Workshop led by visiting scholars Anthony Enns and Anne Kustritz.
Location: MMU, Business School 3.03, Monday
Date and time: Monday 11th May, 11am–12.30pm
Workshop: Cultural Studies of Play: Methods for Analyzing Board Game Procedures and Rhetorics
Like video games, board games both construct immersive storyworlds and invite players to interact with those worlds. However, unlike video games, which contain hidden parameters within their software that players gradually uncover in the course of play, board games require players to learn, understand, and implement their rules and procedures. Because board game experiences often begin with reading the rules, the rules themselves function simultaneously as rhetorical arguments and invitations to action, as they outline a set of objectives and a set of strategies for achieving those objectives, which players are required to accept and emulate. To understand board games as hybrid cultural objects, therefore, it is important to consider both the rules governing player behavior and the way these rules are phrased and expressed. This workshop offers tools for understanding the complex interplay between the representational and procedural layers of board games, exploring discursive storyworlds and interactive affordances in tandem. Using a combination of autoethnography, the walkthrough method, and classic discourse analysis influenced by the cultural studies tradition, this workshop will guide participants through the process of mapping tensions and interactions between board game procedures and narratives.
Bios
Anthony Enns is an Associate Professor in English and Media Studies at Dalhousie University. His work on popular culture has appeared in such journals as Journal of Popular Film and Television, Quarterly Review of Film and Video, Popular Culture Review, Screen, Screen Bodies, Studies in Popular Culture, and Television and New Media, as well as the anthologies The Scary Screen (2010), Comics and the City (2010), Musicals at the Margins (2021), Consumerism and Prestige (2022), and Digressions in Deep Time (2024).
Anne Kustritz is an Assistant Professor in Media and Culture Studies at Utrecht University. Her work deals with creative fan communities, transformative works, digital economies, and representational politics. She is the author of Identity, Community, and Sexuality in Slash Fan Fiction: Pocket Publics, which documents the digital transition of the slash fan fiction community around the turn of the millennium and the “pockets” of counterpublic space they constructed for the circulation of new forms of gender, sexuality, and relationality. Her articles appear in Camera Obscura, Feminist Media Studies, The Journal of American Culture, and Sexualities.
