Book Review: Storytelling in the Modern Board Game — Paul Booth
“The Wave is Building”: An Interview with DC — Evan Torner
The Mermaids of Iedo: Balancing Design and Research in Serious Games — William Dunkel and Minerva Wu
How do the small decisions that game designers make impact the world around them? This issue of Analog Game Studies tackles this important question head on by foregrounding the impact and importance of deliberate design decisions in the analog game community.
Start with Paul Booth’s excellent review of Marco Arnaudo’s Storytelling in the Modern Board Game. In this review, Booth highlights all of the excellent connections that Arnaudo draws between generations of storytelling in games. He explains the amazingly robust genealogical space of analog game design and shows mechanics are shared, borrowed, and circulated between designers of different eras. Continue by reading Evan Torner’s interview with indie game designer DC. DC and Torner discuss how indie designers can work toward a practice of resistant design pedagogy. Finish with the design diary that William Dunkel and Minerva Wu provide for their game The Mermaids of Iedo. In this thoughtful piece, the two discuss the care they have taken to carefully present design from an etic perspective.
We hope you enjoy this wonderful group of essays as we leap together into summer!
—The Editors
June 17, 2019
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Featured image is “romantic and scenic panorama with full moon on sea to night” by Ajith Kumar @Flickr CC BY.