Introduction

Who am I when I play Monopoly?¹ Am I an enterprising real estate developer? A bank teller? Or am I simply a ruthless player of a board game aiming to force my family and friends into simulated bankruptcy? In Monopoly and many other board games, the player's relationship to the fictional world and its characters is ambiguous at any given time. Thanks to such ambiguity, the question may not be “Who am I?” but “How close am I to my in-game role?” We propose a theoretical framework called “distance levels” to analyze the unstable relationships between players and in-game characters in board games.

The distance between a player and their in-game role expands and contracts during gameplay when the player performs different actions. These changes in distance become increasingly visible as many contemporary board games embrace forms of analog-digital hybridity. Traditional game components like boards, cards, and tokens are used with digital devices to play the game in hybrid games. For instance, dungeon crawler Descent: Legends of the Dark² uses a custom mobile app to issue commands to enemy figures and to track campaign progress. We use one such game, Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game³ (Detective for short), as a case study to show the interconnectedness of hybridity and distance levels. Detective is a cooperative campaign game in which players take on the role of investigators, solving a series of five interconnected cases.

We identify moments in our Detective campaign where visible shifts in distance level greatly impact our player experience. A critical component of our investigation is autoethnography – a qualitative methodology that considers the researchers’ positionality and experience within the context of the subject. Augus Baillie builds on existing calls for autoethnography and states that “players are deeply embedded in the game text through play, which means no game text is ever quite the same game text as the next time it is played”.⁴ Concurring with Baillie’s observations, we believe that an autoethnographic approach privileges the player experience over theorizing a game’s possibilities. Autoethnography has recently been mobilized to consider the lived experiences of underrepresented and overlooked players and researchers. For instance, Aditya Deshbandhu maintains that studies on the gamescape in the Global South and postcolonial context can benefit from autoethnography.⁵ We believe autoethnography opens new avenues for understanding our relationship with games. Our analysis also reveals that a broader understanding of board game hybridity is necessary to dissect how board games generally moderate the distance between player and character. Distance levels, shaped by various hybridity forms, combine and conflict to directly influence a board game's role-playing experience. The distance level framework provides insights for scholars, designers, and players who wish to better understand the roles that players play in board games.

Who am I?

The “Who am I?” question frequently arises in the ongoing academic discussion on roleplay in video games.⁶ The concept of an avatar is often in the spotlight of these discussions, namely the relationship between the players and avatars. Is the blinking line in the text program already an avatar, or does it need a body? Britta Neitzel believes roleplay is the key to disentangling the relationship by first asking if controlling Lara Croft means playing a role, to which Neitzel disagrees. The player does not have to pretend to be Lara Croft because Lara Croft is predetermined by the computer program.⁷ Thus, the process involves identifying with a role rather than adopting it.

The configuration of roles in a pen-and-paper game is nuanced and perhaps more complex because a game master, instead of a computational system, bears the responsibility of believability. How much knowledge can be transferred from one to the other through roleplay? How do we understand the distance between the player and their role? Gary Alan Fine uses Erving Goffman's frame analysis and discusses the role and the player differently. Fine argues that role-playing occurs within a context of pretense awareness.⁸ This means that the awareness contexts of the player and character are separated, even though they are aware of each other. Accordingly, the role does not rely on the player's full knowledge, even though the role has access to it.

The same question arises in the board game context. Although not every board game assigns its players roles, modern and especially narrative games often do. For example, Paul Wake discusses the simultaneity of the meeple as doll and avatar, whose distance is bridged by the game mechanics and the associated narrative.⁹ In board games, in general, the mechanics and thus evoked actions can be abstract (placing a tile), even if the motivation for the action is very specific (building a zoo).¹⁰ For instance, in games like Monopoly, players are not explicitly given a role designation, yet their actions align with real estate owners’ actions, suggesting they adapt to the associated role. At the same time, it is clear that Monopoly players have a greater distance to this abstract role than players of a crime board game, whose actions largely depend on ‘being a detective’ (in particular, thinking like one).

We argue that a similar computation of roles occurs in board games as in video games. In both cases, identification is more likely to happen than adoption, as the actions of the roles are largely determined by the rules and can only be carried out within the game mechanics. At the same time, narrative board games often expand this framework to enable role-playing game-like action. Therefore, it is necessary to combine theories of role-playing games with those of video games to examine the player's relationship to their role in board games.

Distance Levels

We propose “distance levels” to define the relationship between the player and their role. It is a theoretical framework for understanding how close the player feels to their role based on the game's situation and elements. This approach offers insights into the emotional connection, actions, and narrative within the game.

Our framework is in debt to preexisting scholarships on roleplay, especially Ron Edwards’ “stance” and Christopher Chinn’s “fictional positioning”. Noticing an emphasis on the binary between “in-character” and “out-of-character” role-playing, Edwards provides the stance mode to describe the various ways of “how a person arrives at decisions for an imaginary character's imaginary actions”.¹¹ Similarly, Chinn spotlights the tension between what is mechanically possible and what makes sense within the fiction of the play by proposing “Fictional Positioning”.¹² To synthesize and further expand on these concepts, we borrow the terminology from Erving Goffman's concept of role distance. In Encounters, Goffman discusses the different roles that people take on in everyday life. These roles can be fully embraced, where a person “disappears completely into the virtual self available in the situation”.¹³ On the other hand, a person may distance themselves from a role and not fulfill it as expected. According to Goffman, role distance is created by individuals, which sets it apart from our idea of distance levels. Distance levels are brought about by the interaction of mechanics and materiality – the roles are imposed on the individuals by the nature of the situation.

Our configurations of the various distance levels derive from Neitzel's Point of Action (PoA), which she proposed to analyze avatar constellations in video games. According to Neitzel, PoA is linked to an avatar’s Point of View that the player adopts.¹⁴ In video games, this is determined by the camera perspective (objective vs. semi-subjective vs. subjective) from which the player sees the avatar. However, this concept cannot be directly applied to board games. To address this, we shall consider the player’s perspective as the camera that oversees all in-game actions. In this context, the term “avatar” doesn't quite fit because the body is not an extension but rather a duplicate of the player's own body, enabling them to take action in the game.¹⁵ Thus, the following discussion will replace the term “avatar” with “player”. Lastly, our conceptualization of the distance levels combines PoV and PoA. The PoA defines the position from which a player acts in the game.

Neitzel differentiates the PoA into three characteristics,¹⁶ which can be adapted as follows:

1. the position from which actions are performed in the game world:
   1. Intradiegetic: The player is visualized or assigned a role in the diegesis.
   2. Extradiegetic: The player is not visualized and has no role in the diegesis.
2. the area within the game world in which the game actions are carried out:
   1. Centered: Actions start from one point (e.g. the avatar's hand).
   2. Decentered: Actions are possible at different locations in the world.
3. the type of execution:
   1. Direct: Controls are converted directly into actions (e.g. pressing a button causes Lara Croft to start running immediately).
   2. Indirect: Controls are converted indirectly into actions (commands are given to locations and characters, which are then executed).¹⁷

The (a) options in each category result in closer distance levels than the (b) options. We argue that different combinations of these elements result in various distance levels, even within the same game. Edwards’ stances can also be understood through this categorization. For instance, the “Actor Stance” can be considered as close distance level as the associated actions are often intradiegetic, centered and direct. In contrast, the “Director Stance” takes actions that are often extradiegetic, decentered and indirect, operating on a far-distance level.¹⁸

Returning to Monopoly as an illustrative example, we can presume that players take on the role of real estate owners. The players' roles are inferred from their in-game actions, such as buying real estate, taking out mortgages, and trading. These actions take place within two distinct distance levels. In general gameplay, the players are represented by a token and assigned a specific role, giving them an intradiegetic presence. As the player can generally act from anywhere, their actions are decentralized. However, the meeple indicates the abstract location of the player's role. The player can perform various actions anywhere on the board. Finally, the players in Monopoly mostly don't take action directly; instead, they control game pieces to represent their actions indirectly. However, there is a shift in distance level when the players exchange the game's paper money. In general, the game operates at a far-distance level, but this shifts to a closer distance when interacting with the money. The players temporarily embody their investors, directly handling the game's in-world currency.

Table 1: Points of action and distance levels in Monopoly.

This combination aligns with Kankainen et al.'s definition of hybridity in games. Typically, the term hybrid has been used by scholars to refer to games that include both traditional physical board game components and some form of digital software. For instance, Mirek Stolee developed a framework for analyzing the addition of digital components like mobile apps to existing board games.¹⁹ Rogerson et al. identified the category of Hybrid Digital Boardgames (HDBs), which require both physical pieces as well as a “smart” component that uses digital technology to serve certain gameplay functions.²⁰

However, hybridity does not need to be defined narrowly as just the combination of analog and digital. Kankainen et al. suggest that a scholarly focus on “smart” technologies like mobile apps is appropriate for current design trends. Still, hybridity should include older combinations, such as board games packaged with VHS tapes. Kankainen et al.'s definition of hybridity does not center on specific technologies. Still, it is instead an “experiential and cognitive category” in which two or more “conceptual domains” blend into hybrid experiences.²¹ Conceptual domains may include genres and their associated conventions or even non-game influences. For example, Kankainen et al. position tabletop role-playing games as combining wargaming and free-form storytelling.²² Within this framework, many more board games can be considered hybrids. We apply this form of hybridity to Monopoly: a blend of a roll-and-move board game and the direct handling of money used in real-life cash transactions (which could be considered a very narrow form of role-playing).

Although we broaden hybridity to include games without stark differences in technological components, juxtaposing different technologies is still important within our distance levels framework. Switching between distance levels in Monopoly is subtle and unlikely to prompt reflection from a player who is not explicitly thinking about it. Newer versions of Monopoly such as Monopoly: Super Electronic Banking,²³ however, make transitions between the distance levels more visible. Unusual game components such as faux credit cards and an electronic banking unit generate a more obvious switch between the general gameplay of Monopoly and the direct handling of in-game currency.

A change in distance levels becomes particularly compelling with board games like Detective, where the narrative serves as the game's primary focus.²⁴ As a member of the recent proliferation of analog-digital hybrid board games, Detective demonstrates several visible shifts between distance levels. Applying insights from scholarship on analog-digital hybridity, we find that analog-digital hybrid board games are particularly useful for examining distance levels because the switch from analog to digital gameplay or vice versa makes a jarring, visible switch between distance levels noticeable to the players. Detective blends analog and digital components and elements of resource management board games, interactive fiction, and digital database interfaces. It thus introduces multiple distance levels between the player and their in-game avatar, which evoke interesting game experiences due to their partially different weighting from case to case.

Hybridity in Detective

Regarding analog-digital hybridity, Detective is a blend of two major elements: the physical analog board game and the digital Antares Database website. The analog components structure the game's general flow. Players solve cases by reading an initial description and following up on “leads” – a deck of cards providing information about the case, including descriptions of the crime scene, interviews with witnesses, and examinations of evidence. Pieces and a board track information like the time of day, locations, and resources like “authority” tokens that can be expended while exploring leads. Often, one lead card will point to more leads, allowing detectives to continue gaining information about the case – though with limited time and resources, they must carefully decide what information to pursue. Each case ends when the players run out of time – advanced primarily by following leads.

The game's digital component, the Antares Database, is a web-based simulation of a police database containing information about each case. In Rogerson et al.'s taxonomy, the Antares Database performs informing, storytelling, and remembering functions.²⁵ Physical lead cards allow players to look up specific information inside the database. Entries include personal profiles of the suspects of the case and transcripts of interviews and police reports. The digital hybrid components of the game allow the game of Detective to become a multimedia experience, where players watch videos, compare portraits, and cross-analyze information to deduce the events of the case. Players may also go beyond the bounds of the Antares Database, looking up terms and locations relevant to the case to make headway. For instance, the rulebook provides an icon next to certain underlined phrases on cards to indicate that players can browse the internet to learn more about them, using resources such as “Wikipedia, Google, and Google Maps”.²⁶

We foregrounded that our use of hybridity suggests the mixing of analog and digital components and signals the multiple distance levels. So, it is imperative to consider how Detective casts the players as detectives. Detective describes itself as a “deduction” game, where the core of what players do is gather information and use this to make inferences about past events. As the players enact these actions, they “become” detectives themselves, piecing together the events of the fictional world spanning the campaign and collating this plentiful data to solve the five cases. By providing the core experience of deduction on limited information and providing a modern setting and diegetic digital elements (digital database, web lookup), the game situates the players in the role of detectives by having players perform similar actions to the fictional detectives of the game (gathering information, searching on the web, and drawing conclusions about the events of the case). Yet, the relationship between the players and the in-game detectives they control is not so simple. The game's hybridity means that player actions occur at multiple distance levels, visibly shifting and coinciding with one another throughout the campaign.

In Detective, four types of actions are involved due to the game's hybrid nature: interacting with databases, managing the narrative, managing the game, and creating the final report. These actions evoke different PoAs and, thus, distinct distance levels (see Figure 2).

Table 2: Points of action and distance levels in Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game

The distance level is closest when the players interact with the Antares Database.²⁷ The close distance of the Antares Database is maintained through its clever usage of analog-digital hybridity. The Antares Database is an unusual manifestation of a hybrid app that aims to represent a diegetic interface. This illusion extends to the rest of the players' web browsers; in addition to this bespoke web app, players are encouraged to use a general search engine to look up keywords provided on leads (such as the names of historical events or addresses relevant to the case). Shifts between the close distance of the Antares Database and the other comparatively distant game actions are made particularly visible by the switch between analog and digital components. Even though actions such as creating mind maps or investigating a “file” are also taken at close distances, the database makes these shifts more explicit. This may be because the technologization of this element allows for the simultaneity of action and fact: Operating a database may feel natural to the player, but the fact that it is a police database makes it more exciting. The database – just like the card machine in Monopoly – becomes a simulacrum. The game's physical cards refer to personnel, case files, interviews, or other clues that can be accessed via the Antares Database. Players have direct control over the database, and as its structure is based on real detective work and as it uses familiar interfaces, navigation feels natural. In the process, performative moments are repeatedly established that situate the person playing as intradiegetically embedded in the database. For example, in a precarious game moment, players receive a warning that they are denied access to a file on the database. Therefore, the “non-functioning” of the Antares Database does not manifest itself in a “real” error code but in a hyper-real performative act in which the person playing is actively addressed. The simulation becomes a simulacrum, evoking similar pronoia as in role-playing games.²⁸

Comparatively, narrative choices that the players take as detectives are more distant. The game's narrative is managed by a deck of cards. Based on the collected information, the case files in Antares and the deck of cards provide leads for the players to follow. These leads then link to other cards that narratively tell the story related to the case. Unlike in the database, the players do not directly take actions here; instead, the actions evoked by following this specific lead get retold by the game. The story of the detectives is narrated from an external perspective, addressing the players in the second person singular. The opening description of a case describes what happens to “you”, the detectives. It is important to note that although the players are assigned functional characters, they are not assigned specific individual roles. Instead, they embody the abstract entity of a detective, representing a collective. This is why “you” addresses the players as a group rather than individual detectives. Although the card texts narratively imply the actions of an individual detective, this implication is not carried over to the general game. Some cards describe actions using the term “you”, such as eating an apple or sitting in a waiting room. However, this “you” is not clearly defined – it refers neither to a player nor to one of the assigned function characters.²⁹ It thus does not have any specific agency. Accordingly, the players have to imagine this character without any details. As a result, it remains more of an abstract concept rather than a specific person.

Accordingly, the actions emanate from this abstract entity of the detective. The players indirectly control the actions through their decisions without influencing the exact execution. They may choose to call a potential witness and draw the appropriate lead card, but that card tells them how exactly their characters handle that interaction.

While Detective borrows conventions of interactive fiction, it is still a physical board game and uses many typical mechanics like resource management. In Detective, pursuing leads requires resources organized on a game board. These resources are not located at any specific diegetic location. The most important resource is time – points are deducted from your score if you go over the initial time limit. A token at the bottom of the game board moves along as time passes in the game world. Players also receive limited influence markers based on their function character's abilities. For example, the function character Ben Harris can spend a “computer” token to advance leads that require computer skills. Leads are linked to locations, and the detectives' current location is marked on the map. These markers provide an in-game representation of the players, but the actions are organized decentrally and indirectly across multiple spaces on the board's map. The “Fieldwork” space, for example, acts as a catch-all location for investigating crime scenes or visiting persons of interest.³⁰ This setup gives players an overview of the action and makes the available resources predictable.

At the end of each case, the players use the Antares Database interface to complete a “final report”. As argued above, the other usages of the Antares Database create a remarkably close distance between the player and their in-game character by maintaining an illusion of diegesis. This illusion falls apart in the final report, a multiple-choice form that confronts the players/detectives with questions about the case. Already, the multiple-choice format conflicts with the presumed structure of actual police reports. Based on their answers, a score determines victory or defeat. The final report also coincides with the distance level established by the narrative actions on lead cards. After completing the final report, the players are addressed within the same interface using the second-person “you”, similar to how the characters are depicted on the cards. The direct diegesis of the Antares Database thus conflicts with the narrative description of game events. Similar to the database operation, the actions are carried out centered on the player. However, while the interface operation is direct, the intradiegetic actions are controlled by input and not executed as in actual report writing. By awarding points (like many other games), the focus ultimately shifts to outside the fictional world. This is supported by a chart that shows how other players have scored, similar to how “decision turn” video games like Life is Strange³¹ use methods such as displaying the percentage of players who made particular choices to emphasize the weight of narrative decisions.³² Creating distance in this context can be compared to debriefing, as it echoes the process seen in pen-and-paper role-playing games. It provides an opportunity for discussing and reflecting on the game experience. During the final report, the closeness of the Antares Database is juxtaposed with second-person narration and overt references to Detective as a game. The player, in a brief period of time, shifts roles from the detective using the interface to the detective being debriefed by their in-game superiors and finally to the player that just finished the play session.

Since all plot elements are closely interconnected, all actions receive approximately the same focus. Thus, the first case of Detective evenly weighs the different distance levels evoked by the different PoAs. Accordingly, the close distance level can be defined as the average value for the game's baseline. This distance allows for a smooth transition between different points of action. Nevertheless, it enables a clear involvement in the case, whereby the action is motivated enough to want to solve the case. This weighting varies concerning Case III, altering the sense of consequence and fundamentally changing the gaming experience. To explore these considerations, we played Detective while paying close attention to our player experience.

Blood on Whose Hands? Case III Analysis

The dissonance between the distance levels becomes jarringly obvious when players are shouldered with high-stake responsibilities. Detective places the fate of non-playable characters (NPCs) directly in the hands of its players on a few memorable occasions, namely, the hostage in Case III and Richard Delaware in Case V. These moments challenge players’ positionality as they navigate various distance levels. In moments of great accountability, “Who am I?” is difficult to ignore. Case III introduces a new paradigm by asking the player to solve a case within one day and in one location. This format immediately ups the ante because the players are no longer tasked with solving a past crime but preventing a present one. This already hints at a different weighting of the distance levels since different timing requires distinct sets of actions. From the very beginning of the case, the designers set the stage with an ominous designer’s note stating that the case will feature changes to the pacing and style of investigations: The task ahead is described as “extremely difficult […] each mistake costs precious time […] Just one or two mistaken clues and the mission will end in tragedy”.³³ The case opens with the headquarters getting locked down after the arrival of a cooler containing a severed human finger. Alongside the finger, the team receives video footage of an unconscious woman being loaded into a van, followed by riddles ostensibly written by the kidnapper leading to the location of the van and stating that if the detectives do not find the van, it will blow up, killing the kidnapped victim.

As the players begin to solve the case, trying to find out who the hostage is and where the kidnapper’s video was sent from, they may begin to piece together who the hostage and kidnapper are and their connections to the past web of events laid out in Cases I and II. They will soon realize that the kidnapper has set out a decoy for them – they have put out two seemingly identical vans on two different islands. If the players open the wrong van, the hostage’s van explodes, and the hostage is killed. If they open the correct van, they are faced with another puzzle – the van contains a bomb and a list of 34 names of potential hostages. The detectives must input the correct name – the hostage’s name –; otherwise, the van explodes.

Case III’s nonstandard rules encourage overall close distance levels. Due to the fewer cards players can pull, we relied more on non-card mechanisms. This changes the weighting of the various PoAs: databases are significantly more time-consuming than the other mechanisms. Additionally, players must repeatedly use Google Maps to investigate locations where the fictional narrative unfolds. For instance, the location of a fictional letterbox company is disclosed, with a name resembling a real company at that spot.³⁴

The limited card pulls force players to rely on intradiegetic, centered, and direct mechanics, using the Antares Database and Google Maps to deduce the hostage and kidnapper’s identities. The unequal weighting of the PoAs allows players to connect with their role as detectives intimately. During our playthrough, we noticed that our decision time between each card pull was significantly longer than in previous scenarios, resulting in similar playtime despite the fewer card pulls. Still, we were not able to save the hostage. The death of this NPC felt personal as it reflects our labor as a detective and a player.

The scenario, however, does not end with her death but a questionnaire testing our understanding of the case. While we solved the case by answering all the correct answers, we did not feel the affective impact of the victim’s death was reflected in the questionnaire. In this somber moment, we became keenly aware of our conflicted positionalities as we (as diegetic detectives) cannot enjoy the victory earned through our (as players) problem-solving skills. Rather than a feeling of finally identifying with our in-game roles, we could empathize with the loss and guilt of our avatars. The final report (farther distance level) thus conflicts with our frustration over our faulty deduction (close distance level).

Who Am I? Case V Analysis

Case V echoes certain design principles of Case III, where players are encouraged to engage with intradiegetic, centered, and direct mechanics. What makes Case V stand out is the recognition of players as diegetic detectives.

Case V begins with Richard Delaware – the detectives’ superior and the man who has been previously providing the case materials – being stabbed and put into critical condition. As part of this introduction, each player reads a separate card detailing their character, learning that they have been framed for the attack on Delaware. The case involves several interwoven parts that all add stakes to the story. Firstly, the player characters are being pursued by the police for the attack on Delaware. As they investigate different leads, they also move up a “pursuit” marker representing this hunt. If this marker reaches or exceeds the current time, then one of the detective characters is arrested, and they lose access to this character’s resources and abilities. At the same time, the players know that Delaware believed that there would be a murder attempt on that day. They must figure out the murderer, the target, and the time and place of the murder to prevent it. Players must work in parallel to clear their name and prevent this murder while working with limited (and dwindling) time and resources.

However, there are times when these design decisions may create some dissonance for players from the fictional world. For instance, at the beginning of the case, players are asked to read individual cards describing what their individual characters were experiencing. Our group had some confusion about what was going on at first. This was the first time the game broke up the group and told the story of individual characters rather than treating the group as a collective unit.

When arrested, that player character is removed from the game, and players lose access to that character’s resources and abilities. However, the player is still in the game and can communicate with and play the game with the rest of the team as normal. This signals a break between the player and the player character – the character is now treated merely as a resource removed from the players’ collective pool of resources and abilities, and the attachment between the player and their role is severed. In our playthrough, we only referenced individual characters with regard to their player abilities and resources and whether to use them during play. There was no strong sense of us playing as certain individual characters or attachment to that specific character. Thus, while interesting, this reference to the individual characters’ stories also seemed to break with our previous understandings of the player’s relationship with the game world and player characters. We highlight this moment because it is the game’s attempt to cultivate a close distance level by assigning individual tasks and stakes (choosing whose character to sacrifice during a police pursuit). It ultimately fails because it is inconsistent with the established distance levels.

Conclusion

Insights from our Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game playthrough demonstrate how distance level changes can strongly affect player experience. Understanding distance levels and their associated Points of Action may help designers manipulate the relationship between players and in-game roles to achieve their desired effects. A closer distance level is not inherently superior to one that is more distant. Powerful resonance and dissonance effects may arise from careful adjustment of distance levels during particular gameplay moments. Simulacra of digital interfaces like the Antares Database can place the player in close proximity to their in-game character without explicitly invoking the language of role-play. A far distance level combined with morally reprehensive in-game actions, for example, may emphasize a character's detachment from the moral implications of their actions.

Our analysis also contributes to a growing understanding of hybridity in board games. Hybridity, especially analog-digital hybridity, can make distance levels and changes between them visible to both scholars and players. Moments of friction between distance levels may be leveraged by designers to create intentionally jarring transitions, for instance. As studies of board games continue, scholars will benefit from a deeper understanding of how the relationships between players and characters shift during gameplay and how hybridity influences these relationships.

Works Cited

Games

Centell-Dunk, Kara; Hajek, Nathan: Descent: Legends of the Dark. United States: Fantasy Flight Games 2021.

Darrow, Charles; Magie, Elizabeth: Monopoly. United States: Parker Brothers 1935.

Don't Nod: Life is Strange. Japan: Square Enix 2015.

Hasbro: Monopoly: Super Electronic Banking. United States: Hasbro 2020.

Trzewiczek, Ignacy: Detective: A Modern Crime Board Game. United States: Portal Games 2018.

Texts

Baillie, Angus: The Case for Autoethnography in (My) Game Studies Research. Angus Baillie (blog), 03.06.2018. <https://angusbaillie.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/the-case-for-autoethnography-in-my-game-studies-research/> [07.09.2024]

Chinn, Christopher: Fictional Positioning 101. Deeper in the Game. 08.03.2008. <https://bankuei.wordpress.com/2008/03/08/fictional-positioning-101/> [07.09.2024]

Clüver, Claudius: Klassische, moderne und erzählerische Spiele: Zur Serialität von Gesellschaftsspielen. In: PAIDIA. Zeitschrift für Computerspielforschung. 22.03.2017. <https://paidia.de/klassische-moderne-und-erzahlerische-spiele-zur-serialitat-von-gesellschaftsspielen/> [29.06.2024]

Deshbandhu, Aditya: Capturing the Holistic: The Need for Autoethnography in Game Studies. Journal of Autoethnography, 4(2), 277–282. 2023.

Edwards, Ron: GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2. The Forge. 14.10.2001. <http://www.indie-rpgs.com/articles/3/> [07.09.2024]

Fine, Gary Alan: Shared Fantasy. Role-Playing Games as Social Worlds. Chicago & London: The University of Chicago Press 1983.

Goffman, Erving: Encounters. Two Studies in the Sociology of Interaction. England & Australia: Penguin University Books 1961.

Kankainen, Ville; Arjoranta, Jonne; Nummenmaa, Timo. Games as Blends: Understanding Hybrid Games. Journal of Virtual Reality and Broadcasting. Vol 14, No 4. p. 1-19. 2017.

Montola, Markus; Stenros, Jaakko; Waern; Annika: Pervasive Games. Theory and Design. Florida: CRC Press 2017.

Neitzel, Britta: Point of View und Point of Action – Eine Perspektive auf die Perspektive in Computerspielen. Berlin: Avinus 2013.

Neitzel, Britta: Wer bin ich? Thesen zur Avatar-Spieler Bindung. In: Neitzel, Britta; Bopp, Matthias; Nohr, Rolf F. (Hg.): „See? I’m real…“ Multidisziplinäre Zugänge zum Computerspiel am Beispiel von ‚Silent Hill‘. Medien'welten. Braunschweiger Schriften zur Medienkultur. Braunschweig: LIT 2010, p. 193– 212.

Redaktion PAIDIA (Hg.): »I’ll remember this« Funktion, Inszenierung und Wandel von Entscheidung im Computerspiel. Glückstadt: Verlag Werner Hülsbusch 2016.

Rogerson, Melissa; Sparrow, Lucy; Gibbs, Martin. Unpacking "Boardgames with Apps": The Hybrid Digital Boardgame Model. Proceedings of the 2021 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. p.1–17. 2021.

Stolee, Mirek: From Boards and Chits to Circuit Boards and Bits. Generation Analog 2021: Proceedings of the Tabletop Games and Education Conference. Carnegie Mellon University ETC Press 2023.

Wake, Paul: Token Gestures: Towards a Theory of Immersion in Analog Games. In: Analog Game Studies. 26.09.2019. <https://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/token-gestures-towards-a-theory-of-immersion-in-analog-games/> [29.06.2024]

Woods, Steward: Eurogames: The Design, Culture, and Play of Modern European Board Games. Jefferson, North Carolina & London: McFarland & Company 2012.

Feature Image

Photographed by Devi Acharya while playing Detective with other co-authors of this essay.

1. Darrow & Magie: Monopoly. 1935.[↩]
2. Centell-Dunk & Hajek: Descent. 2021.[↩]
3. Trzewiczek: Detective. 2018.[↩]
4. Baillie: The Case for Autoethnography. 2018. <https://angusbaillie.wordpress.com/2018/06/03/the-case-for-autoethnography-in-my-game-studies-research/> [07.09.2024][↩]
5. Deshbandhu: Capturing the Holistic. 2023, p. 277.[↩]
6. Neitzel: Wer bin ich? 2010, p. 193.[↩]
7. Neitzel: Wer bin ich? 2010, p. 201.[↩]
8. Fine: Shared Fantasy. 1983, p. 187.[↩]
9. Wake: Token Gestures. 2019. <https://analoggamestudies.org/2019/09/token-gestures-towards-a-theory-of-immersion-in-analog-games/> [29.06.2024][↩]
10. Woods: Eurogames. 2012, p. 35.[↩]
11. Edwards: GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2. 2001.[↩]
12. Chinn: Fictional Positioning 101. 2008[↩]
13. Goffman: Interaktion: Encounters. 1961, p. 92. [↩]
14. Neitzel: Point of View and Point of Action. 2013, p. 9.[↩]
15. In the context of Wake, one could argue that the Meeple functions as the Avatar. However, we prefer to adopt Neitzel's argument about the cursor (201) and view the Meeple as a specific tool rather than a universal tool like the Avatar. There are several reasons for this: First, it serves as an intradiegetic representation, which is better understood as a point of action. Furthermore, tokens are placed on the same level as resource markers. They serve to mark rather than to frame. However, this doesn't mean that tokens cannot also carry identifying characteristics, like being blue to represent their affiliation with the blue player. Nevertheless, they can be replaced by another object without the game losing its content.[↩]
16. Neitzel: Point of View and Point of Action. 2013, p. 17.[↩]
17. A direct mode of execution is always associated with time-covering narration, while the indirect mode can also take place in time-lapse narration. The mixture of both modes in particular leads to interesting narrative structures, which are examined in more detail in the following.[↩]
18. Edwards: GNS and Other Matters of Role-Playing Theory, Chapter 2. 2001.[↩]
19. Stolee: From Boards and Chits. 2023.[↩]
20. Rogerson, et al.: Unpacking "Boardgames with Apps". 2021, p. 1.[↩]
21. Kankainen et al.: Games as Blends. 2017, p. 4–5.[↩]
22. Kankainen et al.: Games as Blends. 2017, p. 12.[↩]
23. Hasbro: Monopoly: Super Electronic Banking. 2020.[↩]
24. Clüver: Klassische, moderne und erzählerische Spiele. 2017. <https://paidia.de/klassische-moderne-und-erzahlerische-spiele-zur-serialitat-von-gesellschaftsspielen/> [29.06.2024][↩]
25. Rogerson, et al: Unpacking "Boardgames with Apps". 2021, p. 7–9.[↩]
26. Trzewiczek: Detective. 2018, p. 10. [↩]
27. A similarly close distance level is reached when the players take notes on the case or visually map out their theories. These interactions with physical objects resemble those taken by actual detectives, just as the exchange of paper money aligns with the actions of actual bankers.[↩]
28. E.g. Montola et al.: Pervasive Games. 2017.[↩]
29. Although the players are assigned functional characters in the game which determine their token supply, these roles are not integrated into the narrative at any point, leading to their eventual oversight as the game progresses.[↩]
30. The players are set up both as a collective group and as individual decision-makers. They can only move collectively, but each player controls the influence markers associated with their function character. However, overall game observations show that the players collectively make decisions about the markers, attributing more influence to this setup. The lack of ambiguity of the pronoun “you” in the German version makes this even clearer, as the texts sometime refer to “ich” (i.e. a single person) and sometimes to “wir” (i.e. a group). However, the group is not further defined either, leaving it as abstract as the singular “you”.[↩]
31. Don't Nod: Life is Strange. 2015.[↩]
32. Redaktion PAIDIA: »I’ll remember this«. 2016.[↩]
33. Trzewiczek: Detective. 2018, p. 6. [↩]
34. Even if the use of Google Maps – unlike the use of the database embedded in the narrative – does not itself evoke performative acts, they are proactively carried out by the players, whereby they appropriate the real space as a fictional place by leaving traces such as comments and recommendations for other players, turning these locations into simulacrums as well. Even if Google Maps is part of the “real world”, it is intradiegetic PoA to the players. [↩]