Chores Are Fun: Understanding Social Play in Board Games for Digital Tabletop Game Design

Xu and colleagues, in a 2011 DiGRA paper titled "Chores Are Fun," argue that the mundane maintenance tasks of board gaming, such as bookkeeping, rule enforcement, waiting for turns, and handling physical pieces, are not peripheral to play but form the foundation of its social life. Their central thesis is that digital games routinely automate these chores, and that doing so removes a rich source of social interaction. For designers of digital tabletop and augmented reality games, the authors contend that such tasks should be preserved or deliberately reintroduced into the shared play space.

The evidence base is a video analysis of 262 minutes of board game play involving groups of four to eight players, comprising 358 social events across titles including Heroscape and Fluxx. From this material the authors identify five categories of social interaction: chores, reflection on gameplay, strategy discussion, out-of-game talk, and commentary on the game itself, with chores positioned as the base from which the others emerge. The interpretive framework is Collins' Interaction Ritual theory, which explains how shared physical actions synchronize group emotion and attention. Within this account, chores create time and co-presence, supporting mutual attention, emotional alignment, and shared humor, while turn-based structure lets players alternate between performer and audience roles.

The study's scope is focused on in-person, co-located tabletop play rather than broad population sampling, and its conclusions are primarily qualitative and interpretive. Its practical recommendation is specific: designers could make traditionally private digital chores, such as avatar setup or game configuration, visible within the shared physical space to recreate comparable social dynamics. The paper thus reframes routine maintenance work as a design resource rather than a burden to be eliminated.