Analog Game Studies: Volume 2

"Analog Game Studies: Volume 2" examines how board games, role-playing games, live action role-play, and other tabletop forms represent race, colonialism, gender, sexuality, disability, and everyday urban life, and how players and designers can reshape these representations. Its central argument is that analog games are not neutral: their settings, mechanics, and conventions encode social assumptions, from the orientalist and "historical exoticism" clichés pervasive in Eurogames to the heteronormative and patriarchal ideals embedded in children's games such as Girl Talk. Essays by Bruno Faidutti, Jeremy Rochelle-style critics, Stenros and Sihvonen, and Elsa S. Henry document how these patterns have shifted slowly, with queer representation in RPG source books moving from villainization in the late 1980s toward matter-of-fact inclusion, largely driven by individual publishers rather than industry-wide norms.

The volume also presents a strong counter-current of critical redesign. The author's "First Nations of Catan" remix reframes the game around indigenous occupancy, and studies of Foucauldian heterotopia, abstraction, and transformative play argue that players can project their own values onto abstract games. Work on larp and performative play, including analyses of gender casting, environmental design, and the performance-versus-participation distinction, suggests that embodied play makes non-normative gender expression harder to sustain unless design deliberately supports it. Research on Ingress and other location-based games shows that play reshapes everyday urban space, though access to that play is unevenly distributed.

The scope spans English-language and Scandinavian traditions, roughly from the mid-1970s through the mid-2010s, and covers commercial board games, indie and source-book RPGs, larps, digital-hybrid installations, and urban location-based games. Its conclusions are largely conceptual and qualitative, drawn from textual analysis, designer interviews, autoethnography, and observational fieldwork rather than large-scale player studies, a limitation the authors themselves acknowledge.