Leading expert Paul Booth explores the growth in popularity of board games today, and unpacks what it means to read a board game. What does a game communicate? How do games play us? And how do we decide which games to play and which are just wastes of cardboard? With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance of board games in the ever-evolving world of media.

Leading expert Paul Booth explores the growth in popularity of board games today, and unpacks what it means to read a board game. What does a game communicate? How do games play us? And how do we decide which games to play and which are just wastes of cardboard? With little scholarly research in this still-emerging field, Board Games as Media underscores the importance of board games in the ever-evolving world of media.

The Digital Age has created massive technological and disciplinary shifts in tabletop role-playing, increasing the appreciation of games like Dungeons & Dragons. Millions tune in to watch and listen to RPG players on podcasts and streaming platforms, while virtual tabletops connect online players. Such shifts elicit new scholarly perspectives. This collection includes essays on the transmedia ecology that has connected analog with digital and audio spaces. Essays explore the boundaries of virtual tabletops and how users engage with a variety of technology to further role-playing. Authors map the growing diversity of the TRPG fandom and detail how players interact with RPG-related podcasts. Interviewed are content creators like Griffin McElroy of The Adventure Zone podcast, Roll20 co-creator Nolan T. Jones, board game designers Nikki Valens and Isaac Childres and fan artists Tracey Alvarez and Alex Schiltz. These essays and interviews expand the academic perspective to reflect the future of role-playing.

The present book explores how modern board gaming and language teaching can be beneficially combined to achieve optimal impact. Modern board games have a lot to offer language learners and teachers, and they should play a much more significant role in what has been labelled "Content and Language Integrated Learning" or CLIL. Modern board games require cooperation, problem-solving, active discovery, interpretation and analysis. Most importantly, modern board games allow students to explore a hypothetical environment without the risk of language errors. The key ingredient of the present book is "game-based learning and teaching theory", or GBLTT, a theoretical framework which measures learning outcomes based on gaming and learning procedures. GBLTT is focused on balancing information and gameplay as well as putting a focus on the ability of each learner to retain language competence and to put their subject to realistic situations.

Despite the advent and explosion of videogames, boardgames--from fast-paced party games to intensely strategic titles--have in recent years become more numerous and more diverse in terms of genre, ethos and content. The growth of gaming events and conventions such as Essen Spiel, Gen Con and the UK Games EXPO, as well as crowdfunding through sites like Kickstarter, has diversified the evolution of game development, which is increasingly driven by fans, and boardgames provide an important glue to geek culture. In academia, boardgames are used in a practical sense to teach elements of design and game mechanics. Game studies is also recognizing the importance of expanding its focus beyond the digital. As yet, however, no collected work has explored the many different approaches emerging around the critical challenges that boardgaming represents. In this collection, game theorists analyze boardgame play and player behavior, and explore the complex interactions between the sociality, conflict, competition and cooperation that boardgames foster. Game designers discuss the opportunities boardgame system designs offer for narrative and social play. Cultural theorists discuss boardgames' complex history as both beautiful physical artifacts and special places within cultural experiences of play.

This book constitutes the refereed proceedings of the 11th International Conference on Videogame Sciences and Arts, VJ 2019, held in Aveiro, Portugal, in November 2019. The 20 full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 50 submissions. They were organized in topical sections named: Games and Theories; Table Boards; eSports; Uses and Methodologies; Game Criticism.

On the Fringes of Literature and Digital Media Culture offers a polyphonic account of mutual interpenetrations of literature and new media. Shifting its focus from the personal to the communal and back again, the volume addresses such individual experiences as immersion and emotional reading, offers insights into collective processes of commercialisation and consumption of new media products and explores the experience and mechanisms of interactivity, convergence culture and participatory culture. Crucially, the volume also shows convincingly that, though without doubt global, digital culture and new media have their varied, specifically local facets and manifestations shaped by national contingencies. The interplay of the common subtext and local colour is discussed by the contributors from Eastern Europe and the Western world. Contributors are: Justyna Fruzińska, Dirk de Geest, Maciej Jakubowiak, Michael Joyce, Kinga Kasperek, Barbara Kaszowska-Wandor, Aleksandra Małecka, Piotr Marecki, Łukasz Mirocha, Aleksandra Mochocka, Emilya Ohar, Mariusz Pisarski, Anna Ślósarz, Dawn Stobbart, Jean Webb, Indrė Žakevičienė, Agata Zarzycka.