The Digital Tabletop

So, my visit to the board games colloquium was interesting. It is a distinct academic gaming culture (made up of historians, anthropologists, mathematicians, game theoreticians, and archaeologists) that has been gathering for over a decade. The quality of the talks, as expected, was pretty varied – but there were a few gems that certainly made it worthwhile.

There are a few aspects of the conference that definitely stood out comparing to my experiences at digital games conferences. This colloquium was very heavily based on three things: history of (old old OLD) games, use of games by cultures (e.g. how Mancala has spread through cultures or traditional board games of Native Americans), and game theory (even the talk on “why people find games fun” evolved into a game theoretic talk after one slide). These topics all simply aren’t approached much in digital games conferences (mainly because the medium is only decades old instead of millenia, of course).

There were several talks on pedagogy and board games. They were generally disappointing; the serious games community has taken much further strides in the academic study of how to incorporate educational principles into games, evaluate their uses, etc. (and we’re not even really that far along). I think a great future talk would be on principles in serious game design and how they translate to board games – a few examples would be necessary though.

One interesting talk was a presentation on the game “Metromachina.” It was invented in the 1500’s by William Fulke and focused on teaching principles in geometry. Players control geometric shapes with different properties (e.g. different shape, size, area, width, etc.) and those properties are used to figure out how to attack other pieces (e.g. summing the based of two triangles to equal the distance to an enemy triangle). I like the notion of math functions being the main combat mechanic for players – it sounds like an oddly useful game for reinforcing math concepts.

Another talk on Mancala focused on how it can be used to teach math concepts. However, instead of focusing on proper techniques for integrating a game like that into a curriculum or teaching program, it was specifically an analysis of what kind of math is in Mancala, interesting but missing the point without a larger context of educational use.

There have been some odd talks….like a conspiracy theory talk on the suicide (or was it murder??) of a famous games figure several decades ago. Another (interesting) talk is a math proof of how a set of axioms that define how you can fold paper in origami can be used to solve all quadratic and cubic equations.

My talk was pretty well received. It was one of the few design talks on the program. Another was a PhD student from Texas Tech who presented his board games about Mexico / US border issues. I tried pointing him to some of Ian Bogost’s work, but he immediately responded by saying that computer games really don’t work for getting people to talk about issues like board games do. Ok…..even if that were true, why ignore the designs of related work?

Overall, it was definitely an interesting experience and worth being involved in again every few years. I plan on taking the digital tabletop playing up again this summer, hopefully with the goal of establishing a clearer language to talk about transmedia game mechanics.