About this event

We know that many players continue to experience marginalisation, discrimination, and exclusion in board game cultures. What are the challenges to participation that players face? How can communities better listen and act to be more inclusive? Academics working in the area of analogue game studies and gaming cultures have worked to identify problems and solutions, but wider conversations are needed to effect change. Manchester Metropolitan Game Centre is excited to host three speakers who have been at the forefront of pressing for such conversations and for change in board game cultures.

Speakers

Tanya Pobuda has completed PhD dissertation research that looks at the relative number of BIPOC and women designers involved in the making of top-ranked board games, specifically in those games that represent the top 400 ranked games on BoardGameGeek (BGG). Her dissertation shares a snapshot of a quantitative visual analysis of the gender and racial representation in the artwork featured on the covers of the board games themselves and provides a look at the results of an extensive and wide-ranging online survey, which revealed that representation was a notable factor in perceptions of, and behaviours within the hobby and industry. Tanya's research also explores the pleasures and dangers of being an embodied player in board gaming spaces. She looks at what happens when players enter board game spaces such as friendly local game shops (FLGSs), meetups, and conventions.

Paul Booth is Professor of Communication at DePaul University. Along with Aaron Trammell, he is the series editor of the new Tabletop Games series from University of Michigan Press. He is the author of Board Games as Media (Bloomsbury, 2021) and numerous other books on fandom and gaming. His latest work includes an extensive ethnographic survey of players and in-depth interviews with game designers, both of which explore the issues of diversity and inclusion in board game production and consumption.

Aaron Trammell is an 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! His research interests cover Game Studies, Play theory, Race, Class and Gender.

For more information about this event please contact Chloé Germaine on c.germaine@mmu.ac.uk