Category Archives: board game

Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space

Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space

 will be released tomorrow by MIT Press.

Dr Juan Hiriart and I have a chapter in it:

Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture.

Full reference:

E. Champion and J. Hiriart. Workshopping Board Games for Space Place and Culture. In: Playing Place: Board Games, Popular Culture, Space, edited by C. Randl and D. M. Lasansky. MIT Press 2023. ISBN: 9780262047838.

Game Design Prototyping Workshop

Prototyping games in a workshop format..just published a short paper on a “Game Design Prototyping Workshop” with Simon McCallum in Wellington NZ @ACM_ISS 2022 (also trying out Kudos, in partnership with ACM) https://www.growkudos.com/publications/10.1145%25252F3532104.3571472/reader

Game Design Prototyping Workshop, November 2022, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery), DOI: 10.1145/3532104.3571472.

Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?

I am very close to submitting to a publisher the edited book (with Dr Juan Hiriart, University of Salford, UK) “Assassin’s Creed in the Classroom: History’s Playground or a Stab in the Dark?” with 18 writers from history, archaeology, architecture, art history, classics, game design, and education. Thanks to Maxime Durand and Ubisoft for helping getting the party started.

“Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture” revised chapter, authored with Juan Hiriart, for “Playing Place” (edited by Medina Lasansky and Chad Randl, MIT Press) sent off today. Each chapter has a 1000 word limit, I believe. Took me some time to trim this! Great to work with Juan on a chapter, I think our different strengths blend well. When (or if?) the book appears on MIT Press I will add another post, the list of authors and topics looks really good, possibly essential reading if you are into boardgames, or are not, but want to know why so many people are …

Workshopping Board Games for Space, Place, and Culture

Conveying built heritage values and historical knowledge through boardgame design may seem an odd decision. Communicating space, place, and culture through play is a challenge let alone through a medium inherently incapable of evoking the direct experience of inhabitation and architecture as a spatial art. Boardgames are engaging, social, quick to make, and fast to learn, intuitive or nuanced. From the complex to the spontaneous, boardgames can be effective, visceral tools for cultural immersion, challenging cultural assumptions and preconceptions, encouraging discussion and collaboration between players, provoking insight and enjoyment with simple props or intricate rules.

The following explains our experience hosting participative design workshops with historians, archaeologists, and heritage professionals. In small groups of three to four people, participants determine the design decisions, discussing and solving problems that often arise in an iterative process where historical research, game design, and play-testing both blend and butt heads.