“Is her spirit clear? Does he have a good heart?”
(Smith, 1999, p. 10)
The question of gender and racial media representation, and its impact on communities, is a complex one. It is understood from the previous chapters that gender and racial representation in media is not a magic silver bullet for inclusion initiatives or broad-based social change, nor is the presence (or absence) of diverse gender or racial representation received in the same way by publics who participate in social and cultural activities. Marginalized communities are not monoliths with the same reactions, thoughts and attitudes towards representation, and representation’s importance in media (Shaw, 2014; Richard & Gray-Denson, 2018). Media representation doesn’t instantly ‘solve’ sociocultural challenges of community inclusion and cohesion. Nor does equitable racial and gender representation eliminate the threat of harassment, abuse or violence faced by marginalized and vulnerable people (Richard & Gray-Denson, 2018; Gray, Voorhees & Vossen, 2018; Ruberg & Shaw, 2017; Shaw, 2014; Harvey, 2020). Nonetheless, this dissertation seeks to locate any linkages between the absence of representation in the board gaming hobby, and how that lack of representation is perceived and acted upon by marginalized employees, creatives, gamers and other members of the wider hobby community and board game industry. This chapter will outline my study design, the methods used to collect and analyze data, the participants involved, my ethical considerations as I conducted this research, as well as my assumptions, delimitations and limitations while conducting the work.
As earlier noted, this dissertation asks the following research questions:
RQ1: What is the demographic profile of designers of the most popular board games; and is there a lack of diversity?
RQ2: To what extent does board gaming cover artwork of popular games evince limited or inequitable demographic representation?
RQ3: Does a lack of diversity among board game designers and a lack of representation of women and non-binary, Black, Indigenous, Persons of Colour (BIPOC) in artwork of games act as a barrier for board game culture’s potential growth, wider mainstream cultural adoption, and create the conditions for exclusion and marginalization for those who identify as women and BIPOC?
RQ4: How does limited representation and diversity impact board game enthusiasts in spaces where gaming is practiced, including public gaming events, conventions and in online fora and on digital platforms?
To answer my research questions, I used a variety of research methods. First, I needed a method to determine the relative number of BIPOC and women designers involved in the making of top-ranked games, specifically in those games that represent the 400 top-ranked games on BoardGameGeek (BGG). Then, I needed to find a way to explore, in a systematic manner, gender and racial representation in the artwork featured on the covers of the board games themselves. In both cases, I decided to undertake a numerical analysis of designers by racial and gender dimensions, and then I needed an analysis to determine the raw numbers of human, animal and alien figures that appeared on the box art of the top 200 BGG-ranked games. This numerical analysis required textual and visual content analysis methods which I will discuss in detail later in this chapter.
After I assessed the current state of the industry in terms of the diversity of designers and board game cover artwork, I wanted to understand how representation matters (or doesn’t) to members of the board gaming enthusiast community, as well as those who work in the games industry. To accomplish this, I constructed an extensive and wide-ranging online survey, launched in mid-August 2020 and concluded in October 2020, to determine what active members of the board gaming community say they think and feel about issues pertaining to representation, equity, diversity and inclusion in the board gaming hobby and industry. Does representation, or lack thereof, matter when purchasing, playing and/or overall enjoying the hobby? How do marginalized members of the hobby and industry experience matters of inclusion or exclusion based on race, ethnicity, gender presentation or sexual orientation? Then, via semi-structured qualitative interviews, I gathered detailed perspectives of women, BIPOC and LGBTQiIA+ members of the board game industry about what it is like to work and play in board gaming spaces. I explore each method in detail below, outlining the overall approach and process steps, the data sources and/or participants, and the analytical framework used for each method.
Wargaming the Issues: Study Design
This mixed methods study was informed by several foundational studies on media representation explored at greater length in chapters one and two. The content analysis method and associated coding framework used in my research was inspired and informed by Smith, Choueiti and Pieper’s (2015) “Inclusion & Invisibility: Comprehensive Annenberg Report on Diversity in Entertainment” (CARD). CARD looked at participants of the film, television and web series industries both behind the camera, and in front of the camera. My decision to look at both the behind-the-scenes labour of making board games, and to look at what appears on the box presented to the games consumer was informed by CARD’s methodology. The methodologies and analyses found in the Williams, Martins, Consalvo, & Ivory (2009) study of female representation in video games also informed my data collection and analyses. In particular, I was inspired by Williams, et al. (2009) study’s rigorous content analysis and numerical counts of the women and BIPOC playable and non-playable characters present in the video games analyzed; this approach informed my gender coding framework. Finally, my approach used to assess the board game cover artwork in my study was also inspired by work done by Erin Ryan (2016), an independent scholar and hobby game enthusiast. Ryan (2016) found there were more games with sheep on the cover than women; the study assessed board game artwork by examining the prominence of certain types of representation on board game covers. While my work is more focused on the raw numeric totals of the fauna and human representation on board game artwork rather than prominence, Ryan provided an instructive and rich guide to undertaking this analysis.
I opted to avoid assessing the covers via a prominence analysis such as was done by Ryan (2016) as that process can involve a significant amount of subjective assessment particularly with images that are highly variable across a wide variety of non-standardized cover art formats. With a sample of this size and variability of image construction, the complexity of a prominence-based assessment, as I feared that kind of analysis might be subject to criticisms of capricious and subjective decision-making. Prominence analysis is often used when there is a more established and standard layout. However, for board game boxes, which are often widely variable sizes, aspect ratios, and non-standard approaches, prominence analyses would be a less useful analytical tool (Gardner, 1983). Instead, I opted for pure, unvarnished numeracy, collecting strict counts of cover art images to find a pattern in the overall data. This raw count provides an understanding of the emphasis or overemphasis of certain types of human identities without the possible subjectivity of a prominence analysis in a non-standard, highly variable set of images.
The questions and process steps used to approach both my quantitative online survey and qualitative semi-structured interviews were informed by the Fox and Tang (2018) study of female online multiplayer gamers that explored the coping strategies these gamers employed (including gender masking or disguising their gender identities, denial of the presence of harassment or telling themselves that harassment wasn’t an issue, blaming themselves, and, ultimately, completely avoiding the game environments. Further, the Davis (2013) study, which featured the qualitative interviews of 57 women who played board and video games, and featured questions about time, childcare, work responsibilities, as well as matters of representation and inclusion, informed the design and content of the online survey, specifically the questions about barriers to gaming for women and other marginalized players.
Playing the Banker: Counting and Content Analyses
Content analysis can enable the quantification of findings to allow the possible strengthening of a qualitative assertion, lending it factual weight (Bryman et al., 2012). In this, and previous content analysis studies, I sought to locate trends in the data to “illustrate a pattern of misogynistic gamer culture and patriarchal privilege” Consalvo (2012). This research method helped me to garner a baseline of data on the demographics of those responsible for the design of board games, as well as the gender and racial representation would-be players and consumers might encounter on the game boxes of the top 200 BGG-ranked games.
Data Collection
I looked to the BoardGameGeek (BGG) database of board games. The BGG web portal enables users to provide scoring on game weight, provide a ranking out of 10 based on level of enjoyment and quality, and share other information about games played, games won, ownership and willingness to buy or sell games. There are three types of ratings, which include user, average and Geek ratings. While the BGG ranking system can be somewhat opaque to even long-time BGG users, this user-driven data source provides an excellent snapshot of what might reasonably represent the current cultural practice of board gaming, and the evolving preferences of avid board game hobbyists. Further, this source provides details of a game's production history, the designers, artists and publishers involved, as well as, in most cases, images of thecover artwork. As noted in chapter two, this data source is constantly updated and verified by active members of the hobby and board game industry; and the data, as a result, is refreshed daily if not, in some cases, hourly.
Board game designers. BGG has 2 million registered users as of Feb. 8, 2019 (Alden, 2019). BGG houses a database of (at last count) 135,200. To examine the racial and gender make-up of the game designers involved in the top 400 BGG-ranked games, I did a database pull of the top 400 games on June 7, 2020, which involved downloading information about them into a Google Sheets file. These top 400 games were ranked by nearly 6 million user votes (5.99 million to be exact) and were buoyed up to this top-ranked status by the millions of active BGG users worldwide. Each game entry has many data fields and files associated with it. Each entry includes information about the publishers, publishing date, artists and designers involved, game weight or complexity, type of game, in-game mechanisms used, as well as user-submitted photos relating to the game including the cover art, photos of game setups, the game components, and players playing the games. In many cases, the game designers included in the sample of the top 400 have BGG game designer profiles on the BGG site, which includes, in some cases, biographical information. Some designer profiles include photos, avatars, and microbadges that include representations of things important to the designer such as flags for their home countries, game preferences, play styles, membership in fandom communities, social causes, and other identifiers. When these designer-created and -maintained BGG profiles did not exist, I searched for this information about designer’s self-identification from press and influencer interviews with the designers on hobbyist sites, the designers’ own LinkedIn pages, Facebook, Twitter or Instagram profiles, personal websites, and other biographical sites for information on the designers’ racial, ethnic and gender identification. This was a laborious process of data collection and validation. It was important that I locate the game designers’ own assertion of their gender, racial and ethnic identification. This requirement was based on my coding framework and approach, as the designer’s own self-identification was imperative, as I describe in more depth later.
Cover art. I opted to catalogue and count all of the fauna and human representations of cover artwork. The decision to limit my focus to the top 200 BGG-ranked games was done for reasons of time, and my own direct access to the games themselves in order to facilitate the process of accurate data collection. I must first say that this process was, like the process of analyzing the designers, highly labour-intensive. Analysis involved looking at the top surface of the box packaging of this sample of 200 contemporary board games. The rationale here was that this is, most likely, the surface that would be, at least initially, reviewed by a potential purchaser or player, and could influence purchase decisions (Leitão, Amaro, Henriques, & Fonseca, 2018). In this case, I conducted manual counts based on a racial, ethnic and gender analysis framework described in detail in the data analysis section that follows. For this analysis, I focused only on representative images on the front of the box. The only exceptions to this rule were the publisher logos and graphical legends indicated the recommended number of players for the games; these elements were excluded. The coding included the painstaking process of counting individual units forming large crowds of soldiers, horses, birds, figures in the distance, even shadowy humanoid figures. These details were captured in nine coding categories: white male-presenting, white female-presenting, BIPOC female-presenting, BIPOC male-presenting, male race undetermined, female race undetermined, gender unknown, animals, and finally, aliens and fantastical creatures. Based on new discoveries made throughout the process, this coding required many rechecks and updates throughout the data collection process. As noted, I determined that a raw total count would allow me to uncover the representation on a relative scale and illustrate large patterns. I did, however, additionally take field notes on my impressions and relevance prominence of women and BIPOC identities on the cover art for later reference.
Content Analysis Design
To understand my content analyses of representation in the contemporary board game hobby, I must first explain the coding system upon which I relied to quantify the gender and racial makeup of the game designers responsible for the top 400 BGG-ranked games and the imagery on the front covers of the 200 top-ranked BGG games. Given the confines of the study, I decided to make the coding system very flexible, open to recalibration based on emergent aspects and characteristics of the data that I observed (Bryman, et. al, 2012). I will now establish the clear definitions of some of the concepts and terminologies of this coding system.
Racial identity. In my coding design, one fundamental question I needed to answer was, “What does it mean to be white and BIPOC?” The emerging field of whiteness studies provides some foundational ideas which can be used to explore what has for so long been considered the default identity of those in North American life (Guess, 2006; Berger, 1989). At its core, whiteness is rooted in an ideology that is fraught with false assumptions and zombie ideas, to borrow from the phrase coined by economist Paul Krugman (2020) about ideas thoroughly discredited by empirical research. Racial rubrics and categories are underpinned by social beliefs rooted in political and sociocultural values and can lead to unscientific, ahistorical notions of the superiority of some races over others (Montagu, 1952). There is nothing certain or objectively ‘natural’ about these rubrics and categories, as such, it is important to keep in mind that the definition of whiteness and BIPOC identities are socially constructed concepts that are culturally and politically fluid. Categorizations of race and ethnicity are fraught and in constant flux due to social, geopolitical alliances and economic shifts, and many other factors. Even renewed frameworks, such as those used by Statistics Canada (upon which this dissertation relies), are social constructs based on social and cultural ideologies, and political and economic alliances (Montagu 1952, 1963; Gossett 1963; Bernal 1987; Bennett 1988).
The Statistics Canada racial and ethnic framework, currently in use by Stats Can researchers, at the time of writing seeks to avoid categorizations predicated on “genetically imparted physiognomical features among which skin colour is a dominant, but not the sole, attribute”, and reflects the United Nations guidelines that encourage governments to facilitate both citizens’ self-identification as well as identification based on belonging to “self-perceived groups, regional and local groups, as well as groups that are not usually considered to be ethnic groups, such as religious groups” (Statistics Canada, 2017). This approach replaces Statistic Canada’s defunct system of racial categorization which broke the Canadian population down into 12 major categories, as follows: “Aboriginal (Inuit, Métis, North American Indian), Arab/West Asian (e.g., Armenian, Egyptian, Iranian, Lebanese, Moroccan), Black (e.g., African, Haitian, Jamaican, Somali), Chinese, Filipino, Japanese, Korean, Latin American, South Asian, South East Asian, white (Caucasian) and other.” Statistics Canada’s current framework allows respondents to self-identify based on “the ethnic or cultural origins of the person's ancestors...an ancestor is usually more distant than a grandparent” (Statistics Canada, 2015). The new set of categorizations are broken out by roughly continental categorization, including “North American Aboriginal origins, Other North American origins (categories such as Canadian, Albertan, American, etc), European origin, Caribbean origins, Latin, Central and South American origins, African origins, Asian origins, Oceania origins'' (Statistics Canada, 2015). In previous studies, I used the definition of white as used by the U.S. Census Bureau: those “having origins in any of the original peoples of Europe, the Middle East, or North Africa'' (Hume, et al., 2011). However, based on feedback on my previous studies and changes in government data frameworks such as Statistics Canada’s, the inclusion of those from the Middle East and North Africa was critiqued as not being reflective of current realities, both culturally and politically, and contemporary evolving understandings of what whiteness entails. Thus, I restricted my definition of whiteness to ancestors of the original peoples of what is now continental Europe (including the European territories of Russia in this definition). Having arrived at the decision to use this definition, I needed to determine what then constituted BIPOC in both my analysis of the game designers of the top 400 games and the cover art of the top 200 BGG database. The Canadian definition of ‘visible minorities in the Canadian Employment Equity Act includes: “persons, other than Aboriginal peoples, who are non-Caucasian in race or non-white in colour.” Categories in the visible minority variable include South Asian, Chinese, Black, Filipino, Latin American, Arab, Southeast Asian, West Asian, Korean, Japanese, Visible minority, n.i.e. ('n.i.e.' means 'not included elsewhere'), Multiple visible minorities and not a visible minority.” (Visible Minorities, Statistics Canada, 2017). I used this working definition of both whiteness and BIPOC to categorize the designers and cover art.
Gender identity. Gender coding was also done with a specific categorization framework in mind. In the case of coding the game designers’ gender identities, I relied on the self-disclosure of designers from their own professional or personal profiles at the time of this dissertation’s writing. This coding was done with the understanding that gender is a complex spectrum that does not fall neatly into binary categories of male and female. As such, there were no hard and fast categories for gender, with my coding focused on seeking out the designers’ self-disclosures. Gender is socially constructed, and thus can be fluid and changeable. Influenced by the United Nations admonishment about the importance of self-identification, I looked for online resources and additional information to ensure I was reflecting a game designer’s self-identity in matters of gender and race. This process involved starting with the listing of the game designer in the BGG database, reading the BGG profile of the designer, where applicable. If no BGG profile existed, I would look for social media profiles, interviews or YouTube videos about the designers. Fortunately, the sample I analyzed was focused on highly popular games, there were ample opportunities to find information on the vast majority of the designers with some exceptions that I will discuss further.
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