Cardboard Ghosts - Holland, Amabel; - Prospero Internet Bookshop

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems
 
Product details:

ISBN13:9781032816685
ISBN10:1032816686
Binding:Hardback
No. of pages:124 pages
Size:229x152 mm
Language:English
700
Category:

Cardboard Ghosts

Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems
 
Edition number: 1
Publisher: CRC Press
Date of Publication:
 
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Short description:

This book explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments. Holland draws connections to computer games, literature, theatre, television, music, film, and her own life, framing board games as an achingly human art form, albeit one still growing into its full potential.

Long description:

Games can be used to model systems because they are themselves systems. Video games handle this under the hood and teach you as you play, but because board games are operated manually, and require the player to understand the system beforehand, they can be a valuable tool for recognizing, understanding, and critiquing real-world systems, including systems of oppression. These systems, often unseen and misunderstood, haunt our world. Board games turn these ghosts into pieces of cardboard we can see, touch, and manipulate.


Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments. Two major approaches are considered and contrasted: one, built around immersion and identification, creates empathy. The other, applying the Verfremdungseffekt to distance the player from the game, creating space for reflection. Uncomfortable questions of player roles and complicity when modelling oppressive systems are examined.


Throughout this book, board game designer Amabel Holland draws connections to computer games, literature, theatre, television, music, film, and her own life, framing board games as an achingly human art form, albeit one still growing into its full potential. Anyone interested in that potential, or in the value of political art in today?s world, will find many provocative and enriching ideas within.


Key Features:




  • Surveys the history of commercial board games as a polemical and persuasive form.



  • Explores games existing at the edges of the industry that push the boundaries of what games can do and be.



  • Grapples with the ethical and moral considerations of simulating real-world horrors.



  • Provides a case study of the author?s influential game This Guilty Land.



  • Lively prose and personal anecdotes makes complicated theory digestible for a wide audience.

Table of Contents:

Acknowledgements


Author Biography


 


01. Stories and Systems


 


02. Mechanical Metaphors


Systems and Synthesis


Little Sisters and Cellar Doors


The Stones of Turncoats


The Hidden Models of Computer Games


System Knowledge is System Mastery


Cognitive Loads


Primitive Polemics


 


03. The Paper Time Machine


History of Professional Wargaming


Avalon Hill and the Birth of Commercial Wargaming


Jim Dunnigan and the Paper Time Machine


Mechanical Complexity in Wargames


 


04. Wargaming as Technique


Games as Arguments


Kubrick?s Two Golden Eagles


The Wargaming of Root


Objectivity in Modeling


Complicity is Required for Systemic Modeling


 


05. Immersion and Identity


Identities


Roles as Empty Avatars


Roles as Opportunities for Exploration


Roles in Historical Games


Detail and Texture


My Favorite Story


 


06. Agency and Viewpoint


A Thing That Happens To You


Pax Porfiriana and Pax Pamir


Viewpoint and Horror in Meltwater


Ordinary Complicity and Fancy Hats


Complicity in John Company


Ethical Considerations of Immersion


 


07. Alienation and Distance


Limits of Immersion


Too Close To The Gears


The Verfremdungseffekt


The V-Effect in Mother Courage


Media Literacy


Nonhierarchical Art and the Monoform


Alienation in Board Games


 


08. This Guilty Land


The Concept


Modeling Civility and Compromise


Modeling a Broken Legislature


Distancing Players From Roles


Working Against Texture


Working Against Flow


Emotional Texture


Limits of Alienation


 


09. Challenges and Hopes


Useful Doubts


Ethical Challenges


Practical Challenges


Political Art is a Custard Pie


The Future


 


Index