Cardboard Ghosts

Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems

Amabel Holland

$103

Paperback

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English

CRC Press
27 January 2025

Art & Architecture; Digital animation; Games development & programming

Series: CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design

Games can be used to model systems because they are themselves systems. Video games handle this under the hood and teach you as you play, but because board games are operated manually, and require the player to understand the system beforehand, they can be a valuable tool for recognizing, understanding, and critiquing real-world systems, including systems of oppression. These systems, often unseen and misunderstood, haunt our world. Board games turn these ghosts into pieces of cardboard we can see, touch, and manipulate.

Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems explores both the capabilities and limitations of overtly political board games to model systems and make arguments. Two major approaches are considered and contrasted: one, built around immersion and identification, creates empathy. The other, applying the Verfremdungseffekt to distance the player from the game, creating space for reflection. Uncomfortable questions of player roles and complicity when modelling oppressive systems are examined.

Throughout this book, board game designer Amabel Holland draws connections to computer games, literature, theatre, television, music, film, and her own life, framing board games as an achingly human art form, albeit one still growing into its full potential. Anyone interested in that potential, or in the value of political art in today’s world, will find many provocative and enriching ideas within.

Key Features:

Surveys the history of commercial board games as a polemical and persuasive form Explores games existing at the edges of the industry that push the boundaries of what games can do and be Grapples with the ethical and moral considerations of simulating real-world horrors Provides a case study of the author’s influential game This Guilty Land

Lively prose and personal anecdotes makes complicated theory digestible for a wide audience

By: Amabel Holland
Imprint: CRC Press
Country of Publication: United Kingdom
Dimensions: Height: 229mm, Width: 152mm,
Weight: 230g
ISBN: 9781032813448
ISBN 10: 103281344X
Series: CRC Press Guides to Tabletop Game Design
Pages: 114
Publication Date: 27 January 2025
Audience: Professional and scholarly , Undergraduate
Format: Paperback
Publisher's Status: Active

Amabel Holland is a board game designer, developer, and publisher, and in those capacities is responsible for over a hundred board games. Much of her work is experimental, concerned either with the potential of games as political art, or with the nature of games as cultural artifacts. According to the New Yorker, she is “widely considered one of today’s most innovative game designers.” She’s not so sure about that, but she’ll take it. A lifelong resident of the Detroit area, in her free time she creates video essays about games and their potential.

Reviews for Cardboard Ghosts: Using Physical Games to Model and Critique Systems

""If you're into understanding systems or helping other people understand systems—especially systems of oppression, you should definitely check this one out. Highly recommended.” – Matt Leacock, designer of Pandemic