Open Collections

Critical board game modification : Changing board games to change the world

University of British Columbia. Department of Central, Eastern, and Northern European Studies; University of British Columbia. Popular Media for Social Change Research Excellence Cluster

Working board game designer and scholar Greg Loring-Albright, PhD will present a talk about changing board games to incite social change. Hobby board gaming, as theorized by scholars like Paul Booth (2018) and Stewart Woods (2012) has been and continues to be a growing subculture, fandom, and market. Games like Catan (Teuber, 1995), Ticket to Ride (Moon, 2004), and Wingspan (Hargrave, 2019) are the result of design interventions by inspired designers. However, board games lag behind other entertainment media like film, TV, and video games when it comes to depicting social change and representing marginalized groups. Greg works to change this, both by designing and publishing new games (e.g. Bloc by Bloc: Uprising, 2022, co-designed with T.L. Simons; Keep the Faith, 2024) and by creating frameworks for modifying existing games (e.g. First Nations of Catan, 2015). This talk will address a general audience, briefly describing the world of hobby board gaming, showcasing some of its problematic dynamics (drawing upon Flanagan and Jakobsson, 2023, among others), and offering paths for other designers and interested amateurs to create their own interventions in the space by modifying the board games that they already play. In addition, Greg will propose a theory of how board games incite social change, developed from close observation of hundreds of board gaming sessions, both in a research context and while playtesting games for publication. Many approaches to games optimistically presuppose a level of impact on the player that may not be justified. Yet board games can change their players, primarily via the discursive opportunities that they afford around the table.

eng

2025-04-09

Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90612

Unreviewed

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/