Board games have not traditionally addressed sex and romance, focusing instead on wars, economies, and fantastical worlds. This piece will analyze three analog tabletop games about romance to assess how their rules and materials create positionalities for players to engage with the taboo topics of sex and romance.
Following the materially-informed games analyses of Jesper Juul and Ian Bogost, I will inventory structural aspects of these games to show how they represent different kinds of games: A casual, mass-market-style board game (Naomi Clark’s “Consentacle”); an independent tabletop role-playing game (Alex Roberts’ “Star Crossed”); and a cooperative strategy board game with storytelling elements (Jakob Jaskov’s “Fog of Love”). Each game embodies “game-ness” in a different way, and each one asks different things of its players. These games create a unique set of positions from which players can engage with sex and romance. Following Adrienne Shaw’s “Circles: Charmed and Magic,” I will discuss how these positions work to either queer or uphold normative romantic and sexual models, and how these games serve to foreclose upon or open possibilities for non-normative romances and sexualities.
The very existence of tabletop games about sex and romance is a move towards queering tabletop spaces, regardless of these games’ individual limitations. By focusing on these three games as case studies, I hope to demonstrate the structural possibilities for analog games to represent sex and romance, and suggest ways forward for more active engagement with this topic in this medium.
About the presenterGreg Loring-Albright
Greg Loring-Albright is a student in the Communications, Culture & Media PhD program at Drexel University in Philadelphia, PA. He makes tabletop and pervasive games, including a card game about Moby-Dick and a game about art theft that was played (only once) inside the Museum of the Art Institute of Chicago. His research interests include games-as-media, non-digital and pervasive games, and the materiality of board games. Find him on twitter @gregisonthego.