Cardboard Ghosts

by Amabel Holland

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 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 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.

Genres: Games

124 pages, Hardcover

Published January 27, 2025

Reviews

[Hadleigh Moon · Rating 3 out of 5]

This book is about game design and using games to explore real world systems and to present arguments about them.

There are some very useful sections. The summary of the history of wargames is interesting. The author's exploration of using Bertol Brecht's 'distancing effect' to remove the emotional engagement of games to underline the argument of them is fascinating.

As was the following case study of her game 'This Guilty Land'. Which I have since purchased as a p&p from Wargame Vault. I cannot stress how valuable I found this and thank the author for her time and effort.

Amabel Holland is a talented writer and her likeable personality really shines through. There are a lot of autobiographical elements in this. Particularly around her journey of self discovery as a trans woman. As well as her development as a prolific and well respected designer and publisher. Which I found engrossing and in places quite moving.

Which perhaps paradoxically is what caused my disappointment. This book is quite a short at around 100 pages including footnotes etc. Presented as an academic text by CRC Press, I wish that the autobiographical elements had been de-emphasised in favour of more case studies. Particularly the many anecdotes of how the author knows this or that designer. At times it felt like this book was aimed at those the author knows established inside the industry; already aufait with how these systems work. More space dedicated to an explanation and exploration of how different mechanics may be employed to achieve different effects on the audience would have been very welcome in this volume.

I am very conflicted on the rating I have given for this. I enjoyed the book very much and took great pleasure in the author's prose and story telling but at the same time I am quite disappointed by the amount (by no means the quality) of technical design content in here. Which is the principle reason myself and I imagine most people would buy this.

[Andy Nealen · Rating 5 out of 5]

This is perhaps the most important and insightful writing on the art form to date. I can’t recommend this book enough.

[Sureyya · Rating 5 out of 5]

Most game reviews focus on whether the game is fun, the quality of the components, and what mechanisms are used in the game system. Amabel Holland argues that we can also look at what the game system teaches us about the real world and consider the political message of the game. She says that board games are particularly good at teaching about systems because they are not passive activities like reading or watching a movie and, unlike video games, players have to enforce the rules themselves and are so forced to learn how the system being simulated works.

Holland is an accomplished game designer and publisher and knows whereof she speaks. In this book, she analyses in detail her game This Guilty Land, touches on her game Doubt is Our Product, and also analyses Pax Pamir and John Company by Cole Wehrle, as well as others. In all of these games, one or all of the players take the roles of morally reprehensible actors in history and she looks at the perils involved in that. She does not want players to sympathize with slave owners in This Guilty Land or cigarette companies in Doubt. To alienate player from the roles they are playing, she makes the system of the game hard to work with, which also represents the conservatism of our legislative system. This makes the players aware of how our system of government makes positive change difficult and strongly favors the status quo. She also discusses how playing the bad guys illustrates our complicity in the current system, willing or unwilling.

Holland contrasts board games with movies, plays, and video games and mixes in anecdotes from her own life where they illustrate what she is saying. All this can sometimes make it confusing where a chapter is headed. But the train aways gets to the station eventually. The writing is clear and entertaining and she permits us to see a view of herself as a person, so the book is not dry and academic.

Holland does not approve of games which use these techniques but disagree with her politics. She says of Phil Eklund's games that they are "rooted in a euro-centric, pro-colonialist approach to history and science which is at best not up-to-date with modern scholarship, and at worst traffic in tropes that some - including myself - find grossly offensive." Eklunds games use many of the techniques she discusses in this book, but do so from a libertarian point of view. For instance in Pax Porfirianna, military troops are protection rackets that parasitize other people's businesses and American gun dealers profit off of violence in Mexico, which they also promote. This sounds to me like a criticism of the military-industrial complex.

Holland also discusses how the original version of Monopoly, The Landlord's Game design by Lizzie Magie transformed from a criticism of passive income under capitalism into capitalist wish fulfilment when it was published as Monopoly. She rightly points out that Parker Brothers screwed Magie financially and hid her authorship of the game. However she does not consider that the changes made to the game may have improved it (certainly they made it more popular.) Randomly distributing the properties does not sound as fun as choosing which ones to buy, and it reduces the number of meaningful decisions made in the game.

Holland comes from the simulationist wargame tradition of board gaming and does not consider how her views could apply to more abstract and less complicated games. I think it would be profitable to consider how the system in Catan teaches the idea that trade benefits both parties and protectionism just postpones the inevitable end of the game. Or that Ticket to Ride illustrates that adding train routes makes your whole network worth more. These are not politically neutral lessons. Traveling by train is less polluting than traveling by plane or car and easier to make carbon neutral.

Cardboard Ghosts is a must read for anyone interested in the analysis or discussion of board games. It lays out an important game designer's thought process in designing her games and the techniques that make her games work. It also makes a plea for the consideration of board games as art and argues that they have meaning, rather than just being logical puzzles. It is brief and well focused on its thesis. I think it also points out a way forward in creating the field of game criticism.

[Jan]

Fajne, parę ciekawych obserwacji.

[Jac · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is like one of the many topics that I would want to explore as a phd one day. Fascinating.

[Paul Harris · Rating 4 out of 5]

Some excellent insights in how to use boardgames as a tool for political change, by making players engage in systemic thinking.