Material Game Studies: A Philosophy of Analogue Play

248 Pages·2022·1.391 MB·English

by  Chloe Germaine (editor), Paul Wake (editor)

Figures
3.1 Jenga (Hasbro 1983) 53
3.2 The Ballinderry gaming board 59
3.3 Rune stone (Gs 19) (Ockelbo Kyrka - Replica) 60
4.1 Miniature gaming model 69
4.2 Role-playing mat 72
4.3 Paper character sheet 76
5.1 The experiential dimensions of object play 97
7.1 Diagramming the glance 126
7.2 A reproduction of the 1959 first edition of RISK staged to replicate
the downward glance of a player seated over the game board 130
7.3 Images from the Twilight Struggle rulebook (top) and Ideology game
(bottom), showing how the games map territorial control 136
7.4 A comparison of the networked maps on the Pandemic (left)
and Freedom (right) boards, both of which train the player
to direct their operational glance towards lines of flow
rather than territories 139
9.1 What selection below best describes the length of your
participation in the board gaming hobby? 171
9.2 The board gaming industry is dominated by white men 172
9.3 I have experienced homophobic remarks while participating
in the board gaming hobby 179
Contributors
Nathan Altice is a writer, game designer and Teaching Professor of
Computational Media at UC Santa Cruz. His research includes computing
history, computational platforms and Japanese board and card game history. His
first book, I AM ERROR, was published by MIT Press in 2015.
Paul Booth is Professor of Communication at DePaul University and the author
or editor of fourteen books, including Board Games as Media (2021), Game
Play (2015), The Fan Studies Primer (with Rebecca Williams, 2021), Watching
Doctor Who (with Craig Owen Jones, 2020) and Digital Fandom 2.0 (2016).
He is co-editor, with Aaron Trammell, of the Tabletop Gaming series from the
University of Michigan Press. He is currently enjoying a cup of coffee.
Chloé Germaine is Senior Lecturer in English at Manchester Metropolitan
University and co-director of the Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre, with
Paul Wake. In game studies, her research focuses on ecology and climate change
in relation to tabletop games, including board games and role-playing games,
and on LARP. She is a game designer and writes for the role-playing games
Cthulhu Hack, the Dee Sanction and the Codex Magazine, which is published by
the Gauntlet, as well as working on original games.
Katriina Heljakka, Doctor of Arts, is a researcher at Pori Laboratory of Play,
University of Turku (digital culture studies). Her background is in toy research
with a particular interest in adult toy play and character toys. Heljakka currently
studies connected toys, playful tools, techniques and environments in the
workspace, and the visual, material, digital and social cultures of play. Her main
interests include the emerging toyification of culture, toy design, playful spaces
and the hybrid and transgenerational dimensions of ludic practices.
Jonathan Rey Lee researches material play media, especially toys and
board games. He has written several articles on board games, and his book
Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published
by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his PhD in comparative
literature from the University of California, Riverside, and currently teaches in
Seattle.
Contributors ix
Esther MacCallum-Stewart is Professor in the School of Digital, Technologies
and Arts at Staffordshire University. Her work examines the ways in which
players understand the worlds around them – as players, fans, producers and
consumers. She has written widely on aspects of gaming including gender in
games, representation and diversity, the ways in which players tell stories
and understand narratives in games. Her work extends beyond the digital to
examine gaming worlds such as role-playing, board games, fan communities
and conventions.
Mikko Meriläinen (PhD) is a postdoctoral researcher at the Centre of
Excellence in Game Culture Studies at Tampere University’s Game Research
Lab. In his work Meriläinen focuses on qualitative player research and is
currently exploring youth gaming cultures, masculinities and gaming, and
miniaturing.
Holly Nielsen is a postgraduate research student in the Department of History
at Royal Holloway University of London studying British board games and play
c. 1860–1960. She is a freelance video games journalist and presenter for Sky
News and Ginx TV.
Tanya Pobuda is a board game academic, licensed drone pilot, artificial
intelligence chatbot creator and virtual and augmented reality practitioner. Her
research on the board games has been featured in The New York Times, the Analog
Game Studies journal and various podcasts, including Stuff Your Mom Never
Told You About, The Spiel, Who What Why Podcast and Beyond Solitaire. She
gained her PhD from Ryerson & York University’s Communication & Culture
programme and has a 26-year background as a former journalist, certified
project manager, digital storyteller with a background in public relations,
communication, marketing and Web design.
Miguel Sicart is an Associate Professor at the Center for Computer Games
Research, IT University of Copenhagen. He is the author of Play Matters. His
research inquiries on the cultural, political, ethical and technical implications
of playing with software. You can read more at miguelsicart .n et and ridiculous.
software.
Jaakko Stenros (PhD) is a University Lecturer in game studies working at
the Centre of Excellence in Game Culture Studies at the Game Research Lab,
x Contributors
Tampere University. He has published nine books and over fifty articles and
reports, and has taught game studies for a decade. Stenros has also collaborated
with artists and designers to create ludic experiences and has curated many
exhibitions at the Finnish Museum of Games.
Aaron Trammell is Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in
Visual Studies at UC Irvine. He writes about how Dungeons & Dragons, Magic:
The Gathering and board games inform the lived experiences of their players.
He is the editor-in-chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the multimedia
editor of Sounding Out!
Paul Wake is Reader in English literature at Manchester Metropolitan University
and a co-director of the Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre. He has published
on literary representations of casino games, 1980s Adventure Gamebooks and
game design for communication. He also designs, uses and plays games to start
conversations about important societal topics.
Jack Warren is a postgraduate researcher at Manchester Metropolitan University,
a member of the Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre and an organizer of
the Queer Research Network Manchester. Jack completed his MA in gender,
sexuality, and culture at the University of Manchester and now researches new
materialisms, role-play and queer theory.
Acknowledgements
The editors would like to thank all the contributors for their efforts in putting
together this volume and for the shared conversations from which the concept
of material game studies emerged. We would also like to thank our colleagues in
the Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre for providing such a vibrant research
community in which to work. We furthermore acknowledge the field-defining
work of the Analog Game Studies journal and thank the editors for providing a
forum for the development of research on analogue games and play. Likewise,
we have benefitted from the support of Asmodee Research and Game in Lab in
providing a network through which to develop ideas with researchers across
the globe. Chloé would like to thank Paul for the collaboration that made this
volume possible. Paul would like to thank Chloé for the collaboration that made
this volume possible.
We offer our thanks for the inclusion of Figure 3.2, which was reproduced
courtesy of the Royal Irish Academy; Figure 7.2, which was reproduced courtesy
of Winning Moves Games; Figure 7.3, which was reproduced courtesy of GMT
Games LLC; and Figure 7.4, which was provided courtesy of Academy Games.

Introduction
Material game studies
Paul Wake and Chloé Germaine
What happened to the material turn?
Writing in 2012, Thomas H. Apperley and Darshana Jayemanne announced
an emerging material turn in game studies, noting an increasing engagement
with the material context of digital games, the relationship between technology
and the body, and with gaming as a situated cultural practice. Despite this
announcement of game studies’ material turn in 2012, there has been no
subsequent sustained attempt to address the concept of materiality in relation
to games, and while scholars such as Sky LaRell (2017), Brendan Keogh (2018)
and Miguel Sicart (2021) have written in response to Apperley and Jayemanne’s
provocation, work on the topic, often pursuing productive lines of enquiry,
has tended to be sporadic and scattered through the discipline. Despite these
notable contributions in the study of games, and the fact that scholars working
in isolated fields of enquiry have continued to investigate the themes identified
by Apperley and Jayemanne, there has yet to be an expansive articulation of what
is at stake in game studies’ material turn. Almost a decade later, Material Game
Studies takes up the call to attend to the material turn in the study of games and
play. This introduction begins the important work of exploring the material turn
by sketching the parameters, concerns and approaches for what we call ‘material
game studies’.
In addition to drawing together distinct strands of enquiry in game studies
that attend to the material dimensions of games and play, our formulation of
‘material game studies’ responds to a wider turn in critical thought that has seen
calls for a materialist theory of politics or agency and a ‘reconfiguring of our very
understanding of matter’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 2). Over the past decade, this
material turn has shaped enquiry in disciplines across the humanities as scholars
have sought to push back against constructivist epistemologies, including the
2 Material Game Studies
cultural and linguistic turns of the late twentieth century, which hold that
‘immaterial’ things, such as (human) consciousness, subjectivity, mind, language
and meaning, are fundamentally different to matter. Following the philosopher
Jane Bennett, who argues that paying attention to the vibrancy of materiality
requires cultivating playful attitudes (2010: 15), we offer Material Game Studies
as a way of exploring the ways in which games and game playing puncture the
‘constructivist’ idea that matter is passive and inert. Through Material Game
Studies, we suggest that games and play disclose a reality in which humans
exist within an assemblage of myriad material agencies whose intra-actions
co-constitute the world. Constructivist approaches continue to be valuable
for material game studies, since games are, of course, culturally specific and
embedded in human social and linguistic processes. However, we contend that
games cannot only be understood as social or cultural constructions, because
they reveal the ‘generativity and resilience of material forms within which social
actors interact’ (Coole and Frost 2010: 26). That is, material game studies as we
conceive it considers games as specific modes of intra-action between a range of
agencies and co-actors (human and otherwise).
Material Game Studies positions play as a material-discursive site requiring
inter- and multi-disciplinary interrogations, which consider games as material
objects, investigate the material conditions of production and consumption,
study the embodied experience of gameplay and theorize the more-than-human
dimensions of play. Such interrogations would surely include, as Apperley and
Jayemanne contend, a focus on the material technologies that facilitate digital
games. However, this volume limits itself to overtly material games, that is,
games that are played through and as material objects: board games, tabletop
games and role-playing games. It is our hope that the focus on such obviously
material games will allow for a distinct attention to materiality and to the ways in
which human play is embedded within and co-constitutive of materiality, rather
than an idealism that is superimposed upon the world as mere background.
Moreover, the work in this volume, focused as it is on tabletop games, is infused
with the sense that its insights apply to games more generally, be they digital
or otherwise, and it is our hope that the term offers an umbrella under which
we can begin to bring together formerly disparate aspects of game studies into
dialogue, including closing the gap between ‘digital’ and ‘analogue’ game studies
through a consideration of the materiality that undergirds both.
Our introduction to the volume scopes potential areas of enquiry within
material game studies, elaborating conceptual and theoretical tools that we
feel will extend game studies beyond the limits of constructivist epistemologies
Introduction 3
and theories. Areas of study that emerge in the volume include the distinct
practices and cultures of analogue games; the materials of games, such as tokens,
miniatures, maps, boards; and the embodied aspects of game playing in its
different forms. We also seek to invert dominant anthropocentric perspectives
that have tended to dominate in the humanities and social sciences despite
the challenges brought into those disciplines through such discourses as
posthumanism. Material game studies shifts focus from the human agent to the
play of materiality itself, thinking through the agency of nonhuman actors and
players that co-constitute games. The more-than-human scope of material game
studies leads us to suggest that play is not only a human cultural activity but an
example of the ways in which humans co-constitute themselves and the world as
part of more-than-human entanglements and assemblages.
Analogue, digital, material
Our emphasis on what has been called the ‘analogue’ as the medium of play
through which to formulate material game studies responds to and builds upon
a history of calls within game studies to pay attention to board games and other
‘analogue’ forms of play. The formulation of material game studies is related
to, then, and also distinct from, what has become known as ‘analogue game
studies’. Nonetheless, the work in Material Game Studies is indebted to scholars
such as Rafael Bienia, Paul Booth, Shelly Jones, Greg Loring-Albright, Esther
MacCallum-Stewart, Nicholas Mizer, Evan Torner, Aaron Trammell, Emma
Leigh Waldron and Stewart Woods, to name but a few, who have worked to
develop and promote the study of analogue games, including board games,
tabletop role-playing games and live action role-playing games (LARP), in the
face of a tendency in game studies to prioritize digital technologies.
Those taking up the cause of analogue games have done so in the context of
the origins of the discipline in video game studies (Aarseth 2001). Important
responses to the dominance of video games in game studies include the inaugural
issue of Analog Game Studies in which the editors state their commitment to
‘support the critical analysis, discussion of design, and documentation of
analog games’ (2014: n.p.). Arguing that ‘game studies can no longer afford to
primarily focus on computer games in an era where the world has become so
digitally mediated that the nomenclature ceases to carry the same weight that
it once did’ (2014: n.p.), their focus on what they call ‘analog games’ emerges
from a belief that games might produce social change. For Aaron Trammell,
4 Material Game Studies
Emma Leigh Waldron and Evan Torner, then, ‘analog games’ can ‘make clear
the rulesets that govern behavior within games and, in doing so, reveal the
biological and cultural rules which have forever governed our society’ (2014:
n.p.). Our formulation of material game studies concurs with this assessment of
the imbrication of analogue games with social and political change, combining
this with theoretical interest in the part played by materiality in the context of
such social and political concerns. More recently, Douglas Brown and Esther
MacCallum-Stewart’s collection of essays, Rerolling Board Games, continues
the work of ‘transporting games beyond the digital’ (2020: 1), focusing on what
they describe as specific ‘ludic complexities arising from the physicality of board
games as a played entity’ (2020: 4). Building on the work in that volume, Material
Game Studies offers a variety of ways of investigating such complexities. We
agree with Brown and MacCallum-Stewart’s suggestion that while board games
are ‘critical texts in their own right’, they should not be seen as ‘paving new
theoretical pathways entirely separate from the rest of game studies’ (2020: 4).
While there are, of course, points at which video games and board games invite
and benefit from distinct modes of critical attention, such points of divergence
are sites of productive mismatches that reveal the play of materiality common to
both. Thus, we suggest that although a focus on board and tabletop games helps
make explicit the need to investigate the materiality of play, by engaging in this
study it becomes evident that all game studies are, in fact, material game studies.
It is this contention that leads us to prefer the word ‘material’ to the word
‘analogue’ in describing the endeavour that impels material game studies. In
common parlance, ‘analogue’ has come to mean tangible, touchable stuff: ‘real’
things. It is in this sense that David Sax uses the word in his book The Revenge
of Analog: Real Things and Why They Matter (2016). There, Sax nostalgically
contrasts things people can hold and touch with digital or ‘virtual’ objects and
cultures. And so, vinyl records are bundled up with a discussion of, among other
things, paper, film, board games, retail, work and summer. The temptation to
connect the analogue with the physical world and the digital with the virtual
shapes Sax’s book, in which those who turn to vinyl records and Moleskine®
notebooks are afforded a countercultural aspect that is ultimately unhelpful.
Granting a form of countercultural, even subcultural, social capital to analogue
items in this way suggests a kind of nostalgic and uncritical mode of consumption
and positions the analogue as that which precedes, and so has been superseded
by, the digital, upholding a false binary between the retro and the modern, the
real and the virtual, the authentic and the fake. We suggest that this sentiment,
while seductive, relies on an artificial construction that says little about either the