Analog Game Studies, Volume IV

Analog Game Studies, Volume IV, published by ETC Press in 2020, presents a collection of scholarly essays examining tabletop and analog games through critical, theoretical, and empirical lenses. Its scope spans cardboard and hobby board games, pen-and-paper roleplaying systems, Legacy games, escape rooms, pervasive play, and experimental game-adjacent art, with material drawn from roughly 2017 onward. The volume's governing concern is how design choices, from irreversibility and randomness to rules, interfaces, and physical materials, shape the affective, social, and political experience of play.

Several threads recur throughout. Analyses of The Grizzled, Pandemic Legacy, and Curse of Strahd argue that mechanics such as unavoidable trauma, permanent change, and randomized cycles can make players embody psychological states like trauma, finitude, and entrapment rather than merely observing them. Critiques of Catan's Oil Springs scenario contend that emergent asymmetries can mirror capitalist accumulation, though the authors conclude that game design struggles to represent structural inequality without reducing it to individual imbalance. Studies of Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder rulebooks find that disability and queer identity have been marginalized across editions, while work on Autcraft, a Minecraft server for autistic children, and on game interfaces shows that accessibility is socially negotiated and often privileges some disabilities over others. Further essays use flow theory to explain hobby board game engagement, propose sex toy design as a model for embodied controllers, and treat human beings as computing platforms.

Taken together, the volume's conclusions emphasize that games are never neutral: their formal structures carry ideological assumptions about bodies, labor, identity, and time, and critical or experimental design can expose and reconfigure those assumptions.