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Book Review

Book Review: Board Games as Media

June 7, 2021 Jonathan Rey Lee

Paul Booth. Board Games as Media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021. 296 pp. Softcover. $26.96 ISBN: 9781501357183

In 2018, Paul Booth published a “short provocation” calling scholars to invest critical attention in “a piece missing from media scholarship: the board game.”1  Three years later, Booth takes up this call with Board Games as Media, a much-needed methodological primer that aims to “develop frameworks, articulate methodologies, and present case studies for how scholars, students, and teachers might study the board game.”2  With engaging language and copious case studies, Board Games as Media clearly constitutes the most accessible and varied introduction to board game analysis currently available. It is therefore poised to shape the emerging field of board game studies.  To that end, Board Games as Media also advances a subtle theoretical argument for privileging player-centric approaches that calls board game studies to pioneer a unique critical amalgam of media studies and fan studies.  

Part One3 of the book surveys traditional media studies methodologies, critiquing their blind spots with respect to board games and adapting the methodologies into ludic4 versions of themselves.  Chapter 1 extends textual analysis to explore how board games can structure competitive and cooperative play, Chapter 2 extends traditional and procedural rhetoric to explore how “the arguments of a board game can be filtered through an emphasis on players’ decisions,”5 Chapter 3 extends discourse analysis to explore the ideological content of board games, and Chapter 4 applies industrial analysis to frame “the board game créateur, the board game crafter, and the board game company’s branded aestheticism as categories of authorship.”6  Finally, Chapter 5 on ludic fandom extends fan studies methods7 to argue that, since board game textuality is constructed through player-driven acts of play, board game studies must approach the medium through the lens of player experience.

Following this latter call for player-centric approaches, Part Two surveys methods for ethnographic research into player communities.  Chapters 6 and 7 provide quantitative and qualitative survey data on the demographics, priorities, and tastes of the influential BoardGameGeek online community, for instance noting that “people already self-identified as board gamers” are particularly concerned with “socialization, intellectual stimulation, or disconnecting from technology.”8 Noting the lack of diversity in the self-selected survey participants, Booth interviews industry insiders on diversity and inclusion in Chapter 8, taking special care to center the voices of women and people of color.  Chapter 9 offers poignant auto-ethnographic reflections in which Booth challenges his own social positioning to interrogate “how someone who fits into the idealized mold of the board game player would read a game designed specifically for them.”9  Thus, the chapters in Part Two offer new insights into gamer communities, allowing Board Games as Media to transcend its titular claim by looking beyond “board games as media” to also explore this particular moment10 in hobby board gaming as (sub)culture.  

Individually, each of these nine chapters could stand alone by offering a single distinct approach to board game analysis.  When taken together, they reflect a deeper theoretical claim about the necessity of player-centric approaches to ludic media that is most explicitly articulated in the central fifth chapter on ludic fandom.  This is the primary theoretical contribution of the book and has significant field-shaping implications.  The argument provokes board game scholars to consider board games not merely as another kind of textual media but rather as a uniquely participatory and player-dependent media form.  And it provokes media studies and fan scholars to consider how “board games allow scholars to open up media studies from the screen and focus instead on the activity of mediation, regardless of medium, as a guiding principle of media viewership,”11 an approach that “offers new perspectives on the assumptions of interactivity given to all new media.”12 This goes well beyond arguing that board games meet some preexisting criteria for being counted as a “medium.”  Instead, the titular claim of Board Games as Media offers an implicit methodological provocation for interdisciplinary scholars to reevaluate what mediation consists in to account for the distinctive nuances of material play.  

While scholars would do well to grapple with these provocations, Booth’s field-shaping call that “board game studies must focus on the players rather than on the game”13 can also be opened to further provocation.  While Booth at times advocates for the complementarity between player-centric and game-centric analysis, the book has an increasing tendency to privilege immaterial aspects of play experience—play style, theme, narrative, gameplay mechanics—over the material textuality that mediates these aspects.  Consequently, in organizing its methodological survey as a trajectory towards increasingly player-centric ethnographic analysis, Board Games as Media does leave underdeveloped important aspects of board games’ material design.  

The possibility of synthesizing game-centric and player-centric approaches is most directly addressed in the opening chapter on Ludo-Textual Analysis, which compares how Scythe: Rise of Fenris (2018) and Pandemic Legacy: Season 1 (2015) “use a similar set of textual elements (cards, cubes, miniatures, boards, and tokens)” while using “different play styles to make different ideological statements about the human condition.”14 The materiality of the thematic presentation becomes evident when Booth reads Scythe’s vision of alternate history from its art assets.  Yet, as the methodological survey proceeds through the following chapters, it tells but does not consistently show how materiality mediates the board game experience.  For instance, Chapter 2 states that “the materiality of the game engenders argumentation”15 while analyzing the procedural rhetoric of player choice primarily in terms of abstract notions of strategy and randomness.  Similarly, Chapter 4 compares four expressions of neoliberal ideology in games themed around Martian colonization by exploring their game mechanics, but without much reference to how their meaningfully distinct game board designs16 materially situate players within different vantage points on the colonial project.  More attention to the distinctively material textuality of board games would do more than strengthen these compelling analyses—it would also further the methodological contribution that board game studies can make to media studies by offering new paradigms for conceptualizing the fundamental intertwining of materiality and mediation.17

If taken as a provocation rather than an absolute methodological imperative, the player-centric trajectory of Board Games as Media productively complements and challenges game-centric approaches to help establish media-specific methods of board game analysis.  And, as a further methodological provocation, this book demonstrates a vital ethical awareness by interrogating how board games can construct problematic ideological formations, how board game communities can privilege certain normative identities, and how the board game industry can have a detrimental environmental impact.  By weaving these socially conscious reflections throughout its methodological survey, Board Games as Media compellingly shows how ethical questions do not merely constitute another method for media analysis but are instead at stake in all methods.

While Board Games as Media primarily targets board game scholars—especially those aiming to conduct player-centric ethnographic research—a wide variety of readers will find something valuable here.  Scholars and students in game studies, media studies, and fan studies will appreciate the interdisciplinary reflections aimed at bridging these evolving fields.  And Booth’s engaging writing style and candid personal reflections will appeal to students interested in moving beyond traditional media analysis, members of the board game industry interested in critically reflecting on their trade, and hobbyist gamers looking to deepen their engagement with their beloved medium.

—

Featured image is an altered screenshot of the book’s cover.

—

Jonathan Rey Lee is a comparatist who currently researches material play media, especially toys and board games.  He has published articles on LEGO, Catan, and the Star Wars CCG and his book Deconstructing LEGO: The Medium and Messages of LEGO Play was published by Palgrave Macmillan in 2020. Jonathan received his Ph.D. in Comparative Literature from the University of California, Riverside, where he studied nineteenth-century British and Russian realist literature and philosophy (especially Wittgenstein). He currently teaches interdisciplinary humanities and writing courses in Seattle for the University of Washington and Cascadia College.

Critical Hits!

  • Table Talk: Archives of Role-Playing’s Personal Pasts
  • Book Review: Storytelling in the Modern Board Game
  • Analog Games and the Digital Economy
board gamesboard gamingbook reviewculturefandomFirst MartiansJonathan Rey LeeludicMartians: A Story of Civilizationmaterialitymediamedia representationmedia studiesPandemic LegacyPaul Boothplayer-centricPocket MarsScytheTerraforming Mars

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  1. Paul Booth “Missing a Piece: (The Lack of) Board Game Scholarship in Media Studies.” Velvet Light Trap 81 (Spring 2018): pp. 57-59. Booth explicitly notes that this article formed the basis for parts of Board Games as Media.

  2. Paul Booth. Board Games as Media. New York: Bloomsbury Academic, 2021, pg. 4.

  3. Although Part One is entitled “Textual Analysis,” this is a bit of a misnomer; these chapters increasingly look beyond board game textuality toward broader paratextual or contextual aspects of board gaming culture such as industry and fan dynamics.

  4. Booth renames most of these methods by adding variants of “ludo-” (meaning “play or game”) to create terms like “Ludo-Textual Analysis, “Ludic Discourse Studies,” “Ludic Fandom,” etc.

  5. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 39.

  6. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 82.

  7. Whereas other chapters adapt and extend methodologies drawn from other fields without necessitating a widespread transformation of those fields, this citationally-dense, highly dialogic chapter calls for a parallel evolution in fan and media studies based on the idea that board game player communities constitute a paradigm case for theorizing participatory media culture.  This is perhaps unsurprising, as Booth is a noted fan scholar who has published two prior books linking fan studies and play.  In Playing Fans: Negotiating Fandom and Media in the Digital Age, Booth analyzes fannish media play through case studies of fan pastiche and media parody and in Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games, Booth explores how licensed board games based on popular IPs (Intellectual Properties) both mirror and contribute to the construction of cult fandoms. 

  8. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 165.

  9. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 213.

  10. As Booth notes in his auto-ethnographic reflections on his own positioning as a gamer, Board Games as Media is clearly situated within a particular cultural and historical moment, with game analyses and ethnographic research mostly targeting the last 5 years of hobby board gaming, especially as experienced by the English-speaking BoardGameGeek online community.  Thus, the book largely bypasses discussions of historical board games, mass-market children’s or family games, or hobby board gaming as experienced by any other communities.  Much of the methodological framework could be applied to these other contexts, but it is worth noting that Booth’s approach to board game analysis is thoroughly entangled with the language (such as terms for classifying board games and board game mechanisms) of this particular hobbyist community.  While this specificity makes sense in context, it should be noted as a consideration for scholars planning to apply these frameworks to other contexts.

  11. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 9.

  12. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 224.

  13. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 114. Emphasis in original.

  14. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 18.

  15. Booth. Board Games as Media, pg. 42.

  16. For instance, Terraforming Mars displays a planetary view of Mars divided up with a hex-grid for tile placement, representing Mars as a desolate yet resource-rich environment ripe for corporatized terraforming—the tiles that are placed on this board symbolize an ecological relationship between natural (greenery and ocean tiles) and urban (city tiles) forces.  Here the coming-to-life of the barren Martian landscape spatially represents a neoliberal fantasy in which this futuristic utopic space is literally shaped by capitalist forces.  This creates a very different vision from the other game boards.  First Martians’ game board and companion app UI design position the players as interacting more with the technical interfaces than the Martian surface itself, creating a claustrophobic interior focus against the backdrop of the red planet as a hostile unknown environment.  Martians: A Story of Civilization arrays a medium-scale aerial view of a domed Martian colony (used to thematically organize Worker Placement spots) around a central grid of excavatable tiles, spatially representing the colonial exploitation of natural resources.  And Pocket Mars replaces a game board with a tableau of cards, creating a more abstract feel as the game asks players to populate rather than expand the Martian colony. 

  17. Without more emphasis on the distinctive materiality of board games, some of the methodological contribution Booth attributes to board games could be alternately supplied by videogames, also a player-centric medium (albeit in different ways).

More posts in…

  • Adrianna Burton
  • Art and Performance Games
  • Axiel Cazeneuve
  • Board Games
  • Book Review
  • Brian C. Etheridge
  • Card Games
  • Chad Wilkinson
  • Chloé Germaine
  • Digital Games
  • Environmental Play
  • et. al.
  • Evan Torner
  • Interactive Fiction
  • Interview
  • Jason Cox
  • Lead Author Shannon McDowell
  • Live-Action Role-Playing Games
  • Pilar Girvan
  • Scott Nicholson
  • Stefan Huddleston
  • Story Games
  • Tabletop Role-Playing Games
  • Theory
  • V.P.J. Arponen

Catalog

  • Volume I, Issue I
  • Volume I, Issue II
  • Volume I, Issue III
  • Volume I, Issue IV
  • Volume I, Issue V
  • Analog Players, Analog Space: Video Gaming Beyond the Digital
  • Volume II, Issue II
  • Volume II, Issue III
  • Volume II, Issue IV
  • Volume II, Issue V
  • Volume II, Issue VI
  • Volume II, Issue VII
  • Volume III, Issue I
  • Volume III, Issue II
  • Volume III, Issue III
  • Volume III, Issue IV
  • Volume III, Issue V
  • 2016 Role-Playing Game Summit
  • Volume IV, Issue I
  • Volume IV, Issue II
  • Volume IV, Issue III
  • Volume IV, Issue IV
  • Volume IV, Issue V
  • Volume V, Issue I
  • Volume V, Issue II
  • Volume V, Issue III
  • Volume V, Issue IV
  • Volume VI, Issue I
  • Volume VI, Issue II
  • Volume VI, Issue III
  • 2019 Role-Playing Game Summit
  • Analog Games and Translation
  • Volume VII, Issue II
  • Volume VIII, Issue I
  • Volume VIII, Issue II
  • The Fiend Folio
  • Volume IX, Issue I
  • Volume IX, Issue II
  • Volume IX, Issue III
  • Volume IX, Issue IV

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