Rerolling Boardgames
Front cover of Douglas Brown and Esther MacCallum-Stewart’s (eds.) volume, Rerolling Boardgames
Rerolling Boardgames: Essays on Themes, Systems, Experiences and Ideologies
Douglas Brown and Esther MacCallum-Stewart
McFarland
ISBN: 9781476670799
Douglas Brown and Esther MacCallum-Stewart introduce their new book by making the case for the study of boardgames, rehearsing the well-known argument (well-known to the small number who know it) that boardgames are remarkably popular, important and enduring expressions of present and past cultures. It is an understandable move, albeit one that I hope will become unnecessary as work on analogue games becomes less of an outlier in game studies.
The editors begin by addressing the rationale for the singular focus on boardgames. Why not, it might be asked, present this work in a book on games more generally considered, as is the case, say, in a book like, Zones of Control? Their response is twofold. First, they note the growing importance of boardgames in academia and in gaming cultures more broadly, and, second, they draw attention to the ludic complexities that arise from the physicality of boardgames as played entities. The essays that follow bear out the logic of this approach, focussing variously on players, play cultures and game design. It is fair to say that where reference to the digital proves insightful it finds its way into the volume. In considering the pros and cons of this decision I’m reminded of the introduction to Gundolf S. Freyermuth’s Games: Game Design Game Studies (2015) in which he writes ‘in this book I will primarily speak of digital games and will use games a synonym to refer to the same concept. Older forms of games I will specifically reference as analog games’ (12). Freyermuth goes on to suggest that ‘digital games are not something entirely different from analog games, but rather that digital games are the specific other of analog games’ (40). There’s much to unpack here, including the suggestion of progress (analogue to digital), the shifting sense of the word ‘game’, and the specifics of Freyermuth’s claims about the relation of analogue to digital games. While that discussion will have to be set aside for now, whatever position we take in relation to these sentiments it certainly seems useful to better our collective understanding of analogue games and volumes like this one play a significant part in this work.
Having set out its rationale, the introduction concludes with a section on defining and referencing boardgames (which they give as a single word). This section will be useful for anyone writing on games in offering a clear set of guidelines to the surprisingly tricky business of discussing ‘texts’ that often have multiple authors, artists, publishers, and editions within remarkably short timeframes.
The book that follows is divided into four sections, with the essays arranged under the headings ‘Themes’, which offers analysis of play and player behaviour, ‘Systems’, which approaches ‘ludological/design’ perspectives from a distinctly analogue angle, ‘Experiences’, which discusses cultural experiences of play, and ‘Ideologies’, which examines ‘design iteration’. As the editors remark, their original call for contributions used these headings to encourage variety in terms of topic and approach and the resultant collection is indeed diverse and the editors do an admirable job of arranging the material to best showcase this diversity and, as is often the case, the moments of connection that thread between a number of the discussions.
Under the heading ‘Themes’ we find Paul Booth’s ‘Playing for Time’, a discussion of time-travel in relation to game mechanics, exploring the connection of time, games and narrative through readings of (among others) Anachrony and T.I.M.E. Stories. José P. Zagal’s ‘Collaborative Games Redux: New Lessons from the Past 10 Years’, which seems likely to be of most interest to game designers, looks at the rapidly expanding design space of collaborative games, while Giaime Alonge and Riccardo Fassone’s ‘Twilight Struggle, or: How We Stopped Worrying About the Hexagons’ offers a history of the development of wargames.
‘Sytems’ is an impressively coherent section, its three essays working well when read alongside one another. The first of these essays is Joe A. Wasserman’s ‘Materially Mediated: Boardgames as Interactive Media and Mediated Communication’, a fascinating essay on the ways in which games communicate through their components – it’s a really wide-ranging discussion (I wish it could have been longer) that opens up many potential avenues for further research in game studies, communication studies and linguistics. The second is Melissa J. Rogerson, Martin Gibbs and Wally Smith’s ‘More Than the Sum of Their Bits: Understanding the Gameboard and Components’, an essay on game components that explores the ‘bits’ of games from a number of angles and which pairs extremely well with Wasserman’s in its discussion of the ways those ‘bits’ assist players in their interactions. The section concludes with Karl Bergström and Staffan Björk’s ‘A Mixed Blessing? Exploring the Use of Computers’, again picking up on the way that games function, this time turning attention to digital components in primarily analogue games (Nikki Valen’s Mansions of Madness: Second Edition is a key example). The discussion here is an interesting one for designers in that it considers what might be usefully automated (what George Skaff Elias, Richard Garfield and K. Robert Gutschera call ‘busywork’ in Characteristics of Games) and what might not.
‘Experiences’ brings us Souvik Mukherjee’s ‘Gamifying Salvation: Gyan Chaupar Variants as Representations of (Re)Births and Lives’, Dean Bowman’s ‘Guilt Trips for the Cardboard Colonialists: The Function of Procedural Rhetoric and the Contact Zone in Archipelago’, and C. Thi Nguyen’s ‘Playing Games, Splitting Selves.’ The first of two of these essays work well in tandem. Mukherjee’s essay explores variants of Gyan Chaupar (including Snakes and Ladders) in relation to gamification (an analysis that is impressive for its attention to the specific historical, cultural and philosophical contexts of these variants). Bowman’s essay considers the ideological import of games as systems, reading Ian Bogost’s work on procedural rhetoric alongside boardgames that play with colonial themes (a key example is Archipelago). The result of these essays is to draw attention both to the potential of games to model systems and the need for critics and players to pay careful attention to the specifics of the context and politics of games. Nguyen’s essay, which rounds out the section, turns attention to what happens when people play games together – it is a fascinating and well-argued piece (reminiscent in some ways of Stewart Wood’s Eurogames (2012) but does feel a little disconnected from the others in this section.
The final section, ‘Ideologies’, contains two essays. The first is a contribution from the editors and game designer Robin Dixon, ‘Narrative Machines: A Ludological Approach to Narrative Design’ and the second, the final essay in the volume, ‘Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations and Multi-Game Approaches’ by Owen Gottlieb and Ian Schreiber. ‘Narrative Machines’ is a fascinating essay that recalls Booth’s essay with which the volume opened in considering the ways in which boardgames might create narrative experiences. Considering the sometimes fraught relation of game and story in game studies, the essay offers a refreshing approach and its consideration of the ways in which games might be designed to promote narrative experiences will no doubt be of great interest (the discussion of the game elements of Peter Rabbit is inspired and is something that I know I’ll use with students). Gottlieb and Schreiber’s essay rounds out the volume with a discussion of learning games with a useful account of the authors’ processes and design decisions in designing Lost & Found.
To conclude, Rerolling Boardgames looks set to be an important volume in boardgame studies, adding to the small but growing number of books that take analogue games as their focus. Readers, whether they are game scholars, game designers, or keen players, will likely find much of interest in what is both an academically interesting and practical set of essays.