Board gaming is like art (Phase 1: Meme analysis)
“Examples abound of the persisting social uses of art — as compensation for frustrations, as a symbolic way to draw social distinctions — but we have to look at the new roles of art that extend its activity beyond what has been organized as the art field. Other explanations, linked to the successes and failures of globalization, are possible: the arts dramatize the death throes of liberating utopias, and they renew our sensory experiences in a world that is as interconnected as it is divided, as well as our desire to live these experiences in non-disaster pacts with fiction” (Nestor García Canclini 2014).
INTRODUCTION
Board gaming is like art
In 2014, Argentine anthropologist Nestor García Canclini wrote a book about the immanence of art. “What’s happening with art?” he began, and soon after this, he typed the passage I cited above, in which art is not just paintings and painters but something with social uses.
So now I am here — in 2019 — and wondering if we cannot re-write NGC’s book, this time while focusing on board gaming rather than art. (That “we” is not rhetorical. Here is where I invite you to think alongside of me, to play along, and to see if together we can figure out where this kind of thinking, this time about board gaming rather than art, leads.)
“What is happening with board gaming?” we might begin, in the likeness of NGC. And to answer this, let’s pretend we are functionalist anthropologists and pose still more specifically, and again, borrowing heavily from NGC: “What are the social uses of board gaming today?”
What the memes say
Ignore what you think. Ignore your instincts to answer this question based on what you know and believe and have lived. We will do all that another day. But. Let’s start instead by going to the Internet and looking (and okay, okay, we will read, too, but only those texts which are superimposed on images and thus are a part of that, ahem, reworking of what Richard Dawkins told us we should call a “meme.” More clearly put: let’s start with visual research methods and focus on memes in circulation on the Internet right now. In so doing, we are asking, What do the memes say? Also: What are the themes in the memes? (I have always wanted to write that.)
METHOD
Maybe you already have a folder filled with favorite board gaming memes from 2019. I do not, and so I will begin by googling “board game memes” and then slowly sink into the Internet meme-osphere from there. Feel free to play along. Think of this as us harvesting together memes for later analysis and interpretation.
FINDINGS
Live copy of a Google Form for collecting board game memes here. Feel free to paste your own findings into this form.
ANALYSIS + CONCLUSIONS
Pending
… There are enough board gaming memes in circulation to suggest that either gaming is OR we understand gaming to be escapist. And thus, we wouldn’t be wrong to think of gaming, like art, “as compensation for frustrations,” as NGC wrote. A more cynical social critic will add, “as compensation for disempowerment in daily domestic as well as professional life.” See [INSERT RELEVANT MEME DATA HERE]. But gaming is not only escapist, and here is where our analysis becomes even more interesting …
[GAMING DOES THINGS. #BEYONDESCAPISM MEME DATA WILL GO HERE]
[REVISIT NGC’s “dramatize the death throes of liberating utopias, and they renew our sensory experiences in a world that is as interconnected as it is divided, as well as our desire to live these experiences in non-disaster pacts with fiction”]
FN: This is the first phase of a much larger, multi-method examination of the immanence of gaming today. If you would like to help build the board game memes data set, feel free to add your findings here: https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/17U0qrFacSw6qSEC_vKtFLFHStHJ5I3deTnPwXMvlMmo/edit?usp=sharing
