literally try on other personas, and perspectives, allowing individuals to create and construct identities (Nakamura, 2000; Keogh, 2018; Montola, Stenros & Waern, 2009). Writing about the tabletop role-playing game Shadowrun (2014), Merriman (2017) discusses the opportunity for “players to be someone other than themselves, it provides a space for roleplay and for players to try on alternate identities'' even as he notes the Shadowrun’s game play and character building tended toward the prescriptive, with a focus on a constructed character with challenges in the gameworld, rather than allowing free play, and an exploration of the player’s own identity (p. 41-42). Gaming can take us out of a potentially blinkered and compartmentalized perspective, and into the lives and systems of others that we might not encounter in our day-to-day realities (Gee, 2007). Games can act as models or “miniaturized” systems enhancing a person’s ability to view problems from an isometric, God’s-eye view of complex systems and dynamics, and helping people analyze, interrogate and experiment with solutions thus broadening empathy and building social systems literacy (Abt; 1970; Bogost, 2007; Gee, 2005). Abt (1970) notes that this impulse comes to us as children, playing with models of human processes (such as dolls, toy houses, etc.) can help children to later assume adult roles in later life. Games-based identity play occupies a key role in the formation of self, and helps individuals understand their place in a wide social context (Abt, 1970). Thus, a research exercise focused on representation in artwork in games, such as this dissertation, is an important one. Limited or absent representation might play a role in limiting would-be players’ ability to see themselves, develop an understanding of possible identities, learn the skills they need to navigate an increasingly complex world, and find their place in the world.
Socialization and community cohesion
Games are neither isolating, sedentary or solitary as Isbister (2016) asserts; indeed, games connect us, get bodies moving, allow us to form communities, and solidify social bonds. All of these factors help to experience emotional connection and empathy via games (Ibister, 2016). In testing focused on the impact of multiplayer digital game experiences, players' galvanic skin responses (GSR) are recorded, demonstrating how playing in a room with friends is an even more pleasurable experience (Isbister, 2016). “When players in a room together laugh, jump and tease each other, the power of games to drive connection, empathy and closeness appears right before your eyes.” (Isbister, 2016, p. 109). Board game enthusiasts often report that they are drawn to the face-to-face interactions missing in digital game play (Arnaudo, 2017; Donovan, 2017). Of traditional board game play, Donovan (2017) says that board gaming has affordances many crave:
I think board games do have that social side, that face-to-face, bringing-people-together aspect that is fairly unique. Video games are their obvious rival. They connect people online, but you don’t get the body language, you don’t get the eye contact, you lose a lot of the communication. There’s something about board games bringing us together around one table, everyone focused on that task, not distracted by what’s happening on social media or on their phone. Everyone’s focused on that game, playing together, seeing the whites of each other’s eyes. (n.p)
Everyday escapism
Board games are also a means to escape the grind of the everyday. Game designer Bruce Barrymore Halpenny once said that board game play provides people with a way to release tension because “most jobs are boring and repetitive” (Stealing the show, 1976). Sociologist Graeme Kirkpatrick (2013) has suggested that we are being driven to computer and console games by a deep dissatisfaction with the state of neo capitalist labour market, unhappy with the precarious, gig-based economy. McLuhan (1964) similarly argued that not only were board games a cultural artefact, a product of their cultures, but games were also a way to cope with the complexities of life, means of dealing with the tension of modernity, with McLuhan writing: “Games are dramatic models of our psychological lives” (p. 267). McLuhan said games, like institutions, were the “extensions of social man [sic]” in the same way technologies are extensions of the animal organism” (p. 267). There are significant social stakes when exclusion happens in products and spaces; the knock-on effects have long-reaching implications.
Exclusion Zone: Barriers to Gaming
Unfortunately, girls, women or Black, Indigenous, Person of Colour (BIPOC) or other systemically marginalised communities do not always have equal access to and at times, the necessary games literacies to engage with and enjoy games (de Castell and Jenson, 2007; Richard & Gray-Denson, 2018; Gee, 2005). While there is a demonstrable need for multi-modal games literacy, as argued earlier, many North American publics do not have equitable access to the gaming spaces and the knowledge-production possible through game play. There have long been discourses within the board and digital gaming world that women, BIPOC, LGBTQiIA+ aren’t ‘real gamers’, are simply not interested in gaming, or, worse, not capable of engaging with gaming activities. They are often welcomed (or not) as “outlier exceptions” in communities dominated by a narrow stratum of the human population: the monied, white, cis gendered, and straight male living in affluent nations (Gray, Voorhes & Vossen, 2018; Ruberg & Shaw, 2017).
The longstanding misconception that people who identify as women, BIPOC or LGBTQiIA+ aren’t interested in games has kept these would-be gamers at the margins of gaming communities. In a BGG thread entitled, “Who [sic] come women don't often play boardgames?”, the replies to the question varied. Some comments were measured: “There's more social pressure put on women than men when it comes to pursuing the hobby, it's less socially acceptable” (Twice, 2011). Others disputed the fact that women aren’t avid gamers, “The number of woman [sic] mahjong, bridge, and bunco players alone probably outnumbers the number of eurogamers [sic] and wargamers by an order of ten” (Straight, 2011). This last comment is interesting as it indicates the multitudinous categorizations of analog games, and resultant schisms within analog gaming, and attitudes within these cultures that some types of gaming are ‘better’ for women and girls. Still others suggest that women place their competitive drive into other areas of life: “Women… might have a primal urge to distinguish themselves from others in a less aggressive way. This might be expressed in how much the average woman loves to shop for clothes and shoes, or buy makeup, etc.” (Liss, 2011). As these discourses and comments signal, the white male gamer has long dominated the spaces where board gaming is practiced and discussed, and white men have been the default ‘gamers’.
Feminist game scholars have long observed a pattern of women and girls in gaming seen as “passive, casual or non-essential participants within a culture dominated by endless narratives of men and hegemonic masculinity” (Gray, Voorhees & Vossen, 2018). As Ruberg and Shaw (2014) observed, as with any community, there are a litany of “unspoken norms” that are shared by dominant and thereby, more established members of the community (p. x). Members of the dominant group then seek to uphold and protect these norms, hold the access to game-based literacies tightly, and ensure their continued leadership through a variety of gatekeeping activities. Like any cultural pursuit, industry sector, or community of practice, eventually a language, a specialized literacy of the space develops, debates about authenticity and validity rage, and interlopers are, often, punished (Ruberg & Shaw, 2014; Richard & Gray-Denson, 2018). Chess (2020) noted that gaming and gaming spaces have always seen masculinity at their “centre” while other identities, ever present throughout histories of gaming, occupied the margins (p. 89).
History of Exclusion
Throughout histories, board gaming spaces have been traditionally occupied by men. Why? There are deep, historic roots in this belief system that still dominates some gaming cultures. Classic analog board games such as chess, referred to frequently by Huizinga (1955) and Caillois (2001) have traditionally been the pursuit and sole preserve of gentlemen of social and economic privilege (Montola, 2009). In contemporary North American and European publics, an infamous image from the late 60s edition of the mass-market Battleship depicts a father and son enjoying a game while the mom and daughter do the dishes in the kitchen, smiling indulgently at the playful menfolk playing the board game (Frauenfelder, 2019). Another classic board game, backgammon, was the focus of a celebrity craze in the early 1970s and was popularized by Hollywood elites, such as actors Roger Moore and Michael Caine, who were seen playing the game, themselves both archetypal representations of the cosmopolitan suave masculinity; the Playboy Mansion West in Los Angeles held backgammon tournaments until the wee hours of the mornings, hosted by Hugh Hefner (Donovan, 2017). Backgammon was marketed specifically and intentionally as a game for jet setting, sophisticated men of action (Donovan, 2017).
Other miniature wargaming subcultures formed in the 1950s and 60s; they were inspired, in part, by influences such as the H.G. Wells’ game manual Little Wars: a game for boys from twelve years of age to one hundred and fifty and for that more intelligent sort of girl who likes boys' games and books, published in 1913 (Plunkett, 2018; Wells, 1913). In North America, tight-knit enthusiast communities formed around tabletop games such as Diplomacy, a back-stabbing war game of political intrigue and negotiation designed by Allan Calhamer in 1958 and distributed commercially in 1960 (Meinel, 1992). Originally designed to be played through the postal mail by players all across the U.S., the Diplomacy zine and postal play community grew to 31 different zines at its height, all run by white, middle-class men who had interest in gaming, and access to at-the-time scarce technologies of “carbon paper, ditto machine, mimeograph or even hectograph” to produce these typewritten and pasted homemade zines (Meinel, 1992). This once-thriving, relatively widespread, and predominantly North American community was broken apart by in-fighting and personality clashes; its widespread fandom moved on to other gaming communities in the 1980s such as wargaming, serious games and simulation communities, as well as other board gaming fandoms (Meinel, 1992; Trammell, 2020).
In 1971, Dungeons and Dragons (D&D) creator Gary Gygax created his own miniature wargaming system called Chainmail, later going on to develop D&D in 1974. Trammell (2020) traces the contemporary board gaming design ethos and development of the contemporary board gaming communities to these early Diplomacy and miniature wargaming groups, themselves linked to the military cultures of World War II, suburban ‘white flight’ in the 50s and 60s, and close ties with the military-industrial complex. These games and their cultures were focused on offering complex statistical approaches to simulated war, and insurgency suppression. A symbiotic and close relationship with the U.S. military, and early Diplomacy zine publishers would result in current staples of game design such as quantitative combat result tables (CRTs), allowing players to consider a wide range of factors when contemplating enemy combatants and their player characters’ abilities (Trammell, 2020). War game and strategy game designers of this era would pore over white papers from the RAND Corporation, a non-profit think tank concerned with matters of public safety and global stability, and whose largest clients are theOffice of the U.S. Secretary of Defense, the U.S. Army and the U.S. Air Force (Trammell, 2020; RAND, 2020). These early communities were also predominantly white, middle-class and male with a militaristic bent, gaming in their white-flight suburban homes with fellow, like-minded players played a pivotal role in the development of contemporary board gaming cultures (Trammell, 2020).
During these formative times for board gaming, there were also early moves to welcome more players into the wider board gaming, wargaming and TTRPG hobbies. One of the early Diplomacy zine publishers (or Dipzine or Dippy as they were colloquially called), Len Lakofka, waded into the D&D fandom, and there, made some attempts to draw women into the male-dominated hobby. Lakofka, a former writer and editor for a Diplomacy fanzine called Liaisons Dangereuses, wrote a guide for D&D players called “Notes on Women and Magic” (Trammell, 2014; Kask, 2019). The guide, applying the same quantitative and statistical rigour required of Diplomacy play, suggested that women could join early D&D groups but that female characters that they might elect to play could never ever level up or have superior strength statistics that would exceed the strength stats of male characters in the fighter race category. Therefore, no matter their achievements in-game, women characters would never be stronger than their male counterparts. Yet, Lakofka posited, women characters might have increased dexterity, and have more talent with lockpicking because of their “lighter builds'' and “slighter fingers” (Lakofka, cited by Trammell, 2014). The 1976 Lakofka guide provides a glimpse into “the ways in which a predominantly white male gaming community imagined the bodies of women'' (Trammell, 2014).
As Trammell (2014) notes, this guide failed to make it into the core D&D rulebooks, and from the D&D 2nd edition and thereafter, “female player characters have no mechanical advantage or disadvantage” (Fandom D&D, n.d). “Notes on Women and Magic” was defended by practitioners then and now as an “earnest attempt at introducing female players to what was at that time an almost exclusively male hobby” (Kask, 2019). Arnaudo (2018) citing a 1977 article about the game Dungeon!, a simplified D&D variant, wrote of additional moves to bring women into the hobby: “The wary girlfriend or hostile wife who wouldn’t touch a C[ombat] R[esult] T[able] with a ten-foot panzerfaust may well enjoy moving through a maze and taking on assorted trolls and hobgoblins” (Michalski, cited by Arnaudo, 2018, Location 1368). Despite efforts such as Lakofka’s, the white male dominance of board gaming has changed “very little in the past 47 years” (Trammell, 2014). The wargaming subculture still appears to be dominated by men; a 2016 poll conducted by the wargaming site PAXism found that 99 per cent of the readership were male (Brynen, 2016).
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