Who's in the Game?: Identity and Intersectionality in Classic Board Games (Studies in Gaming) - Softcover

Terri Toles Patkin (author) D183

Softcover

ISBN 10: 1476676917 ISBN 13: 9781476676913

Publisher: McFarland, 2020

Synopsis

Some board games--like Candy Land, Chutes & Ladders, Clue, Guess Who, The Game of Life, Monopoly, Operation and Payday--have popularity spanning generations. But over time, updates to games have created significantly different messages about personal identity and evolving social values. Games offer representations of gender, sexuality, race, ethnicity, religion, age, ability and social class that reflect the status quo and respond to social change.

Using popular mass-market games, this rhetorical assessment explores board design, game implements (tokens, markers, 3-D elements) and playing instructions. This book argues the existence of board games as markers of an ever-changing sociocultural framework, exploring the nature of play and how games embody and extend societal themes and values.

About this title

About the Authors

Terri Toles Patkin is a professor of communication at Eastern Connecticut State University. Her research program is eclectic, spanning time frames from prehistoric cave art to social media, and her interest in board games emerges from her long-standing examination of messages encoded in popular culture artifacts.

Matthew Wilhelm Kapell teaches American studies, anthropology, and writing at Pace University in New York.

Edition details

• Publisher: McFarland
• Publication date: 2020
• Language: English
• ISBN 10: 1476676917
• ISBN 13: 9781476676913
• Binding: Paperback
• Number of pages: 249