Hybrid Play Experience and Design in Tabletop Gaming

In times of ubiquitous digitality and pervasive media networks, a materially grounded leisure culture of contemporary tabletop gaming is flourishing. This includes the play and culture of modern board games, tabletop role-playing games, and miniature games. While tabletop gamers often herald tangible aesthetics and co-located face to face sociality among the key pleasures of this form of leisure, the tabletop gaming hobby is in many ways shaped by recent techno–cultural developments.

Especially, the past decade has been a period of blurring boundaries between physical and digital experiences in games and leisure, but also more broadly in the contempary West. Everyday practices and social interaction are engaged increasingly through online platforms, shaping the ways in which people experience leisure and life in general. The blending of physical and digital elements in contemporary tabletop gaming practices results in patterns of hybrid play which collate together a variety of tangible and intangible experiences on the physical–digital continuum, characterizing everyday life in the networked society.

This dissertation is an exploratory study, situated in the interdisciplinary field of game studies, with a diverse array of methods and theoretical perspectives. The multi-method approach used in the work is a flexible combination of social– scientific and design research methods. It is supported by a collection of synergistic theories drawn from several related fields, including game studies, media studies, consumer culture studies, and leisure studies. A combination of diverse theoretical perspectives throughout the four articles of the dissertation allows for a comprehensive, multi-angle exploration of hybrid play experiences and design in contemporary tabletop gaming.

The work largely relies on fundamental research on (tabletop game) player experiences. The intention of this was to create understanding on the roles of digital technology and online media practices in contemporary tabletop gaming leisure. Understanding the changing environment of (tabletop game) play in this critical period is among the central goals of this work. However, the study was conducted with a future-oriented design ethnographical ethos, wherein the exploration was carried out to inform and inspire the design of future hybrid play solutions. As a result, I have contextualized hybrid play to a wider aesthetic and cultural “postix digital” paradigm, referring to the way that content has taken the central stage in culture after digital technology has become an inseparable part of everyday life.

I see hybrid play as a temporal phenomenon describing this critical period of converging media and the fusing of analog and digital technologies, and the resulting affective and aesthetic experiences. I investigate the matter from both theoretical and practical perspectives, proposing a set of core principles for hybrid boardgame design, while promoting an understanding of hybrid games and hybrid play as experiential, rather than technological categories.

The results illustrate how experiential assemblages of physical and digital elements in tabletop gaming open an environment for meaningful tabletop gaming experiences beyond the act of playing the game, and how both the material and immaterial cultures of tabletop gaming spread on a global scale through sociocultural hybrid play engagements in networked media. By promoting this approach, I challenge a common approach in games research which emphasizes the gameplay situation over contextual game experiences.

In this, the work highlights sociomaterial interactions in the hybrid media ecosystem of tabletop gaming as a source for hybrid play experiences, and further earmarks key opportunities in the resulting hybrid play design space of tabletop games. Finally, the focus on tabletop gaming in the dissertation is merely an example of postdigital developments in contemporary culture, and the observations made in the work hopefully have wider implications for understanding the entanglements of physical and digital in gaming and leisure experiences, but also more broadly in contemporary networked media cultures.