Over the course of summer school I delved deep into research
on board games and one of the interesting aspects that arose from my research
was the concept of digitization. It actually came up over the course of two classes.
Disclaimer: I am an avid boardgamer.
Board games are not something we think of when we think of digitization,
yet there are official digital versions of tabletop board games. More often
than not we tend to view digitization in simplistic and binary terms, calling
it the digital “version” and assuming it is the same as the analog but
presented digitally. Even the term “digital surrogate” brings up this connotation
of a stand-in rather than a representation. It is easy to fall into that trap
when you are looking at photographic scans of pages.
Board games present an interesting case. That strong link
between the analog and the digital almost doesn’t seem to exist. A paper photograph
from a silver gelatin negative looks (almost) exactly the same as the scanned
version. There is a visual continuity between them. The digital version of Carcassone is different than the
tabletop game in just about every possible way except the game mechanics and
rules. You lose the physicality of the wooden game pieces and tiles, the turning of the tile in every possible direction to find a spot and watching the pile of tiles grow smaller as the game progresses. In the new Android version they have also added characters in the form of AI.
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| The one upside to digital boardgames is you don't get the game pieces mixed up with your snacks. |
What the research from the summer (and further observations
since) has shown is that there are an underlying and fundamental differences
between the analog and the digital board game. They may not be obvious at first
(when I first read these papers I was taken aback, I had never even considered
it). When players get together to play Agricola (tabletop version) there is set-up
of the game components and reading of the rules involved. At first glance this
may seem like a convenience, playing the game on the iPad means no clean-up, no
lost pieces and so much time saved! Right? On the surface level, yes. However what
players gain from set-up, on-going maintenance of the board and pieces as well
rules enforcement is that the players not only actively participate in the
game- as they do these tedious things (restock the supply, double check a rule,
debate a rule) they inherently learn the rules and the mechanics of the game. Thus
they learn how the game works and can strive to optimize game play. I have
tried playing Agricola on my own on
the iPad and it is a no-win situation. I perform one action and it sets off a
chain of events and I have no idea what just happened. When I play in a group, I
watch the other players as they think through and take their turns (oftentimes
they have to explain to me, I am just terrible at Agricola). In the digital versions of games often the other players
(especially if they are AI) turns get passed over and you simply see the
results. This makes it difficult to truly learn a game beyond just a surface
level understanding.
Some board games are reliant on the physical elements that
they simply cannot be digitized. Games that rely on hidden roles, with each
player keeping a card in front of themselves, secret from everyone else. An especially
fun game that Dan Edelen mentions, writing on the website Gaming Trend is Escape: The Curse of the Temple, a
fast-paced game of throwing dice and laying tiles. With the extra rules the
game becomes even more contingent on the physicality (if you drop a dice on the
floor it is out of the game).
The other consideration with the digitization of board games
is the loss of control. This applies to two aspects of playing. Firstly, because
the game play and rules are automated by the program there is little to no room
for house rules. People who wish to customize or adapt the rules of the game or
certain components are out of luck. The other aspect is the physicality of
board games. I am not simply bemoaning the loss of wooden meeples to arrange
and play with to my heart’s content while waiting for my turn. There is a whole
flipside to board games of customization of board game components and
storage. Last year for Christmas I received
a custom set of meeple painted like zombies- and for some reason it just makes
playing Carcassone that much more
fun.
These last two points can be tied back to ebooks and digital
surrogates. Again, I am not just referring to the loss of physicality and the
smell of books (they make a candle for that now). As far as I have seen, ebooks
and digital surrogates do not allow the reader to interact with the page. Yes Overdrive
(the ebook application from the Toronto Public Library) allows readers to
highlight passages, but that is not the same as writing notes and actually
interacting with the text. That is the takeaway from all of this: when considering materials for digitizations it is important to consider how people interact with the material and the, sometimes complex, relationship between user and material.
I leave you with this interesting case of marginalia in the
hopes that ebook makers will in future program the ability to scrawl in the
margins. John Dee was a prolific scribbler in his books, however while he was away on vacation his private library got pilfered. Once the books were reunited, the Royal College of Physicians had an exhibit dedicated to him and his marginalia.
References:
Edelen, Dan. “Are Digital
Board Games Better?” Gaming Trend.
Last modified July 30, 2013. http://gamingtrend.com/2013/07/30/are-digital-board-games-better/
Martin, Tim. “John Dee: The
Man Who Spoke to Angels.” The Telegraph.
Last modified January 10, 2016. http://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/the-man-who-spoke-to-angels/
Nicholson, Scott, & Jason Begy. “A Framework For
Exploring Tablet-Based Tabletop Games (extended abstract).” Presentation at the 2014 Canadian
Games Studies Association, St. Catherines, Ontario. Last modified, 2014. http://scottnicholson.com/pubs/jsbgame.pdf
Rogerson, M. J., Gibbs,
M., & W. Smith. “Digitising Boardgames: Issues and Tensions. Microsoft Research Centre for Social
Natural User Interfaces The University of Melbourne. Last modified May 2015. http://www.digra.org/wp-content/uploads/digital-library/66_Rogerson-etal_Digitising-Boardgames.pdf
“The Lost Library of John
Dee.” Royal College of Physicians.
Last modified December 14, 2015. https://www.rcplondon.ac.uk/node/1541
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