Rerolling Boardgames

Despite the advent and explosion of videogames, boardgames—from fast-paced party games to intensely strategic titles—have in recent years become more numerous and more diverse in terms of genre, ethos and content. The growth of gaming events and conventions such as Essen Spiel, Gen Con and the UK Games EXPO, as well as crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter, has diversified the evolution of game development, which is increasingly driven by fans, and boardgames provide an important glue to geek culture. In academia, boardgames are used in a practical sense to teach elements of design and game mechanics.
Game studies is also recognizing the importance of expanding its focus beyond the digital. As yet, however, no collected work has explored the many different approaches emerging around the critical challenges that boardgaming represents. In this collection, game theorists analyze boardgame play and player behavior, and explore the complex interactions between the sociality, conflict, competition and cooperation that boardgames foster. Game designers discuss the opportunities boardgame system designs offer for narrative and social play. Cultural theorists discuss boardgames’ complex history as both beautiful physical artifacts and special places within cultural experiences of play.

Douglas Brown is the director of the Games Academy at Falmouth University, in Cornwall UK. His research interests surround how games, narrative and imagination work together. He has published widely on games and storytelling.

Esther MacCallum-Stewart is an associate professor of games studies at Staffordshire University, UK. Her work examines the ways in which players understand narratives and the stories they tell and she has written widely on this subject.

Series editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell teaches American studies, anthropology, and writing at Pace University in New York.

Edited by Douglas Brown and Esther MacCallum-Stewart. Series Editor Matthew Wilhelm Kapell
Format: softcover (6 x 9)
Pages: 227
Bibliographic Info: 11 photos, bibliographies, index
Copyright Date: 2020
pISBN: 978-1-4766-7079-9
eISBN: 978-1-4766-3927-7
Imprint: McFarland
Series: Studies in Gaming

Acknowedgments vi
Introduction
Douglas Brown and Esther ­MacCallum-Stewart 1
Themes
Playing for Time (Paul Booth) 15
Collaborative Games Redux: New Lessons from the Past
10 Years (José P. Zagal) 29
Twilight Struggle, or: How We Stopped Worrying About
the Hexagons (Giaime Alonge and Riccardo Fassone) 48
Systems
Materially Mediated: Boardgames as Interactive Media
and Mediated Communication (Joe A. Wasserman) 71
More Than the Sum of Their Bits: Understanding the Gameboard and Components (Melissa J. Rogerson, Martin Gibbs and Wally Smith) 88
A Mixed Blessing? Exploring the Use of Computers
to Augment and Mediate Boardgames (Karl Bergström and Staffan Björk) 109
Experiences
Gamifying Salvation: Gyan Chaupar Variants as Representations
of (Re)Births and Lives (Souvik Mukherjee) 127
Guilt Trips for the Cardboard Colonialists: The Function of Procedural Rhetoric and the Contact Zone in Archipelago (Dean Bowman) 144
Playing Games, Splitting Selves (C. Thi Nguyen) 161
Ideologies
Narrative Machines: A Ludological Approach to Narrative Design
(Malcolm Ryan, Robin Dixon and Esther ­MacCallum-Stewart) 179
Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations and ­Multi-Game Approaches (Owen Gottlieb and Ian Schreiber) 195
About the Contributors 213
Index 217