Eco-Boardgames as Material for Cultural Studies and Cultural History

Abstract

The history of material game culture has so far received little attention in cultural studies, which may also be due to the lack of digitally catalogued collections. As part of a dissertation project, a concept for an open access research platform for game objects is to be developed using the example of environmental board games, which can do more than just list games and describe the individual objects. Based on the media-theoretical concept of the apparatus applied to the board game, which is able to create its own world in a living world and thus open up spaces of experience, it will be investigated how board games that deal with ecology, environmental and climate issues fit into a historical context and change chronologically along thematic guidelines and in the interplay of narrative and game mechanics. One hundred exemplary selected games are subjected to methodological analysis according to four defined aspects and documented in a standardised entity-relationship model. The focus is on the thematic content, the correlation of the narrative with the game mechanics, the materiality and the production context, as well as the provenance data of the board games. This data will be used to model and design the multi-perspective digital interface for visualising the exemplary collection, which will be made available to a specialist community for expansion and collaboration in the second iteration of the project. At the intersection of cultural aspects of material game culture and information science, a collection is to be digitally visualised as an example and juxtaposed with historically relevant events, which, through the relevance of the properties extracted from the analysis, are able to tell more about the medium of board games as such and the outline of a canon than individual categorised objects have been able to do so far.

Lecturer