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.

Table of Contents


Acknowedgments

Introduction

Douglas Brown and Esther ­MacCallum-Stewart

Themes

Playing for Time (Paul Booth)

Collaborative Games Redux: New Lessons from the Past

10 Years (José P. Zagal)

Twilight Struggle, or: How We Stopped Worrying About

the Hexagons (Giaime Alonge and Riccardo Fassone)

Systems

Materially Mediated: Boardgames as Interactive Media

and Mediated Communication (Joe A. Wasserman)

More Than the Sum of Their Bits: Understanding the Gameboard and Components (Melissa J. Rogerson, Martin Gibbs and Wally Smith)

A Mixed Blessing? Exploring the Use of Computers

to Augment and Mediate Boardgames (Karl Bergström and Staffan Björk)

Experiences

Gamifying Salvation: Gyan Chaupar Variants as Representations

of (Re)Births and Lives (Souvik Mukherjee)

Guilt Trips for the Cardboard Colonialists: The Function of Procedural Rhetoric and the Contact Zone in Archipelago (Dean Bowman)

Playing Games, Splitting Selves (C. Thi Nguyen)

Ideologies

Narrative Machines: A Ludological Approach to Narrative Design

(Malcolm Ryan, Robin Dixon and Esther ­MacCallum-Stewart)

Designing Analog Learning Games: Genre Affordances, Limitations and ­Multi-Game Approaches (Owen Gottlieb and Ian Schreiber)

About the Contributors

Index