The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture 9781479818419

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The Privilege of Play

Postmillennial Pop

General Editors: Karen Tongson and Henry Jenkins Puro Arte: Filipinos on the Stages of Empire Lucy Mae San Pablo Burns

The Sonic Color-­line: Race and the Cultural Politics of Listening Jennifer Lynn Stoever

Spreadable Media: Creating Value and Meaning in a Networked Culture Henry Jenkins, Sam Ford, and Joshua Green

Diversión: Play and Popular Culture in Cuban America Albert Sergio Laguna

Media Franchising: Creative License and Collaboration in the Culture Industries Derek Johnson Your Ad Here: The Cool Sell of Guerrilla Marketing Michael Serazio Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities Mark Anthony Neal From Bombay to Bollywood: The Making of a Global Media Industry Aswin Punathambekar A Race So Different: Performance and Law in Asian America Joshua Takano Chambers-­Letson Surveillance Cinema Catherine Zimmer

Antisocial Media: Anxious Labor in the Digital Economy Greg Goldberg Open TV: Innovation beyond Hollywood and the Rise of Web Television Aymar Jean Christian Missing More Than Meets the Eye: Special Effects and the Fantastic Transmedia Franchise Bob Rehak Playing to the Crowd: Musicians, Audiences, and the Intimate Work of Connection Nancy K. Baym Old Futures: Speculative Fiction and Queer Possibility Alexis Lothian

Anti-­Fandom: Dislike and Hate in the Modernity’s Ear: Listening to Race and Digital Age Edited by Melissa A. Click Gender in World Music Roshanak Kheshti

The New Mutants: Superheroes and the Radical Imagination of American Comics Ramzi Fawaz Restricted Access: Media, Disability, and the Politics of Participation Elizabeth Ellcessor

Social Media Entertainment: The New Industry at the Intersection of Hollywood and Silicon Valley Stuart Cunningham and David Craig Video Games Have Always Been Queer Bonnie Ruberg

The Power of Sports: Media and Spectacle in American Culture Michael Serazio The Dark Fantastic: Race and the Imagination from Harry Potter to the Hunger Games Ebony Elizabeth Thomas The Race Card: From Gaming Technologies to Model Minorities Tara Fickle Open World Empire: Race, Erotics, and the Global Rise of Video Games Christopher B. Patterson The Content of Our Caricature: African American Comic Art and Political Belonging Rebecca Wanzo Stories of the Self: Life Writing after the Book Anna Poletti Hip Hop Heresies: Queer Aesthetics in New York City Shanté Paradigm Smalls The Revolution Will Be Hilarious: Comedy for Social Change and Civic Power Caty Borum Digital Masquerade: Feminist Rights and Queer Media in China Jia Tan The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture Aaron Trammell

The Privilege of Play A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture

Aaron Trammell

NEW YORK UNIVERSIT Y PRESS New York

N EW YOR K U N I V ER SI T Y PR E S S New York www.nyupress.org © 2023 by New York University All rights reserved References to Internet websites (URLs) were accurate at the time of writing. Neither the author nor New York University Press is responsible for URLs that may have expired or changed since the manuscript was prepared. Please contact the Library of Congress for Cataloging-in-Publication data. ISBN: 9781479818396 (hardback) ISBN: 9781479818402 (paperback) ISBN: 9781479818419 (library ebook) ISBN: 9781479818433 (consumer ebook) New York University Press books are printed on acid-­free paper, and their binding materials are chosen for strength and durability. We strive to use environmentally responsible suppliers and materials to the greatest extent possible in publishing our books. Manufactured in the United States of America 10 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1 Also available as an ebook

Contents

List of Figures ix Preface xi Introduction: On Geeks, Whiteness, and Games

1

Part I. Beginnings 1. Model Trains and Networks of Privilege

27

2. Avalon Hill’s Race Problem

51

Part II. Networks 3. The Hobby Diplomacy Scene 4. The Alarums & Excursions Community and Belonging

79 109

Part III. Mainstream 5. Geek Culture Goes Digital

135

6. Hobby Games Today

155

Conclusion

177

Acknowledgments 189 Notes 193 Index 211 About the Author 221

List of Figures

Figure 1.1. “The Silver Plate Road” in Model Railroader 7, no. 12 (1940): 38. Figure 1.2. “The Silver Plate Road” in Model Railroader 7, no. 7 (1940): 38. Figure 1.3. “The Silver Plate Road” in Model Railroader 6, no. 10 (1939): 40. Figure 1.4. Model Railroader 7, no. 4 (1940): 30–­31. Figure 1.5. Advertisement for Atlas model train tracks from Model Railroader 19, no. 1 (1952): 62. Figure 2.1. Cover image from the Avalon Hill General 2, no. 4 (1965). Figure 2.2. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 8, no. 3 (1971). Figure 2.3. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 11, no. 1 (1974). Figure 2.4. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 17, no. 3 (1980). Figure 2.5. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 20, no. 5 (1984). Figure 2.6. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 21, no. 5 (1985). Figure 3.1. Example of the Diplomacy visualization constructed with CartoDB, used here to display metadata for Xenogogic. Figure 3.2. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1963. Figure 3.3. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1968. Figure 3.4. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1973. Figure 3.5. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1978. Figure 3.6. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1983. Figure 4.1. Comedic banner framing Eney’s Courtesan class.

35 35 35 36 39 52 70 70 71 71 71 83 84 85 85 85 85 120

ix

x | List of Figures

Figure 4.2. Advancement titles for progressing in Eney’s Courtesan class. 121 Figure 4.3. Eney’s rules for “makin out” in Dungeons & Dragons. 123 Figure 4.4. Illustration by S. C. McIntosh published as the cover of Samuel Konkin III’s Clear Ether within Alarums & 125 Excursions 19. Figure 6.1. Tom (left) and Eric (right) discuss racism on the Dice Tower. 157 Figure 6.2. Old Board Game Geek logo (left) compared to the 163 new Board Game Geek logo (right). Figure 6.3. Map depicting Asmodee’s corporate holdings at Gen Con 2019. 167

Preface

My introduction to hobby games was, without a doubt, Magic: The Gathering. I had played Dungeons & Dragons with my cousin and friends, but for whatever reason the game never got its hooks in me quite like Magic did. Sure I played both, but the collectable aspect of Magic encouraged me to seek out new stores, new people to play with, and new magazines and web forums to learn from. The game showed me how deep one could fall into hobby games and the intricate networks that would eagerly support and encourage this. I grew up mixed (half Black and half Jewish) in the white suburbs of New Jersey near the Quick Stop that Kevin Smith would make famous in 1994’s Clerks. Although race rarely became an explicit conversation among me and my peers, it was something that the other kids at school would frequently ask me about. To them, I looked exotic, vaguely ethnic with my goofy fro and golden skin. I also wore glasses because I had a crossed eye from a botched surgery in my youth. So, yeah . . . I was a nerd. My friends and I would cluster together during lunch, forming a barricade between us and the other kids in the room. Here we made a safe space to disappear into our fantasies and play Magic with one another safe from the teasing eyes of the rest of our peers. The story above, although my own, is also somewhat common. Hobby games becoming a refuge for nerdy kids is somewhat of a trope. Paul Feig devoted an episode of 1999’s Freaks and Geeks to it, it is the conceit of the infamous 1982 Tom Hanks vehicle Mazes and Monsters, and it has even been explored in a 2011 episode of Community (that has been since been removed from Netflix and Hulu due to the use of Blackface). For many nerdy kids, hobby games are a lifeline—­a space of belonging set apart from the bullying and turbulent dynamics they encounter in their day-­to-­day lives. Getting through middle school meant doubling down on the hobby games I enjoyed most—­getting lost in the pictures, stories, and strategies that surrounded Magic. xi

xii | Preface

My interest in Magic catapulted me into a variety of spaces. I would attend tournaments with my friends at local hobby stores and college campuses. With friends and family I would seek out hobby shops when traveling to other towns—­t he Compleat Strategist in New York City and Head Games in Princeton. Even though I was a shy kid, I could get over my bashfulness in order to make friends, play games, and trade cards with the players hanging around these shops. I came to understand intuitively that hobby games were more than the cards that we played with. Instead, they were the networks of people I met along the way. I remember how my interest in hobby games slowly transitioned into a social interest in communicating with others who were also participating in the scene. For all of the amazing friends I made playing Magic as a kid, there were some things that I had to deliberately ignore to persevere in these networks. I have a visceral reaction still today when I remember the awkward pauses in conversation that would follow the casual racism in conversation. My blood ran cold whenever the conversations around me would use coded language like “urban” and “ghetto” to discriminate against the kind of person who wasn’t welcome in the space. Welcome as I may have been, it was wholly contingent on my ability to engage in white-­passing behavior. To some extent I internalized this hatred. Despite my participation, I never felt like I truly belonged in these communities. Even though hobby games remained my space of refuge, I also felt like an outsider in the hobby communities I inhabited. This book explores, in large part, this simple contradiction. It illustrates how geek culture is the product of both racial and class-­based segregation in America. I explain how white flight defined the contours of the networks that hobbyists moved within and how clumsy and often unintentional microaggressions kept minoritized people out. Despite this, these networks were tremendously supportive for the geeks who inhabited them. They were genuine spaces of refuge that supported the folks who moved within them. Even in urban spaces, geeks operated as apostles of white suburban culture—­they developed enclaves where they could socialize within their networks unfettered. In high school and college I all but abandoned hobby games. I came to recognize the hurtful aspects of the cultures of white masculinity that pervaded the network. Even though I still enjoyed many of the games I

Preface | xiii

had grown to love, I saw myself distinctly as an outsider window shopping in a community that would always be somewhat hostile to me, my friends, and my family. No event portended this; I just grew away from the scene and sought community elsewhere. I have endeavored to write this book with the utmost appreciation and respect for the hobby communities that I came up in. Although I am largely critical of the white masculine culture that these communities have incubated, this criticism comes from a place of love, understanding, and care. I hope that readers of this book find the history that unfolds within it both evenhanded and fair as I explain how the white identity of hobbyists was constructed over the course of the twentieth century and why the hobby game community’s present push to diversify is so exciting. At the very least, I hope this book helps some other goofy kid feel more welcome in the hobby networks of tomorrow.

Introduction On Geeks, Whiteness, and Games

The 2002 board game Puerto Rico asks players to cultivate sugar, tobacco, coffee, and indigo plantations as they develop the island of Puerto Rico. Players work their plantations with small brown disks that represent colonists. These disks come from cardboard boats that are filled every round. Puerto Rico isn’t an obscure game. It was the top-­ranked game between 2003 and 2008 on the site Board Game Geek. Its enduring popularity marks it as one of the most influential board games ever designed. Since its publication, the game has vexed fans seeking to redeem it from the obvious subtext: in Puerto Rico you play a slave owner exploiting the labor of your slaves for pleasure and profit. Countless threads on online forums have grappled with the racial subtext of Puerto Rico. One Board Game Geek user wrote that they were worried about sharing the game with a Black friend.1 The game’s defenders, trying to whitewash history, circulated a popular argument that Puerto Rico abolished slavery in 1873, so it was inaccurate to view the game as a slave plantation simulator.2 Others still were simply dumbfounded. In a Reddit thread titled “Puerto Rico the racist game,” a user described their discomfort with encountering the game in a board game café.3 Candidly, a representative from the game’s US publisher Rio Grande Games said that racial representation in Puerto Rico is one of the top customer service topics that the company fields.4 These discussions speak volumes about the discomfort geeks have about confronting their own racism and how ardently they protect their own whiteness. Robin DiAngelo, author of White Fragility, claims this defensiveness makes the problem only worse because “we then feel the need to defend our character rather than explore the inevitable racial prejudices we have absorbed so that we might change them. In this way, our misunderstanding about what prejudice is protects it.”5 In the exam1

2 | Introduction

ple above, someone glibly suggested that the player with a Black friend simply paint the colonist tokens green. This suggestion was followed by another: just replace the colonist tokens with “small plastic statues,” as if the problem simply lay in representing Blackness with brown tokens. Later the thread devolved into a conversation that interrogated the taste of the Black friend in question. Were they offended by the Black “robber” token in Settlers of Catan?6 Was the friend educated enough to recognize that Puerto Rico offers a historically accurate simulation of the slave trade? Richard Ham, a famous board game reviewer who was once the creative director of The Sims, offered the penultimate comment. He noted that the colonist tokens, unlike slaves, could work in the local university or other town businesses. For this reason, “doesn’t that make us a bit racist for just assuming that the tokens represent slaves because they’re brown coloured?”7 The original poster eventually explained that their friend said that the colonist tokens “didn’t bother him,” but regardless he wouldn’t buy the game because he had no friends to play with.

“The Hobby” Welcome to the world of hobby games, where the exchange described above is typical. Tabletop gamers refer to themselves as hobbyists and gaming as “the hobby.” When invoked, the hobby is meant to signify status. Unlike other hobbies like hiking, quilting, reading, or even playing video games, no singular phrase quite carries the same connotation as the hobby does in tabletop gaming circles. It is royal in its usage, implying that “we” share the same hobby, despite its history of white masculine expectations. In this sense, the hobby also represents the collective sensibilities that gatekeep minoritized people from participation. For some, the hobby signifies identity and belonging—­a nudge and wink signaling common ground between those in the know. The hobby signals to readers, viewers, and interlocuters that one is speaking to another like-­minded geek. The hobby is used to describe more than just hobby games; the terminology is a mainstay in all hobby communities that focus on male interests. Its gendered connotations stem from a historical expectation that the interests and passion projects of women are trivial, while the work of men is important. Thus hobby games, ham radio, remote con-

Introduction | 3

trol cars, and even backpacking are often referred to by hobbyists as the hobby, especially when there are gestures toward “serious” participation within it. Take, for example, the first chapter’s focus on model railroads in the early twentieth century. Railroad hobbyists used the definitive to describe their pastime because it implied that the men tinkering in their basements with toy trains were engaged in a broader, more important, and collective project. The hobby is shorthand for participation in a network of hobbyists, networks that have historically championed the norms of white male privilege. Because Black people and other minoritized folk have historically been excluded from spaces of leisure, the networks of hobbyists that this book examines have also been predominantly white. Thus we must ask what the nature of participation within the hobby is and whether hobbyists today have been able to challenge the xenophobic norms that defined it throughout the twentieth century. In this book I use “the hobby” to refer to hobby games specifically, but I also generalize within the statement the many other white masculine hobbies that have followed a similar historical arc. Hobby games include board games, card games, and role-­playing games. They are produced by a cottage industry that scrapes by on razor-­ thin profit margins and distributes them almost exclusively through a network of comic book, toy, book, and hobby stores. Unlike big-­budget games, hobby games are often passion projects of their developers and players. As such, these games have historically offered designers a freewheeling and open canvas on which to innovate. But the price of this creativity has been a tunnel vision within the hobby that perpetuates unjust racial dynamics. Puerto Rico demonstrates how the values of whiteness pervade the hobby game scene. It highlights how the invisible and taken-­for-­granted racial norms that circulate between players and designers exclude people of color from the hobby. In this book I argue that the story of hobby games in North America helps us to understand the normalization of whiteness in digital media today. Digital media, often lauded for its bottom-­up participatory nature, was developed from the tools, skills, and values incubated in hobby communities. While we know that these communities were keen to embrace a rugged, scrappy, and inventive kind of masculinity, the less told story is how the cultural norms of whiteness defined the social milieu. Indeed, just as the early internet was defined by stories of lonely white

4 | Introduction

men reaching out to form community over telephone wires, the story of hobbyists began with lonely white men forging community through the mail. The contribution here is historical. This book tells the story of how the hobby was shaped by invisible norms of whiteness. In the process, I highlight how the ideals, dreams, and practices of hobbyists inform the landscape of digital culture today. Although I focus predominantly on hobby games, the findings are meant to be grokked more broadly. Although certainly every hobby scene is different and privy to its own idiosyncratic makeup and tastes, this book focuses on hobby games because of their adjacency to and influence on the tech industry. The hobbyists whom this book follows were cut from the same cloth as those who went on to develop the personal computer, the World Wide Web, and the many digital games released on these platforms. All of these men engaged in the serious leisure necessary to groom the hobby as a space of white male privilege. There is a pragmatic reason for the focus on hobbyists as well. Given the notoriously white male constitution of the tech industry, this book may offer some explanatory power of how this came to be and how powerfully rooted these demographics are within invisible network structures. I focus on hobby games specifically because of their adjacency to the tech sector and also because they are generally understudied and misunderstood in game studies today.8 This book provides a foundation for better understanding the invisible networks of privilege the white men who run the tech sector have benefitted from and makes legible the profuse impact of hobby games on digital games today. At the very least, it tells the story of hobby games in the twentieth century and how they influenced the attitudes and values of a generation of geeks today.

Geek Culture Geeks see themselves as outsiders, a dynamic influenced by a sedimented set of historical decisions made by white men while cultivating their community. This book largely reads the geek and the hobbyist as though they were cut from the same cloth—­geeks are hobbyists and hobbyists are geeks. This is because it is an extreme interest in hobbies that defines geekiness. Throughout this book, I use a definition of

Introduction | 5

geek identity that privileges its outsider status, engagement with popular media, and tech savviness. I argue that an interest in these domains strongly correlates with the conditions of one’s upbringing, very often the interests of white men who grew up in the suburbs. The story of hobby games connects the decisions, desires, and culture of white men in North America to digital geek culture today. The influence of geek culture is wide-­ranging. To understand it, we must begin with the ideas that were fostered by the hobby game community. In particular, this book traces how white privilege—­an invisible and taken-­for-­granted dimension of social influence—­has historically afforded hobbyists social, technical, and cultural capital. I conceptualize white privilege as distinct from the related concept of hegemonic masculinity—­the cultural system that normalizes a series of masculine ideas that maintain patriarchy. Hegemonic masculinity and white privilege overlap in the history of hobby games and yield a set of seemingly paradoxical values. Geeks see themselves as outsiders because they have been empowered by white privilege yet feel excluded from the domain of hegemonic masculinity to which they feel entitled. Geeks are tech savvy because these skills are often shared within a sphere of supportive masculinity, yet they often feel stuck in their careers because they position themselves as outsiders and thus miss many of the opportunities afforded to those who have embraced a typical white sociality. In other words, white privilege and hegemonic masculinity have incubated the outsider identity of geeks. Rather than take an outsider status for granted, it may be constructive to start by thinking about those working in the tech sector as insiders. Their insider identity is informed by the normalization of whiteness and hegemonic masculinity. Kishonna Gray, Safiya Noble, and Ruha Benjamin have argued that the insiders who constitute the tech industry embrace a culture of white masculinity.9 This book looks to hobby games to ask if this definition alone is adequate. In order to recuperate a more complete genealogical understanding of white masculinity in geek culture, I argue that we must understand how the hobbyist discourse of casting oneself as an outsider has produced a cultural dynamic unique to digital culture’s most conservative fringes. Through such a genealogy between hobbyists and geeks, this book shows the complex and often counterintuitive ways that racialized subjectivity is produced,

6 | Introduction

normalized, and made invisible. My historical work shows that unlike the Irish—­who cast themselves as white in order to gain social privilege in America’s racist society10—­hobbyists view themselves through an insidiously postracial lens, choosing instead to understand themselves as outsiders. The denial of white male privilege established by hobbyists continues to define the sociotechnical space of geek culture today, even as it attempts to embrace a fuller sense of diversity. Scholarship on geek culture often situates privilege merely as a problem of masculinity. In Raising the Stakes, T. L. Taylor investigates why geek masculinity is a dominant cultural dynamic in eSports.11 Salter and Blodgett extend her arguments to television viewing and popular culture to argue that the geek identity contains the toxic and hurtful dynamics.12 For this very reason, Suzanne Scott positions the figure of the “geek girl” as challenging the hegemonically masculine space of geek identity.13 While this scholarship charts a path forward for understanding the politics of geek identity in the contemporary cultural milieu, I believe that it tells only half the story. To understand the other half, we must better investigate the racialized aspects of geek culture. The above work often implies that “masculinity” equates to white masculinity. The geeks described by these authors are aggressive, vulgar, and condescending specifically because they resent being cast as outsiders. They resent not being given the social advantages typically afforded to insiders. Yet they are successful because the cultural dynamics of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity have allowed them to thrive.

White Privilege White flight set the stage for the politics of white privilege to thrive. White privilege is often defined as a set of concrete material advantages that are socially given to white people. As Sara Ahmed suggests in The Cultural Politics of Emotion, white privilege is an orientation. It is a way of imagining one’s relationship to others in the world.14 Explained differently, geeks experience white privilege as a promise of material lived conditions that are owed to them. The outsider identity of geeks is informed by a desire for and an orientation toward white privilege. White flight exemplifies a mass movement toward white privilege. Despite this movement, the ideals of white privilege are more frequently

Introduction | 7

believed than achieved. Geeks pursue white privilege in the domains of design and imagination. The outsider politics of geek identity map almost perfectly onto the conservative politics of white communities that migrated from urban centers to the suburbs in the 1950s and 1960s. On a national level, this migration was driven by constitutional laws governing fair housing and public space. Laws like the Fair Housing Act and rulings like Brown v. Board of Education (1954) were vilified by white communities. They then positioned themselves outside of the egalitarian mainstream of politics by adopting libertarian rhetoric of “freedom.”15 Likewise, geeks also started to see themselves as outsiders with interests beyond the mainstream. And as chapter 4 of this book demonstrates, the demography of geek identity maps onto that of white flight. This alignment suggests that the geek’s outsider identity may have been influenced by kitchen-­table rhetoric that imagined white community as occupying a similar position as the state. Because geek identity emerged from white suburbia, the history of white flight in the United States helps us understand the idiosyncrasies of hobbyist identity. In 1948, President Harry S. Truman ordered the US Army to desegregate, a process slowed by internal pushback from military leadership. Eventually, in 1954, the army was completely desegregated. The same year the Supreme Court unanimously ruled against segregation in public schools in Brown v. Board of Education. The Civil Rights Act followed a decade later, prohibiting discrimination by race, color, religion, sex, or national origin. These institutional reforms set the stage for 1968’s Fair Housing Act, which outlawed segregationist tactics, including publishing advertisements indicating a racial preference, refusing to rent or sell housing to specific groups of people, restricting access to community services, and intimidating or forcing nonwhite people to vacate their housing. These institutional reforms toward a more equitable nation were the result of US civil rights activism, almost exclusively described by the mass media as “race riots.”16 White flight describes the mass migration of white people from urban centers to the suburbs following desegregation. Academics’ identification of its causes was initially spotty, uneven, and—­by today’s standards—­problematic. In his early writing, Morton Grodzins described it as a phenomenon of tolerance—­something that happens when

8 | Introduction

a white population loses patience with their nonwhite neighbors.17 This framing supported a common narrative that desegregationist policy was enacted as a way to address radical segregationist perspectives, like those held by the KKK. Grodzins’s narrative positioned white communities who left urban centers as merely the victims of an overreaching federal policy agenda. Kevin Kruse criticized this policy-­driven history of white flight for considering only radical segregationists, as opposed to the grassroots dynamics that organized the social fabric of massive white migration.18 For Kruse, the dynamics of white flight and white supremacy cut far deeper—­driven by everyday acts of racism that still constitute the fabric of many white communities. This book elaborates on Kruse’s hypothesis by offering examples of how grassroots hobbyist organizing parroted many of the social dynamics of white flight that he observed. For instance, Kruse describes how many “conservative” politics were informed by grassroots media and radio broadcasts that modeled techniques for masking white racism under a veneer of libertarian politics that advocated for personal freedoms. Importantly, freedom was a “dog whistle” for white-­dominated spaces and policies. Hobbyists shared similar practices and visions of freedom within their community. They sent messages through the post office, advocating for their personal liberties, as they pondered the next move of their Diplomacy games. White flight was the single most important factor in catalyzing what this book describes as a “hobbyist subjectivity.” As this book shows, the invisible rhetoric of white flight, reflected in geek subjectivity, continues to inform hobby games today. I also draw on the explanatory power of white privilege, positioning the term as an affect and a set of lived conditions. White people enjoy cheaper mortgage rates, more just treatment by police, better jobs, and the freedom to speak their mind without fear of retaliation. In a racist society, the concept of white privilege is deeply connected to the social hierarchies produced by European colonialism and has been driven by the formation of white identity within North America. A good deal of the activist writing about white privilege has been conceptualized as outreach from white folks to other whites who may be unaware of the privileges they enjoy in everyday life. This genre of writing includes essays like Peggy McIntosh’s “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” and Robin DiAngelo’s popular book White Fragility.19 McIntosh

Introduction | 9

and DiAngelo catalog the many mundane ways that white privilege is socially performed and capture how the concept of white privilege stems from the invisibility of whiteness. For example, Richard Dyer explains how the invisibility of whiteness results in structural privilege: “As long as race is something only applied to non-­white peoples, as long as white people are not racially seen and named, they/we function as a human norm. Other people are raced [whites] are just people.”20 Thus, from a structural standpoint, white privilege derives from whiteness being positioned as invisible and outside of discussions about race. To have race is to be nonwhite; to be white is to control the conversation around who is visible and who is not. Historical writing about white racial identity places conversations around white identity within a European context, where race as a concept is symbolically violent to all people. Noel Ignatiev’s fascinating How the Irish Became White and David R. Roediger’s Working toward Whiteness root whiteness with the historical context of class struggle in North America.21 They ultimately position white identity as strategically making oppressed immigrant populations, like the Irish, visible. This visibility resulted in occasional social and economic gains. Finally, this work builds on that of Rukmini Pande, who questions the hegemony of whiteness in the context of fan studies and fan culture. I appreciate Pande’s observation that for fans “white crime and white evil are considered almost inherently worthy of exploration and nuance in a way that is simply not available for nonwhite characters in similar molds.”22 For me, this is a foundational question, one for which there is a historical answer. In the hobby networks that this book follows, the isolationist politics of white flight have subsumed the community politics so thoroughly that hobbyists see whiteness as a refuge. Remember that hobbyists regard themselves as outsiders, and for outsiders their every act is subversive and resistive. Hobbyists have been reluctant to embrace radically subversive and racially progressive narratives simply because they view the stories they are already telling as transformative.

Hegemonic Masculinity Just as the symbolic connotations of white skin afford privilege to many, the performance of masculinity signifies power. I define “hegemonic

10 | Introduction

masculinity” as the invisible domain of masculine performance within which aggressive, patriarchal, and militaristic activity is valorized. My definition is informed by R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, as well as by the definitions of toxic masculinity explained later in this section and championed by Debbie Ging, Bridget Blodgett, and Anastasia Salter. Research on hegemonic masculinity has grown out of sociological theory that identifies patterns of action among men. Historically, work on hegemonic masculinity predates and undergirds more contemporary work on “toxic masculinity.” Sociologists Connell and Messerschmidt explain that hegemonic masculinity is less about structural subordination and more about small and invisible patterns that add up to societal force: “Hegemony did not mean violence, although it could be supported by force; it meant ascendency achieved through culture, institutions, and persuasion.”23 Importantly, they do not imply that all men perform hegemonic masculinity, nor do they believe that masculinities are universally hegemonic. Hegemonic masculinity is recognized and reinforced by people of all genders in our society. Although the impact of hegemonic masculinity remains relevant to scholarship on identity, research on digital culture and games tends to more frequently utilize the related concept of toxic masculinity. To some extent this reliance is due to the alignment of games and computational technologies with geek culture and the recent work on toxic geek masculinity. Best defined by media scholars Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, toxic masculinity involves identity policing across gender lines in geek communities, thus constituting the performance of geek masculinity.24 Geek femininity exists only in the absence of the hegemonic presence of masculinity in geek communities. Geek culture is thus policed through microaggressions that make geek masculinity toxic. Debbie Ging uses a similar set of criteria to discuss how technological assemblages can encourage toxic masculinity in digital culture. The “manosphere”—­a networked coalition of blogs, streamers, and internet content creators devoted to reclaiming a supposedly lost sense of masculinity from the dustbin of history—­uses the term “antifeminist” to cohere a coalition to fight a culture war defined by today’s radical conservative fringe. The goal of antifeminist masculinity is to produce a new space for hegemonic masculinity to flourish. Yet, departing from Connell and Messerschmidt’s work on hegemonic masculinity—­which sug-

Introduction | 11

gests that violence is only a small part of how hegemonic masculinity is propagated—­Ging emphasizes that spaces of antifeminism are explicitly created through the threat of violence: “Besides transnational homogenization, the most striking features of the new anti-­feminist politics are its extreme misogyny and proclivity for personal attacks.”25 Toxic masculinity tacitly accepts hegemonic masculinity. Drawing on these related concepts, I look to the history of hobby games to understand why geek identity has welcomed toxic white masculinity. Balancing on a tightrope between hegemonic masculinity and white privilege stands the geek. Amanda Cote argues that the gamer’s ambivalent relationship with hegemonic masculinity is directly related to the prevalence of sexism within the community.26 I agree wholeheartedly with Cote’s conclusion and deepen it by showing how the gamer’s orientation toward white hegemonic masculinity is the culmination of an ongoing project. The play of games unites the comparatively effeminate space of inchoate boyhood and the historically white spaces of the military-­industrial complex and the defense industry.27 The figure of the hobbyist helps us explore the historically conservative fringes of fandom. He desires white privilege and hegemonic masculinity, yet sees himself as subordinate to the successful white citizen, to whom North American society offers so much, and the confident man who benefits from patriarchy. The hobbyist, like the geek, imagines himself outside of the insider space of gender and racial identity. Yet his ability to adopt this positionality is itself a privilege, derived from his proximity to the world of insiders and property-­owning white community in the suburbs, bolstered by meritocratic success stories spread within the hobbyist network.

Networks of Privilege The networks that hobbyists built to share their interests and socialize were precursors to the social dynamics we see in digital media today.28 We must understand what it means to label these networked communities white and male if we are to find a path away from the specter of the toxic geek. Rukmini Pande and Swati Moitra argue that a renewed focus on Black, Brown, queer, and feminine voices that have been historically excluded from white male spaces is reparative.29 While I agree, I also

12 | Introduction

feel that we must analyze which aspects of digital media are most biased, broken, and in need of repair, as well as the parts that might be worth preserving. Thus, my historical approach is needed to help us interrogate how social media networks today are structured to amplify such antithetical ideals as incel identity and trans identity at once. Hobbyists allow us to understand how the ideology of white privilege has produced a wild plurality of geek voices. The history of geek identity’s exclusionary tendencies is rooted in the predominantly white communities of the hobby. By considering the historical role of hobbyists in the development of computer technology, game design, and popular media, this book charts a path toward understanding the deeply rooted structural obstacles that have stymied a more inclusive politics. Behind each game is a team of geeks guiding its development. What better site to consider the intersection of game, geek, and media than hobby games? These games are currently enjoying a moment in the sun, but my motives are historical; hobby games have been the creative infrastructure of digital game development since Rogue, Ultima, and Pong.30 Digital game designers often cite hobby games as their inspiration because they are often also hobbyists. I use the term “network of privilege” throughout this book to describe how the social advantages enjoyed by hobbyists were an important feature of the network structure they were embedded in. Hobbyist networks are generationally diverse, despite being homogenously white and male. This generational diversity held some pragmatic utility as older men were able to mentor and teach the younger men in the network the specialized skills needed to participate in the hobby. These skill shares were a constant in every community that I explored for this book, no matter the focus. Model railroading, wargaming, role-­playing, and modern board game collecting all contained elements of this specialized mentorship and training. The key here is that some nodes in these networks were not just knowledgeable but also trained professionally in these matters. For example, MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club had access to the era’s most powerful supercomputers and best engineers by virtue of working at MIT—­they were able to share these insights with the other hobbyists in the model railway scene who shared their interest in tinkering. Similarly, teenagers frequently socialized with storied generals and military strategists in the pages of the Avalon Hill General.

Introduction | 13

These unique connections were a crucial part of how members of these hobby networks were able to further their own privilege. Where popular histories of technology tend to attribute the success of tech wunderkind to their talent, intellect, and savvy, I offer a distinctly different hypothesis and link this success instead to the invisible training they received by other hobbyists in the networks of privilege they inhabit. Because hobbies are frequently pursued in secret spaces and off hours, the networks of privilege that one has access to are quite invisible. This invisibility is fitting, as this book shows, as these networks are also white male enclaves that have maintained their autonomy by seeming dull, boring, and even frivolous to outsiders. In other words, because hobbies have long been taken for granted by the friends, family, colleagues, and visible communities that have surrounded hobbyists, the immense privilege of belonging to hobby networks has gone unnoticed. What’s more, given the private nature of these networks, this privilege has rarely been shared outside of white male communities. As I detail in chapter 1, these networks were formed alongside the rollout of electricity to wealthy and predominantly white communities. For about a century, these network demographics went unchallenged and thus perpetuated a white male culture of hobbyists. Discussions like the one summarized above about Puerto Rico are commonplace in the hobby and highlight its internal tensions about race. The community is fraught with conservative undertones driven by the white assimilationist politics of the hobbyist, who promotes himself with a rhetoric of inclusion. Hobbyists insinuate that all are welcome to participate, and this participation can be a healthy route for personal growth. Inclusion, in this context, is often accompanied by assumed and invisible norms of whiteness for fans who participate in the community. While the hobbyists in these spaces often want to broaden participation in their community, they simultaneously display a profound ignorance about where the norms of their community come from and why they are daunting for women and people of color to navigate. This book presents a genealogy of the hobbyists who trailblazed the twentieth-­century hobby game scene. Like the early networks of science fiction fans that André Carrington details, hobbyists worked in similar and occasionally affiliated networks.31 I situate the hobby as the result of successive generations of networked media in order to tell the story of

14 | Introduction

how white hobbyists across North America invested in their own communities. I follow the hobbyists who opened space for today’s geek identity. These untold chapters in a longer history reveal that the complex identity of the hobbyist is defined equally by its outsider ethos and invisible whiteness. To support my argument, I draw from interviews with key figures in the hobby game industry as well as historical discourse within fanzines and online forums to explain the community dynamics of the hobby game industry to its readers. Given that this book’s argument reveals the white discursivity of hobbyists, some might bristle at the blind spots that are implied by this thesis. Fan studies scholar Mel Stanfill has pushed back against arguments of this sort by pointing out that “the discursive construction of fans as white in popular culture works to produce a notion of appropriate fandom through whiteness and appropriate whiteness through fandom.”32 But hobbyists, unlike the ubiquitously popular category of “fans” today, are rarely portrayed in the mass media—­instead, they have come to know themselves as hobbyists through media they have published themselves. In this regard Stanfill’s argument might be rephrased to understand fandoms that exist outside of popular culture. When these fandoms are white they have themselves produced a notion of “appropriate whiteness through fandom.” There have long been Black, Indigenous, people of color (BIPOC) hobbyists working and playing alongside their white peers; I have even written in depth about their value to the hobby game community elsewhere,33 but this book’s focus is on the often subtle acts of gatekeeping used to maintain hobby games as a predominantly white space. In her brief genealogy of geek identity, science and technology studies scholar Christina Dunbar-­Hester argues that we cannot understand geek identity today without understanding the homogeneously masculine makeup of past hobby communities.34 Indeed, the history of computing recalls geeks within a lineage of hobby tinkerers that dates to ham radio operators, model rocket developers, and model train enthusiasts. This lineage eventually connects with personal computing in the late twentieth century. When expressing the economic imperative to develop a software industry, a young Bill Gates famously penned “An Open Letter to Hobbyists.”35 Before identifying as a geek, Gates saw himself as a hobbyist. Yet the importance of hobby games in this history is largely

Introduction | 15

understated. If we cannot understand the cultural values of geeks without understanding their history as hobbyists, then we cannot understand the culture of hobbyists without dwelling on their culture, values, and beliefs. Hobby games tell the rich story of how hobbyists have long existed alongside what we now call “tech culture” and highlight the assimilationist and libertarian tendencies that have largely insulated them from the mainstream game industry. The assimilationist and libertarian tendencies that define geek culture result from the community’s sociological development within the white suburbs. Suburbia opened up domestic space for camaraderie that coalesced around an object of mutual affection—­hobby games. The affectionate camaraderie that derived from a shared appreciation of games has been investigated in game studies, predominantly through work that considers gamer subjectivity.

Game Studies and the Crisis of White Geek Masculinity Game studies research considers the gamer as a way to understand how toxic geek masculinity is embodied by a particular player type. Unlike the gamer, who is primarily understood as a consumer, hobbyists exist in a network where the lines between production and consumption become blurred. Yet despite this important difference, we can better understand the conservative tendencies of gamer identity by understanding a history of hobbyists. A history of hobby gaming connects game studies’ concern with lived gamer identities to concepts of whiteness and masculinity. The history of the hobby, then, explains why games came to be seen as “apolitical” in the eyes of white male players who have historically constituted the scene. As I detail in chapter 6, this community makeup is presently changing as a new and more diverse set of geeks find hobby games, yet despite their best efforts hobbyist discourse continues to define “politics” and therefore clout in gamer communities. The wider framing of what constitutes a game and concern with how lived experiences relate to racism and sexism constitute what I refer to as the “third wave” of game studies. When describing game studies as a field, I roughly divide it into three waves. There are doubtlessly any number of ways to divide the field, but for those who are new to this conversation, this model should help

16 | Introduction

make sense of how academic discourse on games has developed since the nineties. This model looks at what was happening in the industry outside of the field to make sense of the discussions we have entertained within it. The first wave was concerned with aesthetics, driven by the mass computerization of society and the rapid spread of networking technology in the 1990s. Here game scholars took both interpretive and stubbornly formalist approaches in an effort to understand how to navigate interactive media. The second wave, characterized by social-­scientific approaches, was a response to the market popularity of video games in the early 2000s and a return to scientifically grounded methods for understanding the influence of games on society. Games in education, games as ways to train a workforce, and ethnographies of game use characterize second-­wave game scholarship. Finally, the third “critical” wave was a reaction to Gamergate and the global resurgence of nationalism. Scholarship in the third wave started with the recognition that games are political and worked to better understand the implications thereof. The first wave of game studies can be most generously summarized as a set of methodological conversations about the most fruitful scholarly approaches toward reading games. Broadly, these scholars were part of a greater conversation about how to study new media in the late nineties. Approaches during this period ran the gamut from those that conceived of games more formally as systems to those that approached games as texts.36 The work of this period most famously found its home in the online open-­access journal Game Studies and several anthologies published by MIT Press. Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan’s collection First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game staged live conversations between the early games scholars described in this section and others who were contributing from the sidelines. It still stands as a helpful snapshot of this early moment’s scholarly ambition in field building.37 As the first wave crested and fell, the second wave of game studies scholarship began to swell. As noted earlier, this wave was marked by a rapid increase in the market share of games as interactive media and the subsequent opportunities this boom created. Massively multiplayer games and virtual worlds like World of Warcraft and Second Life came to dominate a good deal of scholarship due to their novelty. Along with this popularity came a renewed attention toward the pathologization of

Introduction | 17

games, sexuality, and violence. Grand Theft Auto IV’s “hot coffee” mod, where an explicit scene was coded into the game and revealed only through a mod that was found by users, stands as an example of gratuitous sex in video games that worried some politicians. Additionally, conservative activists like Jack Thompson seized upon this groundswell of concerns to litigate against game developers. In the academy, the new opportunities for virtual worlds encouraged a new paradigm of social scientific research and games. Virtual worlds became laboratories of experimentation for researchers to consider how games might inform some of the larger research questions posed by their home fields.38 The earnestness and optimism expressed by second-­wave game scholars did not last. Perhaps because reality truly is broken, third-­wave game studies was catalyzed by a global right-­wing push toward authoritarianism, nationalism, and antifeminist values. The chief driver of this push was Gamergate—­a baneful social movement that advocated for a set of misogynist values in the game industry under the fig leaf of “ethics in game journalism.” The assorted social winds coalesced with a repoliticization of games and identity in ways that had previously been limited only to media effects.

Critiquing the Gamer: Third-­Wave Game Studies The impact of Gamergate on third-­wave game studies has been profound. Described by Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, the imageboard and Reddit users who participated in Gamergate captured conspiracy theorizing about conversations within game studies. Chess and Shaw have discussed how a cloud document containing live notes taken during the diversity fishbowl conversation at DiGRA 2014 found its way to the Gamergate community.39 This document was then used as evidence to show how game studies (and, by association, higher education) was radicalizing and “indoctrinating” young minds with the values of “cultural Marxism” and feminism. Of course, for those of us in the room at the time, the conversation looked quite different; it was a dry, earnest conversation about gatekeeping in higher education. Unfortunately, many of the women who participated in this conversation became targets of the Gamergate movement; they received threats and were harassed on online forums.

18 | Introduction

Third-­wave game studies started to see itself as the critical response to conversations about digital media that were on the verge of becoming national news. While in hindsight Gamergate may feel overstated when compared to the far-­right rallies that have been more commonplace in North America since the election of Donald Trump in 2016, there is a through line that connects the two via imageboards like 2016’s 4chan and 2021’s 8kun or the many Reddit forums that enable toxic masculinity such as KotakuInAction and TheRedPill. However, a central argument I make is that toxic geek culture is entwined with white nationalism. The political playbook that fueled Trump and the far-­right celebrities who championed him simply moved from conversations about games in 2015 to those about geopolitics in 2016. News organizations like Breitbart promoted literature about Gamergate, while editors Milo Yiannopoulos and Steve Bannon were busy touring college campuses. They were discussing video games long before they became mouthpieces for the “alt right” in the 2016 election. In fact, Gamergate is why third-­wave game studies scholars now wear their politics on their sleeves. They believe that games are the avant-­ garde of today’s culture wars and that the affective impacts of games in this space are not yet fully understood by the research community. Importantly, scholarship in third-­wave game studies foregrounded an intersectional and player-­centric approach to understanding games and identity. Scholars like Adrienne Shaw, Shira Chess, Bo Ruberg, Kishonna Grey, and Carly Kocurek highlighted the intersections of queerness, femininity, masculinity, and race.40 What I call third-­wave game studies also encompasses critical work that delved deeper into the subjectivity and materiality of game play. Nick Taylor’s work on eSports, for instance, considered how a masculine subjectivity was cultivated by the apparatuses of spectacle built into the market paradigm of eSports.41 Similarly, Chris Paul’s work showed how mobile games relate to a meritocratic mindset that privileged and prioritized late capitalist values.42 Alenda Chang’s work on the environmental impacts of the game industry also fell into this category by situating games within a discursive space that challenged the positive attitude around impacts that characterized second-­wave game studies.43 Although the methodological approaches of the scholars listed above varied, all took up a core concern with how the politics of representation saturated discourse on games and culture.

Introduction | 19

The waves of game studies summarized above are meant to be seen more as a rough outline—­a way for readers who are new to game studies to quickly orient themselves to the field and the main topics that have been covered within it. Doubtlessly, some works, such as McKenzie Wark’s Gamer Theory and Mia Consalvo’s Cheating, were released during what I categorized above as the second wave of game studies but would be best categorized as critical theory, perhaps precursors to the critical turn in game studies we are experiencing today.44 Despite these omissions, I use the above heuristic to describe game studies because they help to explain how a good many theorists working in game studies today focus on issues of social justice and equity in their writing due to its urgency specifically in conversations around game development. The dynamics of toxic geek masculinity within the discourse of gaming today underscores the urgency of understanding hobbyist history. If we are to work toward a geek culture that doesn’t revere the dynamics of toxic white masculinity, we must understand how this positionality is fostered. Hobbyists are a living story of how the community’s most toxic dynamics are caught up in its most utopic imaginings of self. Indeed, hobby games show us how an outsider identity has allowed hobbyists to challenge the neoliberal dimensions of the market that seek to commodify identity, creativity, and community.

Outside Game Studies: Hobby Games Hobby games can be best described as the products of a cottage industry, even as this is changing (see chapter 6). Hobbyists remain outsiders in a discourse of gaming that positions digital game developers and players as insiders. The hobby game community’s historical orientation toward white privilege explains how, even now at a time when industry relies on precarious labor, hobbyists have been content to develop games simply for the pleasure. The autonomy from big business that has historically characterized the hobby game scene is discursively connected to white privilege. That is, hobbyists have the privilege to imagine, develop, and play games that are radically subversive. Yet more often than not, this privilege fuels the representational dynamics that further the status quo of white masculinity.

20 | Introduction

Board games, card games, altered reality games with physical components, and escape rooms are all hobby games. This category of games has been hugely influential to most game designers yet strangely absent from even conversations in third-­wave game studies. In order to better understand where hobby games are present, we must first address why they have been absent. Game Studies books, articles, and journals have relied on the cache of new and computational media to justify the importance of games scholarship. For instance, the full title of the field’s journal is Game Studies: The International Journal of Computer Game Research. The title of Dmitri Williams and colleagues’ influential paper is “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games.”45 Even the prominent book series at the University of Minnesota Press is titled Electronic Mediations. On a basic representational level, hobby games have been edited out of the discourse of game studies simply because digital and virtual framings have dominated games research. Hobby games stand on the outside of technocratic discourse that sees games as an entryway to the insider world of government grants. Because large grant-­giving organizations in the United States such as the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, the National Science Foundation, and the National Institutes of Health are interested in how new technologies can constructively intervene on the policy level of problem solving, there has been less incentive to pitch research on analog technologies. There are also financial incentives to develop curricula specializing in digital games. As Evan Torner explains, “Computer programming experience combined with a primary focus on digital games remains the ticket to employment in the game studies field, often seeking predominantly straight white cis male scholars under ‘the Silicon Valley-­created shroud of “merit.”’ The message is clear: finance capital demands an investment in the digital whereas a more modest intellectual commitment to the digital would befit our field.”46 As countless incentives push researchers to embrace the frontiers of the digital, blind spots around the analog have developed. Nowhere is this clearer than in contemporary conversations within game studies. Because scholarship on hobby games has never been as influential or frequently cited as that on digital games, it has required new organiza-

Introduction | 21

tional, publishing, and funding strategies. A small subset of researchers from the DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association) conference scene occasionally sport tees with a subversive “GRA” logo—­a bygone relic of a playful rebellion against the digital in the institutional memory of game studies. Edited collections have focused on “analog games,” such as José Zagal and Sebastian Deterding’s Role-­Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, Pat Harrigan and Matthew Kirschenbaum’s Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, and Evan Torner and William White’s Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-­Playing.47 The LARP (live action role-­playing) scene in the Nordic countries, perhaps due to its proximity to many European first-­wave game studies scholars, has actively developed a corpus of knowledge around role-­playing. The Knutepunkt conference serves as the intellectual crossroads for this work, and scholars maintain a robust publication archive of conference proceedings dating back to 2001.48 Additionally, Analog Game Studies, the journal I founded along with Evan Torner and Emma Leigh Waldron, began a sustained conversation about the critical cultural elements of hobby games. A handful of scholarly manuscripts about analog games have been published too, often by McFarland, a smaller academic press that specializes in popular culture. Within this context, Paul Booth’s writing stands tall as he has demonstrated the importance of hobby games for the related areas of both fan studies and media studies.49 Finally, the occasional essay about hobby games has found its way into game studies venues where the digital is almost always foregrounded.50 Despite these barriers, there are signs that hobby games have found their way from the periphery of game studies to the center. Third-­wave game studies’ concern with addressing the toxic impacts of games and gamer subjectivity opened up a new appreciation of indie games and games that challenged the mass-­market appeal of consumer video games. Additionally, the new interest in the politics of materiality that has been evinced by third-­wave game studies aligns well with the importance of material components to develop, design, and manufacture analog games. Finally, hobby games have undergone a renaissance in recent years, becoming, arguably, the indie stratum of game design and community. Penny Arcade Expo, North America’s largest video game

22 | Introduction

fan convention, now has several highly influential satellite conferences that cater directly to fans’ interest in hobby games.

The Impact of Hobbyists The story of the hobby that this book tells has been deliberately curated to inform the intersecting and overlapping discourses that coalesce around geek culture today. I began this introduction with a typical vignette from the hobby game scene to show how deeply the invisibility of whiteness resonates within this community. The everyday racism of Puerto Rico speaks to the shared values of the community. Understanding hobbyists and their historical relationship to geek culture can help us better appreciate the politics of gamers, fans, and nerds today. This analysis is urgent because the geeks, weirdos, and nerds who once stood at the fringes of consumer culture now find themselves at the center. As hobbyists reorient from outsiders to insiders, their values begin to carry more weight and reach broader audiences through participatory networks of digital media. Geekiness is also big business. In this business, hobby games are one of the largest transmedia growth areas, as industry numbers make clear. Critical Role, an “actual play” series that performs a Dungeons & Dragons campaign for internet audiences, has seen Kickstarter crowdfunding for their adventure series “The Legend of Vox Machina” surpass Mystery Science Theater 3000, making it the best funded “Movie or TV” Kickstarter in the site’s history.51 “Tabletop Games Dominated Kickstarter in 2018, While Video Games Declined,” boasts a headline from game review site Polygon.52 The bottom-­up fan-­driven dynamics of these hobby enterprises are not coincidental. Rather, they share a central through line within the narrative of hobbyists who have been creating geek culture for years. The geeks who run the analog game industry cohabitate within a dense community structure where the boundaries between consumer and producer are so blurred it makes little sense to disambiguate them. Where prior work on what Axel Bruns terms “produsers” assumes that the work of fans takes place within an industry context, here the work of fans is the industry context.53 Understanding the relationship between hobby games and the games industry is key to comprehending the scope of the hobby game industry

Introduction | 23

and the urgency of its analysis. This means that radical queer game designers like Avery Alder, Anna Anthropy, and Tor Kjetil Edland chose analog games as their preferred medium to design within. Additionally, their games sit alongside Jason Matthews and Anada Gupta’s Cold War simulation Twilight Struggle and Corey Konieczka’s epic wargame Star Wars: Rebellion. On internet forums like Board Game Geek today and historically in fanzines like Alarums & Excursions, fans with radically divergent political opinions from different walks of life assemble to play, design, and form lifelong friendships. More importantly, they all identify as geeks. The invisible politics of white privilege are what have sustained this fragile coalition between radical and conservative designers alike. This privilege, as chapter 6 describes in detail, is to abstain from political discussion. Of course, one might regard this agnostic dynamic as nightmarish. The contours of the close-­knit analog games community are fraught with conservative internal tensions about an assimilationist politic behind geek identity in this space. “Welcoming for all” in this context often brings with it the assumed and invisible norms of whiteness for fans who participate in the community. What’s more, as I noted above, analog games are an expressive space precisely because the community is just small enough to resist the profit-­seeking needs of industry actors who might seek to colonize it. Unfortunately, the razor-­thin profit margins of the analog game industry have led to a precarious labor paradigm for the publishers, designers, and YouTube personalities who make their living in this space. This book builds these bridges by presenting the hobbyist as an important figure created by the intersection of games, technology, and white male culture. Research in game studies and digital media studies has identified toxic white masculinity as one of the most pressing concerns of the twenty-­first century. We cannot address this problem if we don’t ground our analysis in historical approaches to geek culture that seek to understand its conservative tendencies. Through the genealogy of the hobby, we can begin to understand how the culture of games, geeks, and digital technology has been heavily influenced by the segregationist values of white conservative men who argue that we shouldn’t take games that seriously. White privilege is clearest when it manifests as a pathway out of struggle and out of precarity, escaping the totalizing

24 | Introduction

regimes under which we collectively suffer. I track white male privilege as it developed over time in the hobby games community and show how this dynamic is essential to understanding the white masculinity that proliferates through digital media today.

Mapping the Scenes The book starts by tracking hobby games in different scenes across North America by following what I term “networks of privilege.” Our understanding of geekiness today is deeply indebted to the personalities who maintained the hobby game scene over the past fifty years. By understanding the political beliefs of these personalities, we can better understand the fraught politics of technoculture today. The Privilege of Play makes this case through three parts: The first part, Beginnings, comprises two chapters that tell the story of the early participants in the hobby game scene. The second part, Networks, is composed of two chapters that show the growth of the hobby game scene and the negotiation of a shared white culture between its participants. The book concludes with two chapters about the culture of hobby games today in a part titled Mainstream.

Part I Beginnings

1

Model Trains and Networks of Privilege

To understand the pervasiveness of white geek masculinity in the hobby, and by extension the tech sector, it is important to challenge the dominant historical paradigm. This paradigm is typified by a handful of books and documentaries that describe the history of computer and video games. In these sources, the narrative arc is almost always the same.1 A ragtag crew of geeks, almost exclusively white men, join up to develop a game and navigate challenges as they learn to become entrepreneurs and titans of industry. This story is not only ubiquitous but also recursive and inadequate—­it takes for granted the absence of women and people of color in the early video game sector of the tech industry. Books on game history tell this same story about different people, occasionally even managing to transform the entrepreneurial heroes from early on in the book into villains in the later pages.2 The metanarrative is that video games were David to the entertainment industry’s Goliath. This story is told repeatedly as we glimpse different geeks working at different studios encountering the same barriers to entry in a competitive business environment. Here I challenge this narrative by foregrounding how these histories are themselves about the network privilege enjoyed by the white men on whom they focus. I do this by reconsidering how MIT’s storied Tech Model Railroad Club might be better understood in a history that considers their serious interest in model trains as a sign of their class privilege, racial homogeneity, and masculine taste. My interest in the Tech Model Railroad Club is not arbitrary; the group is famously lauded in histories of games and technology for its centrality in both networks. In their zeal to provide an origin story for the tech sector, these tales take for granted the group’s explicit positionality as hobbyists. The Tech Model Railroad Club was the hobby scene for students at MIT. At its heart it was a club for geeky misfits to socialize but also to tinker on the room-­sized model railroad that the club maintained. This meant grooming, painting, and cultivating the di27

28 | Model Trains and Networks of Privilege

orama landscape that the model trains ran through and exploring the electronic circuitry that was used to illuminate model lamps, drive the trains, and allow users to switch tracks. The model train landscape was both a centerpiece and a shared project for the nerdy hobbyists at MIT to engage in as they found community in each other. The Tech Model Railroad Club was also the convergence point for key figures interested in video games and computing. As described famously in Stephen Levy’s Hackers, members of the Tech Model Railroad Club had to work on the model railroad for forty hours with the group before receiving a key to the building housing the club. This was a special form of access because the club was located near a room with some of the university’s newest computers. The IBM 704 and TX-­0 were especially appealing to members of the club’s Signals and Powers subcommittee, which was responsible for the electronic circuitry that illuminated the model. This group, already having been primed with the knowledge necessary for hobby tinkering, took to these early computers like cats to catnip. Soon they were developing their own programs and games on them. Considered the first computer game by many, 1962’s Spacewar! was the result of this tinkering.3 Spacewar! was a head-­to-­head space combat simulator where players each piloted a spaceship and tried to blast the other ship out of the sky. Its code was widely shared between members of the hacker community. I draw attention to Spacewar! because in this moment the Tech Model Railroad Club became canonized in both video game and hacker history. The individuals who designed, modified, and played Spacewar! were part of the early networks of hackers remembered as the “network intellectuals” who drove early computing and later the early internet.4 In these histories, the Tech Model Railroad Club is remembered as the creative space where games and computing converged. The hobbyists working in this space were thus part of both scenes, and their cultural practices, proclivities, and norms have since been shared with the hobbyist communities that followed—­in both gaming and computing contexts. This chapter analyzes the Tech Model Railroad Club in order to better understand the culture of hobbyists and situates the culture of white geek masculinity that pervades the hobby within the context of this group, so as to reveal the depths of its historical lineage. The Tech Model Railroad Club did not simply beget white geek masculinity as we understand it today, but

Model Trains and Networks of Privilege | 29

we can understand the nature of white geek masculinity by tracking its development over time. I do this by traversing several connected scenes in the hobby. The first such scene is the Tech Model Railroad Club, which I have selected both because of the historical significance of Spacewar! and because of the club’s primary interest in model railroads. As stated above, the Tech Model Railroad Club helps us to better understand an early example of what today would be referred to as white geek masculinity. This cultural trope wasn’t the invention of the group itself, so much as the group worked as a lens—­refracting and combining the culture of several other influences in its own unique way. Overall, I concur with the Benjamin Woo’s definition of “geek” that situates geek culture as a form of community belonging as opposed to an aesthetic or set of interests.5 Woo argues that the way geeks are represented in popular culture says more about us than about them. For example, the stereotypical white male geek is a product of media representation, not genuine demographic representation.6 Thus, the hobbyists participating in the Tech Model Railroad Club were geeks by virtue of the way their quirky interests in model trains led them to seek community with one another. They were not geeks simply by virtue of their interests alone; these interests pushed them to seek community with other like-­minded “outsiders.” Yet as authentic as these social ties undoubtedly are, the specter of racialized belonging and network privilege looms above them. The Tech Model Railroad Club was a homogeneously white male space because MIT admitted few women and even fewer Blacks. The cultural tropes that influenced the Tech Model Railroad Club were poached from the zeitgeist of boyhood in the mid-­twentieth century. Given the club’s interest in railroads, it should come as no surprise that they were interested in the sort of stories and culture that were born of railroads—­the Wild West, frontiers, and westerns. These narratives, which were shared between boys in the 1940s and 1950s, all told the same story. They reinforced an insider/outsider dynamic that pit “civilization” against any number of dangers that were lurking at the edge of town. This trope is well worn and problematically reinforces a mentality of white exceptionalism. But for the members of the Tech Model Railroad Club, it was a crucial part of their worldview and identity. Working on and around technology was exciting for them because it was a sort of frontier. They were the exceptional group of outsiders who had the knowledge and oppor-

30 | Model Trains and Networks of Privilege

tunity to explore this frontier in a way that had never been done before. Thus, this chapter considers the frontier myth as a crucial point of identity for white geek masculinity and shows how hobbyists consumed this myth by tinkering with and purchasing model railroads at hobby stores.

Model Railroads Understanding model railroads is crucial to comprehending the infrastructure of hobby scenes. Pivoting to the economic structure of hobby game distribution helps us better understand the connections between the two. Hobby games are mostly sold and distributed in hobby stores. As the following chapters describe in detail, hobby games are a relatively modern phenomenon. Before 1960 there were few examples of hobby games. At the time, hobby gaming was an activity young white men engaged with in quaint motifs like the local chess club—­a space quite different from the large conventions that host hobby games today. Thus, when hobby wargames, the first hobby games to be sold commercially, sought a distribution network, they were able to sell their wares through networks of hobby stores, which had long provided hobbyists the ability to purchase miniature railroads, model trains, and the craft tools necessary for constructing landscapes. I grew up near Red Bank, New Jersey, a small town on a river that fed out to the Atlantic Ocean at the uppermost point of the Jersey Shore. As a child of the 1980s, my parents would often walk me through Hobbymasters, a small hobby store that specialized in the odds and ends that epitomized masculine-­coded hobbies. These trips were a high point of my youth. I remember dashing around the cluttered shop, peering through the displays at remote-­controlled cars, model planes, rockets, telescopes, rock tumblers, and games. The centerpiece of the store was found on the second floor, where a massive model train track was suspended from the ceiling. The train ran endless loops, to the delight of the boys and fathers who would venture upstairs. I remember sitting on my dad’s shoulders as I glimpsed at the inside of the train. Hobbymasters closed down in 2020. As an independently owned hobby shop, it could not maintain its business during the fraught days of the COVID-­19 pandemic. I took a moment to reminisce on this story from my youth because it characterizes the economic precarity of hobby shops, their gendered

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merchandise, and the curiosity these spaces sparked. A major theme of this book is the unique identity space of an old guard of hobbyists who historically defended an infrastructure of hobby stores, publications, and (later) websites. As I argue in greater detail in chapter 5, the old guard’s success has been predicated upon what I term “network privilege”—­a form of social gatekeeping that polices the boundaries of networks along racial, gendered, and socioeconomic grounds. Network privilege results in the endurance of privileged networks—­clusters of people with homogeneous demographic makeups, interests, and worldviews. Hobbyists are a paradigmatic case of network privilege, even though the hobby stores that constituted the economic backbone of the hobbyist network were not financial successes. Hobby stores specialized in unique and esoteric curiosities mainly enjoyed within the leisure hours of a predominantly white male consumer base. They relied on consumers using their surplus savings to purchase rare and specialized luxury goods. In the case of model trains, although these specialty goods were somewhat affordable, they were still rare and, outside of the hobby, unnecessary. Hobby stores stockpiled acrylic paints for miniatures, spongy green materials for simulating turf and trees, rails, ties, magnets, circuits, wires, small lights, and balsa wood for constructing houses and bridges. They also distributed the magazines that were used by hobbyists to keep in touch with one another. Although model train sets have been sold and produced almost as long as actual trains have existed, the hobby of model train development didn’t find broad appeal until the early twentieth century, when the first electric model train was mass marketed by an American company called the Lionel Manufacturing Company. Before Lionel, the electric model train had been developed and sold in 1896 by another American company called Carlisle & Finch, and the first model train sets were sold by a German company called Märklin in 1891.7 The model trains that had come before were designed to be used on the floor, not a diorama model that ran on miniature tracks. During this early moment, model trains were not in wide circulation. The mechanical components that propelled early model trains were expensive. Once electric model trains were introduced, they were sold only to the wealthy few who themselves could afford electricity in their homes. Thus, when model railroads were first introduced to the world, the general public didn’t even know they existed.

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This all changed with the trains developed by Lionel Manufacturing Company. Lionel shrewdly marketed its trains to businesses as well as wealthy hobbyists. Lionel trains, which were relatively easy to assemble and display due to their preassembled tracks, became the centerpiece of the holiday displays of main street department stores. The now-­famous trope of a model train cruising through a pastoral Christmas village began with Lionel’s efforts to align the sale of model trains with the selling of electricity. Grandiose displays illuminated with electric bulbs were a novelty to attract consumers. In this early era of electricity, Lionel’s toy model trains running on miniature tracks were exciting and new—­a way for consumers to imagine electricity as an integrated part of their leisure time.8 Model trains were one of the many “killer apps” that came with the wide adoption of electricity. By the 1910s the widespread rollout of electricity left many consumers with the means to power their homes but with relatively few devices to plug in. Model train sets, which many had glimpsed on holiday dioramas while shopping, were an appealing way to showcase the exciting new technology. At this moment, Lionel Manufacturing’s easy-­to-­assemble train sets came to enjoy widespread adoption. Lionel would later roll out a series of advertisements for parents of young boys that focused on how wonderful their trains were as gifts. They continued marketing to young boys as their brand grew. By 1929 they had founded the Lionel Engineer’s Club, which was accessible by mail order but required members to ask their parents to send Lionel proof of the purchase of a Lionel train set. In return, members were given a “handsome badge.”9 By 1952, model trains were the top holiday gift for young boys. Lionel had succeeded in inventing a popular niche for hobby trains in a market that fifty years earlier had catered only to the outrageously wealthy. Of course, the success of model trains cannot be attributed to the Lionel Manufacturing Company alone. As is the case with all the hobby networks in this book, success runs in tandem with the development of a network infrastructure that supports the people and products that inhabit it. The magazines that best epitomize the model railroad hobby network were Model Craftsman and Model Railroader, which began publication in 1933 and 1934, respectively. Model Craftsman began with a focus on scale modeling, later narrowing its focus to model railways by devoting the bulk of articles to them. In 1949 Model Craftsman officially changed its name to Railroad Model

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Craftsman, formally acknowledging that the scale modeling community was mostly tuned into railroad modeling at the time. Vintage issues of Model Railroader can help us appreciate the hobby railroad scene as well. The inaugural issue greeted new readers with a series of overtures that celebrated participation in model railroad building. The stated goal of the magazine was to help grow the community and develop the hobby: “Our circulation is limited by the extend of the field, and we cannot hope to maintain a large or lucrative business, but we are model railroad fans ourselves and we hope to advance our hobby.”10 The magazine was run by A. C. Kalmbach, who owned and operated the Milwaukee Commercial Press, a small press that local churches relied on for newsletters. The success of Model Railroader allowed A. C. and his wife Bernice to work full-­time publishing the magazine. It quickly became a hub for all kinds of model railroad interests. Early issues contained articles that addressed themes that would be evergreen in the hobbyist community. Just as sites like Board Game Geek today and magazines like the Avalon Hill General in the sixties and seventies would spill a great deal of ink in order to market exciting games, many articles in Model Railroader described new train models that would soon be brought to market by toy companies like Lionel. Model Railroader also offered a space for community discussion and networking via a monthly letters column that would allow readers to ask the publisher any questions on the topic. Of course, many articles would cater to hobby tinkerers by including schematics of trains with scale measurements, blueprints for buildings and other scale objects, and proposed landscape layouts for dioramas. For the amateur historian reading the magazine, articles about actual trains were provided. Likewise, just as hobby fanzines would include fiction written by its contributors, Model Railroader included fictional accounts of families playing with and designing model railroads. Finally, there was a good deal of space in the magazine’s back matter devoted to networking the community. This came in the form of advertisements for model railway clubs and brief (and free to post) newsletters from existing clubs and guilds across the United States that specialized in model railroads. Kalmbach’s early goals were to develop a magazine with a stable profit model that would allow it to become a centerpiece of the model railroad community. His efforts were largely successful; by 1950 Model Railroader enjoyed a worldwide distribution of over a hundred thousand, and

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it remains in circulation today. Additionally, Model Railroader has been influential, as echoes of it persist in hobby publications today. In the decade and a half since its original publication, Model Railroader made significant changes to its content. By 1950, the magazine had quintupled in size. Each issue stretched to almost one hundred pages on average, offering far more content than could appear in the less than twenty pages the magazine began with. The editorial board also quintupled in size, as the magazine employed its own editor-­in-­chief separate from Kalmbach, as well as an art director, four associate editors, an advertising manager, a business manager, a general sales manager, and a production manager. Each page presented advertisements and sometimes two-­to four-­page catalog spreads for readers to consider. The publication continued to print updates from model railroad clubs nationally, but it also allowed hobby stores, which then sold model trains, to list their wares in the publication. In other words, in the short span of sixteen years Model Railroader grew from a small niche publication run only by Kalmbach and his wife into the flagship magazine of Kalmbach’s publishing enterprise. It was through the networks of privilege afforded by individuals who could find one another through Model Railroader that the hobby of model railroading was able to find an audience. Model Railroader curated an audience of geeky white men by publishing articles, advertisements, and potpourri that appealed specifically to their tastes. An example that illustrates this sort of cultivation was a comic called “The Silver Plate Road,” by John Kalbach, that was published monthly in Model Railroader. The gag in all of the comics is that men would rather be playing with or thinking about model trains than doing almost anything else. The comics generally follow Van, a bespectacled older man, through both domestic and professional spaces. In figure 1.1, Van interrupts a bachelor’s proposal to encourage him to play model trains. Figure 1.2 features Van getting scolded by his wife for blocking the laundry machines. And finally figure 1.3 shows how Van is able to woo an ambassador away from a well-­to-­do party to a train room presumably in the basement. In figures 1.2 and 1.3 Black folk are illustrated through caricatures that typified Blackface as the help, in stark contrast to Van and his wealthy white friends and family. This pattern of Black erasure would continue in other hobby publications, such as the Avalon Hill General, which would feature Black people only in servile roles.

Figure 1.1. “The Silver Plate Road” in Model Railroader 7, no. 12 (1940): 38. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Model Railroader magazine archive at https://trains.com.

Figure 1.2. “The Silver Plate Road” in Model Railroader 7, no. 7 (1940): 38. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Model Railroader magazine archive at https://trains.com.

Figure 1.3. “The Silver Plate Road” in Model Railroader 6, no. 10 (1939): 40. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Model Railroader magazine archive at https://trains.com.

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Figure 1.4. Model Railroader 7, no. 4 (1940): 30–­31. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Model Railroader magazine archive at https://trains.com.

Model Railroader would court a white male audience in more subtle ways as well. A two-­page full-­color advertisement (figure 1.4) from Scale-­Craft offered an engineer’s hat to subscribers who were interested in joining their “brotherhood” of “international scale model railroad builders.” The advertisement features a celebrity endorsement as well; Elliott Donnelley, the president of said brotherhood, hands a membership card to Jim Leary, pilot of the Santa Fe “Chief,” in a photograph embedded in the advertisement. The advertisement’s framing of Scale-­ Craft’s customer loyalty program as a “brotherhood,” the repetitive use of male pronouns in the advertisement, and the absence of Black people in this and other advertisements featured in Model Railroader make clear how the magazine was geared toward white men looking for deeper involvement in the hobby.

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The demographics of white flight inscribed themselves on the hobby of model railroads even at this early stage for hobbyists. The hobby store index provided within Model Railroader allowed one to track the locations of different model train stores over time. I’ve used this information to isolate different stores by zip code at 1950 and 1970. Mapping these zip codes shows the geography of hobby train stores shift from a more urban geography that found these stores in the downtowns and urban centers to a more suburban landscape. As I describe in chapter 3, the geography of white flight is racially loaded and corresponds to the changing racial dynamics of urban centers. And it wasn’t just white people fleeing urban centers; businesses that catered to upwardly mobile white people with leisure money also relocated. The geographic distribution of hobby stores, although impacted by “white flight” in the 1960s and 1970s, was also the byproduct of electrification. Model train stores began their distribution in urban centers because at the turn of the twentieth century cities were more affluent than the rural areas surrounding them. In North America, suburban development didn’t boom until after World War II. There were stark disparities in wealth between those who lived in cities and residents of less affluent rural areas. Model trains, already a luxury product, needed to be sold to families and stores that had access to electricity. Thus it was imperative for model train retailers to anchor their businesses in locations where their customers would be shopping. In the early twentieth century, this meant founding shops in urban centers. Of course in this era, to a far greater extent than today, wealth could be easily correlated with race, as after the Civil War no reparations were given to the newly liberated Black population.11 The lack of reparations created a situation where race is often still highly correlated with affluence today. It is no accident that hobby trains and the networks of privilege that developed around them were predominantly enjoyed by white Americans. For Black folk and other minoritized people who may have been interested in hobby trains at the turn of the twentieth century, participation in the hobby would have meant overcoming both geographic and economic boundaries—­access to a major urban center and enough money and electricity to enjoy leisure products like model trains at home. Additionally, publications like Model Railroader positioned the

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model train hobby as an opportunity for father-­son bonding. Thus the hobby is predicated on a nuclear family unit where the father has enough leisure time to partake. This is an assumption that is also related to racial demographics, as leisure time has historically been a luxury only the wealthy and white working class could afford.12 All of these factors combined to create a situation where hobby trains and the infrastructure that supported them were coded as white consumer goods. They were products made by white-­owned companies, marketed to a white consumer base, and then distributed to predominantly white areas. Hobby games would later graft onto this infrastructure as they became popularized in the hobby community of the sixties, seventies, and eighties. The development, infrastructure, and demographics of the model train scene make clear how it was driven by class-­based racial stratification in America. As outlined above, it was not a lack of interest in model railroads among Black folk and other minoritized groups that led to them being largely enjoyed by a white male demographic. Instead, it was simple logistics—­access to electricity, leisure time, and wealth. Nonetheless, by the middle of the twentieth century, model railroads were a cultural staple and prized gift for young boys. At the apex of model train popularity, it is doubly important to untangle the network of model train hobbyists from model train consumers, as their popularity undoubtedly led to their appreciation within minoritized groups. While the demographics of model train consumers may have diversified, those who formed the core of the network remained white men. The advertisements in Model Railroader imply this much. Although many advertisements are somewhat inconspicuous, including lists of model train merchandise for sale or novel devices to integrate into one’s set, others were clearly geared toward their white male audience. One advertisement (figure 1.5) features a bombshell sitting atop a model railroad track and the headline “Curvacious! . . . so is atlas . . . the straight curvable ho track.” Underneath the woman strides a white cartoon train conductor in overalls. The ad markets to a set of white male hobbyists who were assumed to empathize with the happy-­go-­lucky man striding on the bottom of the ad and to understand the joke that tracks were as desirable as the woman. It is this network of privilege—­the white men who were actively involved in the model train scene—­that the remainder of this chapter

Figure 1.5. Advertisement for Atlas model train tracks from Model Railroader 19, no. 1 (1952): 62. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Model Railroader magazine archive at https://trains.com.

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explores by focusing on MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club. The club is famously remembered through Steven Levy’s rendering in the book Hackers, which positions the club as a network of computing insiders who were able to bootstrap themselves into key positions in the years that followed their time at MIT. In contrast, I explore the cultural dynamics of the club and consider how their values and beliefs are symptomatic of the greater beliefs held by hobbyists in general. As such, instead of highlighting how the Tech Model Railroad Club tinkered with computers and left their mark on the hobby computing scene, I focus on the club’s raison d’être—­model railroads.

The Tech Model Railroad Club The Tech Model Railroad Club was composed of young men who cultivated a set of interests typical of the era. Specifically, having been raised in the 1950s, the young men who worked on Spacewar! grew up at the height of the model railroad boom. Their generation was delighted to find model trains as gifts under their trees at Christmas and grew up enjoying the large model train displays showcased by department stores. They watched television shows that fetishized the iconography of America’s western frontiers. Lassie, Howdy Doody, and Fury all encouraged the boys watching them to imagine themselves living at civilization’s edge, gazing out at the open wilderness. Model trains were a natural fit within this mythology, as they were a symbol of how technology’s progress was able to shape and transform the nation’s wilderness. Thus model trains replicated the frontier mentality that was portrayed in media at the time. Trains play a crucial role in westerns. They symbolize modernity, progress, technology, commerce, and society. A single train contrasted against the stark background of the lonely American West is iconic in our national imaginary. In the 1950s, as children grew to tinker with model trains, they were also playing with a fantasy of frontier living. Within this fantasy space, the tropes of rugged, self-­sufficient masculinity were easy to apprehend. The fantasy of toy trains was one of freedom and control. Trains were the vehicle through which one could arrive in a libertarian fantasia where government was small, distinctions between “good guys” and “bad guys” were stark, and opportunities for wealth

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were close at hand—­recall the famous Mark Twain slogan “there’s gold in them hills.” While the frontier mentality may have been disquieting to some, model train hobbyists were able to sidestep the darker overtones of the American frontier by controlling the landscape itself. Building papier-­mâché landscapes, constructing miniature trainyards, trees, and villages, and even painting are practices of control. So the hobby of model railroad building for many youth in the 1950s allowed them to enjoy the West while controlling and sculpting the landscape of this fantasy to their liking. In addition to emulating the fantastic landscapes of the American West, the mythic archetypes may have resonated with members of the Tech Model Railroad Club. Within their own network of privilege, hobbyists appear as insiders, yet simultaneously their unique, complex, and perhaps childish interests cast them as outsiders among their peers. In other words, hobbyists enjoy the privileges that benefit insiders even as they are cast as rebels, outcasts, and nerds. The fictive space of the Old West thrives on an insider-­outsider dichotomy. Many heroes in westerns are renegades—­neither supporting the sheriff and upholding the law nor engaging with the debauchery of bandits and outlaws. Ruggedly individualistic, renegades were a fixture on television and movies. They epitomize how the outsiders who participated in the members of the Tech Model Railroad Club may have seen themselves. As the community that eventually gained notoriety as hackers, they were neither part of the regulatory body that managed computing nor necessarily looking to hack computer systems to commit crimes. Instead, as hackers they furthered their own agendas. They tinkered with computers to advance their own systems of knowledge, invent games, and—­perhaps most importantly—­participate in the hobby. As I noted at the start of this chapter, popular histories of technology offer a notoriously gendered perspective on who has been able to participate. For instance, Laine Nooney argues that game history holds a patriarchal bias because it fails to contend with the material and representational spaces that games represent and are consumed within. Offering the designer Roberta Williams as an example, Nooney considers her investment in the game Mystery House, which “[did] not share the genealogical investments in space and military research, tabletop gaming, and science fiction enthusiasm that concretized male

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affinities, affects, and practices around gamemaking,” as well as her unspoken relationship to the domestic space where Williams played the game.13 The implication for Nooney is that any critique of video games or the game industry must recognize that games are embedded within cultural systems much greater than the representational stories told by the games themselves. Williams’s role as a new mother defined the story of Mystery House’s development. Nooney re-­creates a detailed illustration of how Williams’s work may have overlapped with her domesticity. By considering the domestic context of Williams’s labor, we can better understand how her work as a game designer fits more neatly into the history of the late twentieth century. Her designs deal not with space but with households, families, and nursery rhymes—­ the very material a new mother may have surrounded herself with while caring for her child. Correspondingly, in the pages that follow I make use of Nooney’s “speleology,” a clever retheorizing of Foucault’s historical “archaeology,” as a mode of reconstructing histories from past artifacts. Where archaeology aims to paint a complete historical picture, speleology recognizes that to construct histories of the oppressed and minorities is fundamentally messy, rough, and incomplete.14 Speleology is equivalent to spelunking through a cave system to learn about it, as opposed to the mechanical precision through which histories might be remade through artifacts. It can be contrasted with the dominant paradigm of game history, which can be critiqued as “history in a vacuum” because of its inability to connect representation in video games to a larger cultural story, paradigm, or motif.15 I apply Nooney’s concept here because it helps critique Steven Levy’s treatment of the Tech Model Railroad Club. For all of the detail Levy provides about the worlds of hackers, his book lacks cultural details. Such cultural specificity, Nooney suggests, would allow readers to understand the culture of the group and how it is embedded within a world that stretches far beyond the walls of MIT. Levy’s writing pulls the reader deeper into the world of hackers, which pushes the rest of society out of focus. Take Levy’s introduction to the Tech Model Railroad Club: The clubroom was dominated by the huge train layout. It just about filled the room, and if you stood in the little control area called “the notch” you

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could see a little town, a little industrial area, a tiny working trolley line, a paper-­mâché mountain, and of course a lot of trains and tracks. The trains were meticulously crafted to resemble their full-­scale counterparts, and they chugged along the twists and turns of the track with picture book perfection. And then Peter Samson looked underneath the chest-­h igh boards that held the layout. It took his breath away. Underneath this layout was a more massive matrix of wires and relays and crossbar switches than Peter Samson had ever dreamed existed. They were neat regimental lines of switches, achingly regular rows of dull bronze relays, and a long, rambling, tangle of red, blue, and yellow wires—­t wisting and twirling like a rainbow colored explosion of Einstein’s hair. It was an incredibly complicated system, and Peter Samson vowed to find out how it worked. The Tech Model Railroad Club awarded its members a key to the clubroom after they logged forty hours of work on the layout. Freshman Midway had been on a Friday. By Monday, Peter Samson had his key.16

This passage tells us what it may have been like to inhabit the space. However, it avoids explaining how such a space fit into the cultural tapestry that was unfolding in the world outside of MIT. The world of switches and wires under the crafty papier-­mâché landscape of the track works adeptly as a metaphor. It signals to readers that Levy’s division of the club into two “factions”—­the hobbyists who were excited by the crafty aspects of model railroading and the engineers who worked on the electrical systems that propelled the trains—­is itself a metaphor for how the work of “hackers” might be read against the social dynamics of the outside world.17 In other words, even within the Tech Model Railroad Club, hackers saw themselves as outsiders who diligently labored in a secret world of technology and wires that lay just under the mundane surface. This metaphor encourages readers to apprehend “hackers” as a unified subculture—­homogenous in attitude while also distinct and separate from the world of normal folk. I am skeptical of Levy’s distinction. Revisiting the book’s narrative through the lens of historical speleology reveals nuance that may not have been lost in Levy’s writing. All historians grope for a narrative within the archives, and Levy’s narrative about the nerdy hackers who

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trailblazed the information age seems almost too tidy to be true. A careful reading of Hackers reveals these flaws. In it Levy masks many details about who belonged to the Signals and Power subcommittee in the Tech Model Railroad Club. He is also silent about the degree to which they were separate from the faction he identifies as being interested in the more crafty elements of model railroads. His writing is so ambiguous about these distinctions that it becomes hard to determine whether these factions were even mutually exclusive: “There were two factions for TMRC. Some members loved the idea of spending their time building and painting replicas of certain trains with historical and emotional value, or creating realistic scenery for the layout. This was the knife-­ and-­paintbrush contingent, and it subscribed to railroad magazines and booked the club for trips on aging train lines. The other faction centered on the Signals and Power subcommittee of the club and it cared more about what went on under the layout.”18 Levy’s book revolves not around the Signals and Powers subcommittee but around a handful of individuals within the subcommittee who moonlighted as hackers elsewhere in the building because they were able to earn the key to the premises. Even Levy describes this faction as “centering” in on this subcommittee rather than being the subcommittee itself. Levy’s ambiguous use of “faction” and “subcommittee” further muddies the narrative as it implies only that there were members of a faction in the club who were interested in the crafty aspects of model railroading and a different faction that was more interested in the electrical aspects of the hobby. It does not imply—­despite Levy’s careful phrasing—­that all members of the Signals and Power subcommittee were more interested in the wiring of model railroads than the hobby scene of model railroads. Like all members of student clubs, their interests were likely distributed, and it was the club’s stated interest in hobby railroads that united the social fabric of the group. I’ve gone to great lengths to detail how Levy’s writing, in attempting to describe the hacker ethic, produces what I would consider a false cultural binary between the two factions within the club. Levy’s skillful writing encourages readers to distinguish the hackers in the Tech Model Railroad Club from the hobbyists. I strongly disagree with his assessment and feel that it contributes to the segregated telling of game and technology history. For if we are to understand the culture that

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the hackers in Levy’s book operate within, we must look to the clues in the culture that surrounded them. Hobby railroad magazines did little to separate hobbyists who were interested in the electrical aspects of the hobby from those drawn to the crafty aspects of the hobby. And although MIT’s Signals and Power subcommittee clearly shared an acute interest in the wiring of model railroads, it is a historical error to assume that they came to this knowledge without ever referencing hobby magazines and field manuals. Thus, the culture of hackers has long been connected to the culture of hobbyists. The outsider and rebel depictions that we have come to associate with hackers are part of the very same white masculine geek identity that has long been possessed by hobbyists. Continuing our speleology, we should reconsider the Tech Model Railroad Club as a more porous entity. It incubated the wants, needs, and desires of early hackers within the same motif as hobby railroads. In this way, we can better assemble the cultural milieu of the group as a relatively homogenous group of tinkerers that cultivated diverse interests. The group likely sought components for tinkering at the local hobby shop, Crosby’s Hobby Center, a thriving hobby store located about a mile from Cambridge Square and two miles from MIT’s main campus. In their Model Railroader advertisements they boasted about carrying model railroad supplies “in all gauges” and keeping late hours on Thursdays. In this store, members of the group were likely to encounter other hobbyists as they perused the latest models, tools, scenery, electronics, and magazines that supported the hobby. The specialized wares of Crosby’s Hobby Center must have appealed to the hobbyists of the Tech Model Railroad Club, as most parts for model railroads—­such as motorized rotating platforms for track switching, specialized power packs and control dials, and unique tools like small handheld sanding wheels for deburring metal tracks—­were otherwise available only by mail order. The hobby, in other words, demanded rare tools, so the local hobby store was probably a godsend for the MIT tinkerers. The social context of hobbyists is essential for constructing a historical narrative that understands their relationship to the broader cultural dynamics of the time, a sensibility that is all the more important given that critical conversations about civil rights were happening in major US cities at the time. This context is doubly critical as the student body

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of MIT, like those of many other elite college campuses in the 1950s, was overwhelmingly white. The university didn’t begin outreach programs to recruit Black students until civil rights conversations began nationally in the 1960s.19 Additionally, MIT struggled with attrition among the women who were admitted prior to 1960, as the institution took a laissez-­faire attitude toward their success and retention. Essentially, they allowed women to enroll without offering them guidance or institutional support.20 Institutional barriers to entry disincentivized women and Black students from taking a broader role institutional life, and coed fraternization at late hours would have been read as uncouth. For these reasons, we can assume that the social context of the Tech Model Railroad Club in the early sixties was homogenous—­composed of young white men. Levy relates this social context in his book but uses it as evidence to support his argument about how hackers emerged from one of the Tech Model Railroad Club’s factions. He makes a great deal about how the Signals and Powers subcommittee was obsessed with tinkering with club policy through the parliamentary manual Robert’s Rules of Order that the group used to manage its meetings: “The hackers would exploit every possible thread of parliamentary procedure to create a meeting as convoluted as the programs they were hacking on TX-­0.”21 He then describes the frustration of the more crafty members of the group at convoluted meetings, the arguments that broke out, and the juvenile jabs they would use to characterize these arguments in their minutes. Levy even relates a quote where one member mentions how they wish someone would “purchase a cork for Samson’s oral diarrhea.”22 These petty arguments strike me less as evidence of the hackers in the group seeking to break down any barriers (procedural or otherwise) that might have kept them from tinkering with computers, as Levy characterizes them.23 Instead, they seem more like examples of geek masculinity. T. L. Taylor defines geek masculinity as a form of masculinity that reinforces an outsider mentality through the performed mastery of nerdy or arcane topics.24 Pedantic arguments about Robert’s Rules of Order epitomize this mindset as they characterize how members of the club came to embrace their outsider status while also bickering over parliamentary procedure.

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Additionally, these petty arguments highlight how members of the club were barely grown themselves. Just as model trains appealed and were marketed to a generation of adolescent men through a nostalgia acquired in their youth, the hobbyists in the Tech Model Railroad Club were only just out of high school. Their proclivities and tempers had not yet been sorted by life outside of college. In the chapters that follow, I identify a common theme of young and old men bridging an age gap by participating in networks of privilege. The Tech Model Railroad Club was no different. Participants would socialize with older professors (like mathematician and artificial intelligence expert John McCarthy) and members of the vast network of railroad hobbyists through magazines like Model Railroader. The social space of model railroading was really quite juvenile. Older men were respected for their social status and experience, but this experience did not translate into a more charitable or mature social motif. The Tech Model Railroad Club is typical of people this book describes simply as hobbyists: a group of nerdy white men who participated in networks of privilege and took seriously activities that their peers found silly or childish. Perhaps the biggest difference between the Tech Model Railroad Club and hobbyists overall was the club’s geographic location in Cambridge, adjacent to Boston and MIT. Hobbyists lived predominantly in the suburbs of major cities, not cities themselves, primarily due to white flight in the 1960s and 1970s, which had a profound geographic impact on the demographic contours of North America. The white clusters of model train hobbyists who lived and worked in cities overwhelmingly fled these centers. Yet in 1962, when associates of the Tech Model Railroad Club released the game Spacewar!, white flight had not yet begun in earnest. It was not until 1963 that mass protests in major cities like Birmingham, Alabama, became a chief part of the American civil rights narrative. Although white flight was a factor in North America’s geographic landscape in the 1940s and 1950s, it accelerated in the next two decades as newspapers characterized the protest in cities as riots. The white hobbyists who founded the Tech Model Railroad Club and built a culture around it were insulated within their own white enclave at MIT. In 1955 MIT had only just hired its first Black professor, and by

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1968 there were only twenty-­one Black students out of a total student body of around thirty-­five hundred.25 Even if the hobbyists who participated in the Tech Model Railroad Club did encounter one of the few Black students who were enrolled at MIT at the time, it is unlikely that they would have made MIT seem any less white. Not even one of every hundred MIT students was Black in 1968, and so even fewer would have been Black in 1962—­six years earlier and before the acceleration of US civil rights discourse. Just as the suburbs were a space of predominantly white culture, so too were many elite universities that declined to admit Black and minority students. The elite university was designed as a white enclave, as Craig Steven Wilder documents in his book, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities. Many prestigious universities in North America were founded to disseminate the ideas that would further dispossess Native Americans and maintain the institution of slavery.26 While Wilder’s historical work specifically critiques colonial universities such as Harvard, William and Mary, and Yale, his central point holds up. Scholars like Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, working within the Black radical tradition, note how the university assimilated and indoctrinated its students within a white European tradition of education hostile toward women and people of color.27 In 1962, MIT was certainly not a space that was hospitable to Black students. It was a space that allowed white men to thrive by giving them easy access to like-­minded peers, facilities where they could tinker with technology and toys, and access to networks of privilege that put them into conversation with faculty who were working at the cutting edge of their field. The hobbyists in the Tech Model Railroad Club had a sweet deal by any objective standard.

The Beginning of Hobby Games The goal of this chapter was to historicize MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club by offering a history that detaches it from a history of technology and hackers. I critique Levy’s claim in Hackers that the club defined the ethos and ideology of hackers worldwide. My work in this chapter shows that all members of the club would have had more than a passing familiarity with the hobby of model railroad building and thus an

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understanding of the culture of hobbyists. This slight recontextualization is important because it identifies a culture within the Tech Model Railroad Club more unified around the hobby than Levy’s hypothesis of different group factions would suggestion. I am arguing not that the group didn’t have factions but that the hobby of model railroad building was not incidental to the culture of the hackers who spent time as part of the group. Positioning the Tech Model Railroad Club first as a group of hobbyists and a distant second as a hacker incubator helps foreground how the cultural zeitgeist of the club influenced its other famous projects, like Spacewar!, and what Levy identifies as the “hacker ethic.”28 Better understanding the culture of model railroad hobbyists helps to better contextualize these projects within the interests typical of white geek masculinity. They were driven by a frontier mindset that embraced an outsider identity typical of the heroes of many westerns and brought a desire for white community—­be it in the suburbs or in the elite halls of MIT. The through line of race has marked the Tech Model Railroad Club through its absence in a rapidly integrating world. Issues of the magazine Model Railroader fill in this missing context by showing how interest in model railroads was intrinsically linked to both race and class. The limited rollout of electrical infrastructure in the early twentieth century illustrates how model trains were initially a luxury that only wealthy white consumers living in cities could afford. After the electrical grid became more ubiquitous, a broader spectrum of consumers had access to model trains and so the hobby was able to expand. By the mid-­t wentieth century the infrastructure of hobby railroading had already been developed and assumed a white male reader. Thus it furthered many interests that already appealed to white men, including a fantasy of a rugged and masculine Old West where trains were emblems of commerce and civilization. The Tech Model Railroad Club inherited this fantasy, and it impacted everything they touched—­from Spacewar! to the “hacker ethic.” Model railroads were historically important because they were one of the first networks that were founded and maintained by hobbyists participating in a massively networked hobby community. Other than science fiction fanzines, there were few comparable networks in the

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early twentieth century. Model railroad magazines also established a format for how the fan networks that followed would integrate hobby consumer goods into an autonomously managed hobby scene. These scenes produced famous communities like the Tech Model Railroad Club, but they also set the groundwork for a series of cascading networks around hobby games to follow and further proliferate the culture’s traditions.

2

Avalon Hill’s Race Problem There is no Mr. Avalon, nor is there a Mr. Hill. . . . The very first games were published in a Baltimore suburb, Avalon, high up on a hill literally overlooking the genteel plantation land of picturesque south Baltimore. It was there that Gettysburg was conceived . . . labor of love in which the famous civil war battle was rehashed time and time again by admitted Confederate sympathizers (in the “border” state of Maryland southern loyalty ran high). One of the very first correspondents was an elderly Alabama gentleman who was having the time of his life “slaughtering those damyankees.” —­Avalon Hill General (1964)

No publication has been more influential to networking the community of hobbyists in North America than the Avalon Hill General. Initially founded in response to the surprisingly robust sales of Avalon Hill’s wargame Gettysburg, the periodical became a community institution in the wargaming fan community. This chapter tells the story of how Avalon Hill used the Avalon Hill General as a promotional tool to attract disparate communities of white men scattered across the suburban landscape of North America. It also argues that the magazine prominently featured Confederate and Nazi imagery on their pages to cultivate an audience of white hobbyists. These hobbyists did not reject the symbols of white supremacy. Rather, they were comfortable enough with its racist connotations to band together and participate in the culture of hobby wargaming. The white supremacist imagery printed in the Avalon Hill General primed an audience of hobbyists to self-­select a community of like-­minded white players in the 1960s. The magazine’s tenth issue prominently features an advertisement for their new game $quander (1965) on the front page (figure 2.1). It is unlike every other cover photo that the Avalon Hill General would 51

Figure 2.1. Cover image from the Avalon Hill General 2, no. 4 (1965). Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Avalon Hill General magazine archive at the site View from the Trenches, www.vftt.co.uk.

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go on to print because it features a Black man. Of course the image is a gag—­a promotional shot of a phony white “millionaire” with a giant bag of money. The Black man shown is his servant, the limo driver. There is a second Black man watching from the background and possibly a Latinx child approaching from the left (the lighting of the shot makes this difficult to discern). The photo is oddly composed; the supposed millionaire named Gardner is positioned toward the back of the shot. His limo driver is prominently positioned in front of him, holding a promotional bag of money. The text on the money bag reads “$quander: the game for born losers.” An arm in the background gropes around the limo driver for one of Gardner’s thousand-­dollar bills. For the white suburban readers of the Avalon Hill General, this ad was undoubtedly funny—­an opportunity to laugh at the poor “losers” who would debase themselves on camera for a bit of fool’s gold. The ad and the game presage what we call “Trumpism” today. Just read the photo caption: “Millionaire Elwood Gardner is besieged by the mob for what they think are real thousand-­dollar bills. No wonder they’re elementary school drop-­outs . . . with the perfect intellect for playing $quander, the game for born losers.”1 The Black and Brown folks depicted in the photo are seen as part of the “mob”—­a word that continues to be racialized today. They’re depicted as materialistic, uneducated, and gullible as they grab the “thousand-­dollar bills” that Gardner is distributing. Finally, this sordid scene is summarized with one clear word: “losers.” The crass joke that the ad tells is intended for the Avalon Hill General’s white suburban readership. It is a nudge and a wink to the magazine’s readership that implies they have superior taste and refinement. In other words, readers of the ad saw themselves not as dupes or “losers” but as discerning consumers. The “mob” of “elementary school drop-­outs” were fooled by the promise of “thousand-­dollar” bills. By contrast, the Avalon Hill General’s audience understood themselves as smart outsiders from multicultural urban life. The “mob” was coded as Black, Brown, and poor, while the discriminating wargamers saw themselves in decidedly more cerebral terms. They may not have been millionaires, but they knew that “thousand-­dollar” bills didn’t make the man. $quander was an unusual game for Avalon Hill to publish. It was intended for a mass market, not the usual wargamer and hobbyist crowds who preferred wargames. In comparison to games like Monopoly (1935),

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in which players tried to get rich by bankrupting one another, in $quander the concept is simple: to “throw your money away—­even faster than the government does it.”2 The game’s mechanics are novel—­the first player to go bankrupt wins!3 Narratively, these similar yet separate objectives are telling. Monopoly began as a critique of monopolistic capitalism and was repackaged by the company Parker Brothers as a celebration of capitalism and meritocracy.4 In contrast, $quander presents no such meritocratic lens for players to interpret the game through. The game is cynical and almost nihilistic about capitalism and wealth. It encourages players to inhabit a position of privilege and spend recklessly, which in 1965 stood in decadent contrast to the standards of meritocracy that drove Monopoly. At the time, Avalon Hill was producing games for niche groups of players who saw themselves as outsiders. $quander is indicative of the elitism Avalon Hill incubated in its consumer base. The company marketed games to players who distanced themselves from the market appetites of “the masses.” The depiction of folks chasing thousand-­dollar bills in the advertisement for $quander as a “mob” speaks clearly to this point. Avalon Hill’s consumer base saw itself as intelligent, elite, discerning, and even snobby. This depiction of Avalon Hill players colluded with the politics of white privilege. By internalizing a sense of privileged elitism in its players, Avalon Hill encouraged them to flirt with white supremacy.

Jerry Pournelle Avalon Hill’s consumer base perceived themselves as elite because they shared a network with genuine military brass. This was by design as Avalon Hill deliberately courted military elites. The company strove to publish articles written by them in the Avalon Hill General and to earn their endorsements for their games. Perhaps the most notorious of these elites was Jerry Pournelle, a man who epitomized the intellectual privilege that hobbyists could attain within the network. Pournelle’s writing in the hobby community helps to draw a contrast between the simulationist wargames that Avalon Hill published and the simulations of war that the US military would term “wargames.” In this regard, Pournelle helped to reinforce Avalon Hill’s ability to market their games as serious renderings of military scenarios.

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Pournelle was a frequent contributor to the Avalon Hill General and served as an intermediary in the scene because he was able to connect figures from the military with the grassroots. He was a renowned science fiction author and president of the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association (1973). But he is most famous in military circles for coauthoring The Strategy of Technology with Stefan Possony (1970)—­a hawkish book that promoted a cynical strategy for military and economic dominance during the Cold War.5 Because Pournelle took on a variety of professional and amateur roles, he bridged discourse between Avalon Hill, the hobby Diplomacy communities that chapter 3 explores in more detail, and the military elite. As a writer, Pournelle defaulted to an aggressive and xenophobic tone. While quite successful in his career as an author, he also may have held deep white supremacist sympathies. He used a quotation—“Freedom is not free. Free men are not equal. Equal men are not free.”—to sign off on entries he wrote for the blog he kept until his death in 2017. The quote became so synonymous with Pournelle that it was widely included in his obituary. The quote was not Pournelle’s writing, however—­it is more accurately attributed to Richard Cotton, a white supremacist radio personality whom Pournelle admired. Pournelle, a man who moved between many circles, shrewdly left the quote unattributed, allowing it to act as a “dog whistle” for other white supremacists in the hobby community.6 Pournelle sought sympathetic camaraderie in the hobby. In the Avalon Hill General, Pournelle was able to participate in conversations with other wargamers who flirted with historical revisionism and white supremacy. Pournelle’s writing was essential in Avalon Hill’s efforts in cultivating a homogeneous white network of hobbyists keen on learning more about military strategy. He was also influential enough in military circles to share hobbyist ideas with military leadership. In a two-­part article written for the Avalon Hill General in 1971, Pournelle compared his experience at the Research Analysis Corporation (RAC) to Avalon Hill’s wargame Afrika Corps.7 In his article “Simulating the Art of War,” Pournelle analyzed the similarities between hobby and military simulation by asking: what is to be simulated, tactics or strategy? For Pournelle, the crucial distinction between was that “strategy operates against the will of [an] opponent rather than his means.”8 In other words, strategies were focused on the long term and less concerned with the opponent’s

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immediate surrender. In contrast, tactics were concerned with the loss or gain of key materials. Pournelle theorized that wargames offered no real sense of strategic purchase and were concerned with abstracted resources. He saw wargames as purely tactical apparatuses focused on the material conditions of battle, unconcerned with the psychic, social, and interpersonal conditions of warfare. In short, wargames abstracted people to numbers that were easy to place on a map. Pournelle was inspired by wargames that mathematically modeled and quantitatively understood game states. Thus the playful, real-­time simulations of the RAC—­and the simulation of slow bureaucratic processes in general—­were criticized by Pournelle for being boring. Pournelle was a champion of Avalon Hill’s wargames, greatly preferring them to the plodding simulations that were relied upon by tacticians within military circles at the time: The last time I was involved with a RAC game (as a consultant to feed in data about how to simulate strategic and tactical air strikes) it took six months playing time to finish a forty-­eight hour simulation—­and that was with about ten players on each side, as staff of twenty referees, and a large computer to help. The game, incidentally, was one which eventually resulted in the US Army’s evolving the Air Assault Divisions, now known as Air Cav. The point is that although an accurate simulation—­it had to be, since procurement and real-­world organization decisions were based in part on the results—­the “war game” at RAC was unplayable, and one suspects, even the most fanatical war-­games buff would have found it dull after working at it full time for months.9

Wargames required players and designers to consider how statistically based combat tables mapped onto the actions of players in the game. Through abstraction, traditional wargames provided a space for gamic action to develop quickly. The simulations Pournelle refers to, on the other hand, were slow to unfold. They focused more on the development and analysis of social action than on quick simulation of combat action. Military simulations involved more than just modeling spatial and temporal dynamics. Military-­style simulations went beyond representing and reducing things in the world to miniature proxies—­they

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produced larger and more robust models that allowed researchers to sift through an array of moving parts. As these were consumer goods, however, the “fun” was never located in the interpersonal elements of wargames. Instead, the quantitative and statistical aspects of simulations were taken up by fan cultures and later brought to the mass market.10 Jerry Pournelle brought specialized military knowledge to the design of simulations in this network of privilege. His participation as reader and writer for the Avalon Hill General reveals how games were imagined at the intersection of the grassroots and the military. He believed that war was inevitable and that others in the world would be either allies or enemies. Fascinatingly, his work was seamlessly integrated into both the military and hobby infrastructures. He contributed to a network of white privilege by bringing the white network of hobbyists into close dialogue with the predominantly white US military leadership. In contrast to other sites of discourse between the US military and the greater American population—­ which are remembered as rife with conflict, disagreement, and contest—­ there is a true sense of collaboration within the established avenues of dialogue that existed between the hobby and military institutions. Through the Avalon Hill General Jerry Pournelle also fostered a discourse between the play-­by-­mail gaming hobby and the politico-­military elite. Notably, he compared games that were played by hobbyists to other games played by military think tanks. Through this moment of ideological dissemination, we can see how the values placed in games by military interests were entirely compatible with the interests of hobbyists. Hobbyists were enthusiastic to learn from military brass and saw their feedback on hobby games as a form of authentic valorization. After all, if a military strategist found value in a hobby game, it valorized the hobby game community as a serious intellectual space. Through these unique ties between military and grassroots spheres, a white group of hobbyists learned the intellectual skills necessary for leveraging their invisible social advantage into a series of incremental gains. These connections and skill-­sharing patterns were foundational to the value that hobbyists were able to locate in the network of privilege they constructed. When Pournelle offered a comparison of the simulations he would play at the RAC and wargames like Afrika Corps, it is clear that he found military simulations obtuse. He felt that more interesting work was being done by fans who were using statistics to better represent the

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plural outcomes of combat. Pournelle was a tremendously influential figure in the hobby game scene who facilitated the transfer of knowledge between it and the US military. He also held white supremacist sympathies that were articulated through his xenophobic beliefs of American exceptionalism. As a hobbyist, he helped to refine Avalon Hill’s unique contribution to the practice of game design. Avalon Hill, it turns out, found their niche by producing nostalgic military scenarios that allowed players to imagine alternate histories. Unfortunately, these histories were often slightly too compatible with white supremacist revisionism.

The Games of Avalon Hill I use the term “simulationism” to describe a philosophy of game design that aims to produce an authentic and historically accurate model of a game. It is related to simulation, which also aims for accuracy, but looks to the future as opposed to the past. An economic game might simulate the stock market by providing players with a useful set of intuitions about what might happen in the future. By contrast, a simulationist game would model the stock market in 1929, encouraging players to see how circumstances could culminate in the Wall Street crash. While both simulation and simulationism aim to accurately model events, simulations are predictive and often relied on by both governments and businesses. Simulationist games are marketed to a hobby audience interested in “what if ” scenarios.11 Avalon Hill’s fortunes rose by selling simulationist games, which they refined by adding a sense of specificity that had been lacking in the past. Earlier attempts at simulating war through games attained verisimilitude but were rarely sought out by consumer audiences. The Kriegspiel (1899), a genre-­defining wargame that was used to train nineteenth-­century Prussian troops in the art of war, was updated in the early twentieth century by H. G. Wells. His game Little Wars (1913) was notoriously abstract and includes line drawings and rules for movement, logistics, and combat. Compared to the games that Avalon Hill would later publish, with vivid, full-­color illustrations, Little Wars looks like a cartoon sketch. Certainly one might be able to discern how a sketch led to an illustration, but there is an enormous gap in the level of detail the two rendered.

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In its early days, Avalon Hill relied on a small handful of wargames to buoy its popularity. Its first game, Tactics (1954), was a commercial wargame in the style of The Kriegspiel that encouraged two players to compete in simulationist land-­war combat. Players would push small cardboard chits around a map (blocked out with square black lines) as they positioned their units to best their opponent.12 The gameplay in Tactics created a template for wargame mechanics that would be developed by Avalon Hill. When opening a new game box, players expected to receive a cardboard map, instructions, and a rulebook. The fun of playing Tactics derived from experimenting with a simulationist sandbox—­seeing how different approaches and battlefield configurations might alter the landscape of war. The game made a promise to its players that they could play as generals, surveying the landscape of a fictional battlefield from the comfort of their own home. Soon after Tactics came Dispatcher (1958) and Gettysburg (1958). Although not a tremendously popular game in Avalon Hill’s line, Dispatcher was a bridge between the Avalon Hill’s networks of privilege and those in the model train community. In Dispatcher, players act as train dispatchers tasked with coordinating the logistics of slow freight trains. It would be a simple job except faster commuter trains and the opponent’s freight trains invariably gum up the works. The game provided players with small cardboard tokens representing trains as well as a number of charts for automating the rest of the trains on the tracks. The first edition’s grammatically incorrect tagline betrays Avalon Hill’s amateur roots. A large font on the box cover reads: “Now you be a railroad dispatcher in this realistic game by Avalon Hill.” Not only did Avalon Hill botch their cover tag, but they also misprinted a number of components. The game was printed with a rules errata sheet that notes how the small tokens representing “helpers” were also misprinted. Clearly Avalon Hill struggled to oversee the quality of their early games. As chapter 5 describes at length, publishing board games is a complex enterprise that today requires a complicated sequence of fulfillment logistics. Things were simpler, but not exactly easy, when Avalon Hill was producing games. When Avalon Hill first published games like Dispatcher they had few models of publishing in the industry to learn from. What’s more, Avalon Hill’s games almost all relied on small, fiddly tokens printed on sheets of thin cardboard. These tokens were often only

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one or two centimeters long and were printed in such a dense way that looking at the grid boggles the eyes. In the early days Avalon Hill took its first steps toward becoming a commercial game publisher but lacked adequate staff to best manage their output quality—­a pattern that would replicate in other small, cottage-­industry companies in the years ahead. Dispatcher was marketed to model train enthusiasts as it imagined a tactical space where players competed to run the rails efficiently. Part of their marketing included an effort to ride the hobby boom that had been incubated in the model train scene. This meant outreach to magazines like Model Railroader, where Avalon Hill would run ads promoting Dispatcher to the model railroad crowd. These ads naturally included marketing for Avalon Hill’s other products as well, such as Tactics and Gettysburg. Like $quander, Dispatcher is somewhat of an oddity in Avalon Hill’s catalog of wargames. It was a game that built a one-­way bridge to the model railroad community and encouraged model train enthusiasts to give Avalon Hill’s main line of wargames a chance. This bridge saw a lot of traffic, as Gettysburg proved to be a hit. Gettysburg offered similar gameplay to Tactics. Cardboard chits represented units and were pushed around on a map simulating the actual territory over which Gettysburg was fought. It iterated on the formula provided by Tactics and added a layer of computational complexity to the tokens. The game included a more complicated set of statistics, including differing movement values. Combat was resolved using a separate reference table that players would consult to interpret dice rolls. Mechanically, Gettysburg worked within the metaphorical grid lines that Tactics established to introduce a deeper and more simulationist vision of what wargaming could be. Gettysburg was the first hobby wargame to be based upon an actual historical battle. The stakes of the game, in other words, were somewhat existential. The 1863 Battle of Gettysburg is remembered by historians as the turning point of the US Civil War, as General Robert E. Lee’s Confederate advance on the North was met with defeat. Speculatively, had the Battle of Gettysburg not been a victory for the Union forces, the war’s outcome would have been in question. These stakes added to the drama of Gettysburg and made it more than a game about war. It was a dark game about alternate futures where wargamers were invited to ruminate upon what military strategies might have produced a Confederate win. Its

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dogged simulationism allowed players to tinker with the past and imagine a world where the outcome of the US Civil War had been different. Gettysburg was a hit for Avalon Hill. Fan interest led the company to revise and rerelease it in 1961, 1964, 1977, and 1988. As $quander illustrates, Avalon Hill’s fanbase welcomed the outsider politics of geek culture with a shrewd sense of elitism. They were “in on the joke” because they thought of themselves as clever and intelligent in a world where presumably few others were. Gettysburg allowed them to play “armchair general” and speculate on histories that never were. The game’s historical narrative also drew them to trade book lists and opinion columns about history within the pages of the Avalon Hill General. These opinion columns often flirted with white supremacist takes on history and would provoke “what if ” questions in a similar vein to the speculative history of Gettysburg. In Gettysburg fans found a simulationist model for tinkering with history and a platform for quasi-­intellectual conversations about military history. Gettysburg’s success led Avalon Hill to expand their line of wargames in the decades that followed. Their reputation for publishing historical simulationist wargames was unmatched in the sixties and seventies. During this period they published games set in locations with different units and generals, with similarly concerning ideologies. While Gettysburg was one of the many games that Avalon Hill published that focused on the Civil War, they also expanded their line to games focused on World War II, including Afrika Korps (1964), based on Erwin Rommel’s campaign in Northern Africa. The campaign came at a decisive moment in World War II, when a beleaguered Nazi Germany was able to stave off defeat through shrewd desert combat tactics. Like Gettysburg before it, Afrika Korps offered players an opportunity to take part in a fantasy scenario where they could change the course of history. The back of the Afrika Korps box is most telling—­Avalon Hill advertises the game in a way that betrays sympathy for Hitler and the Nazi Party: “Ever since men began making weapons they have used them to create legends: in early 1941, when his conquest of Europe was embarrassed by the rout of his Italian allies in Africa, Hitler dispatched General Erwin Rommel to forestall a seemingly inevitable Axis defeat. Reorganizing the forces under his command as the Deutsches Afrika Korps (DAK), Rommel immediately launched the first of his legendary desert offensives.”13 Here Avalon Hill juxtaposes the “legendary” nature

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of Rommel’s North African campaign against the “embarrassment” of Italy’s campaign. I regard this as a sympathetic depiction of Nazi Germany because the game manufacturer not only glamorizes Rommel’s skill as a general but also lauds Rommel’s ability to turn the war around for Nazi Germany. Avalon Hill would go to great lengths to refer its readers to white supremacist histories of World War II and even glamorize abominable leaders such as Adolf Hitler on the cover of its magazine. The overtly white supremacist symbolism that Avalon Hill used to market Afrika Korps made the game beloved by its player base. It was followed by similar wargames that allowed players to don the mantle of the Axis powers in World War II. Blitzkrieg (1965) and Panzer Blitz (1970) led the pack and resulted in gaming innovations—­rules for line of sight and scenario-­based rules that allowed players to reenact multiple historical battles with a single game set—­that continue to be used in wargames today. The narrative and mechanical aspects of Avalon Hill’s games are just one piece of a larger picture. When this puzzle is assembled, it shows that the company flirted with white supremacy to appease its suburban fanbase. As I describe in the section that follows, the editors of the Avalon Hill General may have even held white supremacist sympathies themselves. The games published by Avalon Hill fed the white geek masculinity of the company’s fans. Perhaps they said it best in this chapter’s epigraph: the company was founded in the suburbs of Baltimore, “high up on a hill” and “overlooking [a] genteel plantation.” The company packaged nostalgia along with the wargames it sold. For Black folks who stumbled upon these articles in the sixties and seventies, their connotations of genteel southern aristocracy were undoubtably disgusting. But such low-­key racism was mostly invisible for the Avalon Hill General’s predominantly white consumers. Before slavery was abolished, Black people worked plantations and were abused by landowners and slavers living “high up on a hill.” With these dog whistles, Avalon Hill curated a predominantly white player base that saw itself as better than the “mob” of people who chose other games. Avalon Hill cultivated white geek masculinity through the games it sold and what their game mechanics represented. Representation, however, is only one piece of this history. A second and equally important piece is the network of privilege that grew from Avalon Hill’s games. The early issues of the Avalon Hill General featured profiles of editors whom

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the company hired. By looking into the interests of the magazine’s editorial staff, this chapter takes a closer look at the culture that was embraced by Avalon Hill, which they subsequently spread to readers and gamers.

Personalities of the Avalon Hill General “Privileged” is a good description for the player base that Avalon Hill cultivated with their games. Most of their products were wargames that thrust players into roles of generals commanding large armies. Avalon Hill’s games filled a hobby game niche that catered to a variety of players. Some maintained an interest due to their service in the military, while teenagers in high school were looking for games to play with their friends. This strange demographic cross-­section was united by a sense of privilege born from an internalized sense of elitism derived from rejection by normative social groups. These were the high school geeks who read military strategy for fun and the military men who imagined themselves to be well versed in military history. They found community because they were able to “geek out” over the simulationist military games sold by Avalon Hill. Each year, the Avalon Hill General introduced readers to the periodical’s editors. Early issues of the magazine read like a mixer for fans of Avalon Hill’s games to meet and socialize. At least in the first issue, introductions to the editors take up a third of the page and feature four editors. Because they would be in charge of editing that year’s submissions from groups of players in their area, editors were given a regional jurisdiction. Regional responsibility would reduce the lag time in correspondence as editors worked to bring submissions from fans in their area to production. Additionally, editors were expected to write columns for the magazine. As an incentive, the editors contributing to the Avalon Hill General were also granted a free subscription to the magazine. Within this early template of regional jurisdiction, editors were responsible for eight regions: New England, Middle Atlantic, South Atlantic, Central, Midwest, Northwest, Southwest, and Pacific Coast. Editors tended to be young white men, often still in high school, or older white men affiliated with the military. Take the unique crew charged with editing issues in the Avalon Hill General as a sample of this demographic. In the first issue, readers were introduced to Hilary Smith, a seventeen-­year-­old boy from Silver Springs,

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Maryland; Sgt. Louis Zocchi, a twenty-­nine-­year-­old man from Alamogordo, New Mexico; Jon Perica, a sixteen-­year-­old from Woodland Hills, California; and Cadet Captain Carl F. Knabe II, a twenty-­one-­year-­ old ROTC (Reserve Officers’ Training Corps) officer and student at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana. The second issue filled out the lineup with editors representing the remaining regions: Thomas LaFarge, a seventeen-­year-­old from Marion, Massachusetts; Victor Madeja, a sixteen-­ year-­old from Brooklyn, New York; and Daniel Hughes, a seventeen-­year-­ old from Wichita, Kansas. By issue three, editors for a new “Arctic” region and broadly for “Naval Affairs” were introduced: Walter G. Green III, an eighteen-­year-­old freshman at Duke University from Burlington, North Carolina, was made naval affairs editor; and Martin D. Leith (age undisclosed), a postal clerk, ex–­Royal Canadian Air Force officer, and father, was appointed the magazine’s Arctic editor. Finally, fifteen-­year-­old Philip Beasley of Libby, Montana, was appointed Northwest editor in issue 4. The biographies included in the Avalon Hill General reflected a mix of naïve and edgy personalities. Contributors like Hilary Smith seem like typical nerdy high school students. Smith was interested in his high school science and finance clubs.14 John Perica played junior varsity basketball and held twee sentiments about his interest in Avalon Hill games. “I like to think of myself as the only sixteen year old Field Marshall in the world,” Perica wrote to express the privilege he felt as a participant in the Avalon Hill community by betraying his youth.15 Others like Louis Zocchi expressed a sense of humor that could be described only as crude, self-­deprecating, and misogynist—­even in the context of 1964’s social norms. Zocchi wrote his biography as if it was stand-­up comedy: “[Zocchi] is an amateur magician, teaches guitar and electric bass, plays in a dance band, and beats his wife for amusement,” and then continued, “Sgt. Zocchi’s magic show for a Japanese General was so impressive that The Avalon Hill General ordered Zocchi decorated. He was tarred and feathered on the spot.” His biography ends with, “The word sarge is applicable because that is his rank. Anyone that meets him knows just how rank he is.”16 Rank indeed! I would describe the overall mix of personalities brought on by Avalon Hill to edit the Avalon Hill General as juvenile—­if not for their genuine interest in military tactics and the commonplace participation of military officers in their community. Avalon Hill leadership poached mili-

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tary officers because they saw military buy-­in as essential to retaining the authenticity of their simulationist games. This mix of personalities produced an extraordinarily privileged space. Discussion in the Avalon Hill General revolved mainly around the strategy and tactics used within Avalon Hill games and how military history informed game design. The teenagers who wrote and edited the magazine were in close dialogue with military elites who were curious about Avalon Hill’s games. One must speculate whether an equivalent space for discourse could be cultivated if any of the personalities who edited the Avalon Hill General were Black. Given the magazine’s willingness to print Zocchi’s off-­color jokes and glamorize white military leaders including the Confederate general Robert E. Lee and the Nazi general Erwin Rommel, it is unlikely that Black readers would have had the stomach to read or contribute to the periodical. This was probably fine with Avalon Hill leadership, who were actively courting endorsements of their products from a military that had finished desegregating only in 1963. While the editors of the Avalon Hill General handled editing and producing articles for the magazine, Avalon Hill used the publication to market their games, seeking buy-­in from anyone who might bolster the company’s fledgling reputation. Perhaps the best example of Avalon Hill’s influence on the magazine was a trip that its leadership took to Washington, D.C., to meet the famed general Anthony C. McAuliffe. His decisive leadership helped turn the tide for the allies during the Battle of the Bulge. During this trip they recruited McAuliffe for a previously nonexistent “advisory board” and asked him to weigh in on their simulationist game Battle of the Bulge (1965). McAuliffe was allegedly delighted by the company’s interest in military history and felt that wargames were an excellent way to educate the public.17 Avalon Hill then used McAuliffe’s endorsement as a headline for issue 6 of the Avalon Hill General. They described their consultation with McAuliffe in detail to vouch for the simulationist authenticity of their game and brand. The Avalon Hill General’s template of fostering dialogue among wargamers proved to be a great success. Avalon Hill networked the hobby through white suburbs across the United States, producing the thriving fan community that much of gamer geek culture today is predicated upon. Additionally, Avalon Hill created a commons where military elites and teenagers could discuss history, strategy, and wargames.

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In turn, this commons popularized white supremacist ideas in politically elite circles and fan circles.

“Opponents Wanted” The commons that Avalon Hill created in the Avalon Hill General were not limited to authors who would publish in the magazine, either. In the back of each issue was a column titled “Opponents Wanted,” essentially a singles section for lonely men looking for friends to play Avalon Hill’s games with. The first issue of the magazine contained a single advertisement: “Experienced German Field-­Marshal desires to engage capable British General in a game of Afrika Korps.”18 The solicitor left their address after this sentence, thus inviting any of the Avalon Hill General’s subscribers to reach out and send a letter with their interest. The next page listed the addresses of the magazine’s subscribers. In 1964, the magazine was not widely distributed at all, having barely more than seventy subscribers. This number would grow in the years ahead as Avalon Hill continued to print the Avalon Hill General at a steady bimonthly cadence. Early on, though, the magazine was a parlor of sorts for the small network of subscribers who shared an interest in Avalon Hill’s simulationist games. By 1970, the Avalon Hill General’s popularity had snowballed. No longer was a subscriber directory printed publicly for all to read; instead that information was kept private. In its place, the “Opponents Wanted” section had seen exponential growth. In each issue, hundreds of fans would advertise their games to other interested fans. Such advertisements used a mix of colorful and pragmatic language. Some fans would describe in detail what kind of gaming experience they were seeking, listing games they aimed to play and even the faction (for instance, the Germans) that they wished to play as. Others would be more vague and just note the genre of game they were looking for. Some left just their name and address. Avalon Hill solicited these columns with a form they included in every issue of their magazine. Each subscriber was allowed to post only one advertisement per issue, ensuring that the most excitable hobbyists had to write succinctly and specifically about the sort of engagement they were seeking. The “Opponents Wanted” column proved a massive success. It extended the network of privilege that the Avalon Hill General was already

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cultivating. Len Lakofka, a fan who was most notorious in both Diplomacy and Dungeons & Dragons communities, described “Opponents Wanted” as one of the great Avalon Hill innovations: The Avalon Hill General was the first step in creating a broadly based permanent market of “hard core” wargamers and a means via which persons, interested in the hobby could contact one another. Of course, I refer to the “opponents wanted” column in this magazine. It was this unique innovation that began the process of tying together the various segments and factions of wargaming aficionados. The merging of purposes and interests were fostered by the large number of wargaming clubs that sprang up around the country. Their interest, while primarily in Avalon Hill games, also lapsed into the areas of miniatures, game design and military history.19

By providing the infrastructure necessary to allow hobbyists to connect with one another, the Avalon Hill General produced a ripple effect of networks far beyond what Model Railroader was able to provide its readers. While the network of model train hobbyists was localized mainly between brick-­and-­mortar hobby stores and the small handful of clubs that advertised their meetings in the back of the Model Railroader, the network of wargame hobbyists was able to grow in a decidedly less linear fashion. Many of the games that hobbyists found through the “Opponents Wanted” column were those played by mail. These games required a good deal of work on the part of the person hosting the game as that individual had to collect a script of the moves from each of the other players involved and then distribute these scripts along with the updated game state to the group. Even though it was not an Avalon Hill game, a good number of hobbyists in the Avalon Hill General sought one another out in order to play the game Diplomacy, which was also popular among hobbyists at the time. A full game of Diplomacy required seven players exactly; many hobbyists who owned a copy did not have enough friends to play. On average a game of Diplomacy required a fanzine to dedicate about four pages of space to it. Although the game took up only a few pages, the players participating in the postal scene often wanted additional space to communicate with each other about their lives, the imagined characters in the games they played, and more. These small postal publishing syn-

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dicates quickly became large publishing syndicates as hobbyists began to moderate several different simultaneous games with different players. Relatively quickly, many of the publishing loops that were inspired by the “Opponents Wanted” column grew to have subscriber bases almost as large as the Avalon Hill General itself. By 1970, there were hundreds of active play-­by-­mail amateur publishing loops as well. The networks of privilege that characterized the communities of hobbyists were thus greatly amplified by the commons provided within the Avalon Hill General. Along with this amplification came several of the values that the Avalon Hill community took for granted. Hobbyists who went off to publish within their own loops looked to hobbyist publications like the Avalon Hill General for guidance on how to phrase things, what normal discussion between fans looked like, and even what the norms of representation in wargaming were. The cultural dissemination at play between the magazine and the legions of “opponents” it inspired is particularly troubling when one considers the content of many Avalon Hill games and articles. For years the publishers of the Avalon Hill General worked to include a number of sly white supremacist dog whistles for the publication’s general readership.

Glorifying the Disgraced The Avalon Hill General fetishized the “good” general who fought for the wrong cause. These figures gave players a plausible alibi for playing simulations as the Nazis in World War II or Confederates in the Civil War. The “good” general also was a popular topic of discussion, game development, and advertising in the Avalon Hill General. While these figures may have been brilliant battlefield tacticians, they also fought for wicked causes such as slavery and genocide. Examining how these figures were positioned within the magazine helps us better understand why the Avalon Hill community of hobbyists embraced figures who fought for what can only be described as white supremacist governments. For the purposes of this chapter, I compare two ways that the term “white supremacy” is used: structural and ideological white supremacy. Structural white supremacy is a set of interlocking cultural beliefs and institutions that produce a system that benefits white people. In this context, white supremacy is not so much an ideology as an internalized

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mise-­en-­scène. Structural white supremacy is often unconsciously performed in subtle ways by both white and BIPOC people. Importantly, white supremacy in this sense organizes society around whiteness. It embraces white culture while rejecting and undervaluing other forms that challenge it. Ideological white supremacy, in contrast, is a personal ideology. Here, white supremacy is a deep-­seated personal belief that manifests through hate symbols, hate group affiliations, racist language, and violence. Ideological white supremacy recognizes that some people are white supremacists because they strive to produce a society that favors whiteness. I include groups like the KKK in this second definition of white supremacy, alongside people who reiterate symbology and talking points from hate groups. The wargaming hobbyists whom I discuss throughout this book are a network that reflects the values of structural white supremacy. This network of privilege allowed hobbyists to share knowledge and also served to professionalize young men. They received access to privileged knowledge that had been circulated only in elite military circles. Even though most information exchanged in the Avalon Hill General was not privileged, hobbyists furthered structural white supremacy by training a creative workforce that would later use the skills they learned through the magazine at their white-­collar jobs. Overall, the Avalon Hill General was a homogenously white community of editors and contributors with a set of shared interests. These interests were often valuable in the workforce, and because of the community’s demographic makeup, it was structurally complicit in white supremacy. Participants in the Avalon Hill General may have also been complicit in ideological white supremacy. The community’s affinity for generals Robert E. Lee and Erwin Rommel is particularly telling. These generals were featured as prominent figures in Avalon Hill’s wargames partly because the company adopted a simulationist design model to accurately model real historical events. Yet a simulationist rationale alone is insufficient to explain the community’s ties to ideological white supremacy. To understand their links to white supremacist ideology, one must carefully examine the articles published in the Avalon Hill General about Lee and Rommel. These articles not only celebrate these figures for their military prowess but also include white supremacist propaganda—­“dog whistles” that reinforced the white supremacist beliefs of their authors.

Figure 2.2. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 8, no. 3 (1971). Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Avalon Hill General magazine archive at the site View from the Trenches, www.vftt.co.uk.

Figure 2.3. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 11, no. 1 (1974). Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Avalon Hill General magazine archive at the site View from the Trenches, www.vftt.co.uk.

Figure 2.4. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 17, no. 3 (1980). Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Avalon Hill General magazine archive at the site View from the Trenches, www. vftt.co.uk.

Figure 2.5. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 20, no. 5 (1984). Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Avalon Hill General magazine archive at the site View from the Trenches, www.vftt.co.uk.

Figure 2.6. Cover of the Avalon Hill General 21, no. 5 (1985). Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from the Avalon Hill General magazine archive at the site View from the Trenches, www.vftt.co.uk.

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Volume 8, issue 3 of the Avalon Hill General advertises a new game for their line, Origins of World War II (1971). In this game, players take the role of diplomatic envoys preceding World War II and can make decisions that change how the war begins. The cover boasts the magazine’s headline story for the month, “Who Really Started World War II?,” suggesting to readers that Hitler’s Nazi Germany was not responsible (figure 2.2). This form of well-­documented revisionism is a common white supremacist tactic. Revisionism about the origins of World War II, specifically, can be traced to a Harvard graduate named David Hoggen, whose 1961 book Der erzwungene Krieg was popularly read and cited in white supremacist circles. As Holocaust historian Robert S. Wistrich explains, “[Hoggen’s book] presented the British as warmongers, the Poles as provocateurs, and Hitler as an angel of peace.”20 Origins of World War II was deliberately cribbing from Hoggen’s white supremacist playbook. By focusing on the diplomatic circumstances that arose before the war, the game let players tinker with Hoggen’s main theses—­that Hitler was doing everything in his power to avoid a war. What’s more, by making revisionism the headline topic of an issue, Avalon Hill was aligning itself with white supremacist fringe groups. The article “Who Really Started World War II?” described the unfolding events in an authoritative and self-­assured manner. It quotes Hitler’s 1932 campaign speech, which promised “law and order” verbatim. It then concurs, “On this strength of this promise, it is easy to see why the infamous Third Reich came into being with Hitler ascending as the sole master of Germany.”21 Here Hitler’s campaign promise of “law and order” is positioned as relatable, speaking clearly to the zeitgeist of civil rights protest that terrified Avalon Hill’s white suburban market demographic.22 The article continues to sow doubt as to the veracity of established historical narratives of World War II. Avalon Hill claimed that their game was even more accurate than the history books: “Extensively researched, origins is probably the most authentic historical documentation of the pre-­war years ever published. That’s because over 100 different works were consulted in the preparation of this brilliant expose of who really started World War II.”23 Of course, this conclusion was spurious and akin to a conspiracy theory. These narratives tried to destabilize the dominant and factual historical narrative by asking probing questions and relating inconsistencies: “And if you think Germany

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started the war, wrong again. France, Britain, Russia, and the United States could have stopped Germany before the shooting began. Why didn’t they?”24 The article sows doubt through inuendo and question yet provides no evidence. But it wasn’t just this singular article that betrays the white supremacy of the Avalon Hill wargaming community. One of Jerry Pournelle’s more interesting articles in the Avalon Hill General was a critique of Origins of World War II. In this article, Pournelle explained that he found this history inaccurate but didn’t critique the white supremacist foundations of its historical revisionism. On the whole, Pournelle’s letter reads more as fan mail for the simulationist alternative histories sold by Avalon Hill than as a historiographic critique. Nonetheless, Pournelle’s critique highlights how Avalon Hill cultivated a libertarian sense of discourse among its fans. Encouraging a somewhat freewheeling sense of opinion driven debate around topics as grimly serious as Nazi Germany. Articles in and covers of the Avalon Hill General repeatedly valorize Nazi and Confederate men. One issue features a close-­up portrait of a Nazi general standing on the beach at Normandy, watching the allies invade through binoculars. The framing invites the reader to empathize with the Nazi, a lone man facing overwhelming odds (figure 2.3). Another issue from years later depicts Erwin Rommel in full Nazi regalia posing valiantly over a hex grid adaptation of North Africa (figure 2.4). Rommel is posed in a proud and dignified manner in the center of the cover, consulting with troops in the bottom-­left corner with a swastika above his shoulder (figure 2.4). Three years later, in 1984, the Avalon Hill General would release an issue with Confederate general Thomas “Stonewall” Jackson on the cover, saber in hand, staring determinedly at the battlefield of what is presumably the First Battle of Bull Run (figure 2.5). Bull Run is remembered as the first major battle in the Civil War, with Jackson’s brigade able to hold their ground against Union forces, making it—­like Gettysburg—­an interesting battle for speculative historians. Finally, the Avalon Hill General also released a cover that paints Adolf Hitler in a particularly kind light (figure 2.6). In this issue, important political figures including Franklin D. Roosevelt, Charles de Gaulle, Winston Churchill, Joseph Stalin, and Benito Mussolini all stand as lesser figures; Hitler’s head is elevated above all others. He is posed heroically and stares into the distance like a visionary. Below the men are

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tanks, battleships, and fighter planes, suggesting to the viewer that the scene was the work of the men above it. As a whole, the cover implies a glorious hierarchy that rises from the faceless soldiers who fought in the war at the bottom to Hitler at the top. I highlight the examples above because they demonstrate how the Avalon Hill General fostered a white supremacist space. The clear depiction of taboo symbols, like swastikas, on the cover surely signaled to Jewish and Black consumers that the community found within the magazine would not be an inclusive space. The magazine’s focus on cover art that prominently featured “enemy” figures was likely equally unsettling. Rarely were American presidents or Union generals featured on the cover of the magazine. Instead, Avalon Hill valorized generals who fought for the wrong cause and leaders who were notorious for their authoritarian and militaristic ideologies. Napoleon Bonaparte was frequently featured on the cover, as were countless troops and vehicles (usually French artillery, German tanks, or US fighter planes). These images show that the Avalon Hill General targeted a smaller audience of consumers with an acute interest in white supremacist causes.

White Supremacy in the Hobby This chapter tracked the rise of ideological white supremacy in hobby games through the networks of privilege established in the Avalon Hill General. In order to illustrate this, I explained how Avalon Hill’s simulationist philosophy of game design was uniquely compatible with white supremacist thought. By offering players the opportunity to tinker with alternative histories, Avalon Hill’s wargames sought an audience of players interested in historical “what ifs.” And while this audience wasn’t completely ideological white supremacists, Avalon Hill seemed to deliberately court this group through covers of their magazines that idolized Nazi and Confederate generals and articles that echoed revisionist white supremacist talking points. In short, Avalon Hill created the conditions for ideological white supremacy to thrive in their consumer base and doubled down on its symbolism by featuring a concerning number of white supremacist heroes on the cover. Some might dismiss the white supremacist narrative I have spelled out here as cherry-­picking as Avalon Hill also published a number of is-

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sues of the Avalon Hill General with less polarizing figures on the cover. Perhaps the Confederate and Nazi generals on the cover of their magazine were being featured in an effort to illustrate villainy as opposed to heroism. Unfortunately the facts just don’t bear this thesis out. Avalon Hill also published articles that described revisionist histories that have been well documented as originating from extremist hate groups. What’s more, the Nazis and Confederates featured on the cover have had something of a glow-­up in illustration. They look heroic, attractive even, as they are invariably featured in the most positive light imaginable on the cover of the magazine. Avalon Hill deliberately courted a white supremacist readership by adorning their publication with a variety of white supremacist tropes. The white supremacy of Avalon Hill is significant because the Avalon Hill General was something of an entry point into hobby games in the 1960s and 1970s. Players who found copies of the magazine would seek out other players to game with in the “Opponents Wanted” column. This column was instrumental in networking hobbyists outside of the Avalon Hill General who would eventually become the core of the play-­by-­mail hobby Diplomacy networks I describe in chapter 3. In other words, the culture established by the magazine created ripples in the hobbyist community that extended far beyond. The white supremacist norms of the Avalon Hill General extend even to board and computer games today, which often use the same simulationist conceit to justify the inclusion of practices such as slavery. Some games, like the computer simulation of World War II Hearts of Iron, even to allow players to take on the role of Adolf Hitler in the name of simulationism. And while Hearts of Iron isn’t marketing itself to an audience of white supremacists, the game’s decision to allow players to take on the role of Hitler in the discourse of games today is relatively uncontroversial, mainly because it is seen as part of the simulationist tradition of wargaming. Avalon Hill pioneered this tradition. Finally, this chapter touched on the networks of privilege that Avalon Hill established in its consumer base. These networks are particularly concerning because the company went out of its way to court military elites like Anthony C. McAuliffe and Jerry Pournelle. In particular, Pournelle was an avid reader and contributor to the Avalon Hill General and even went out of his way to debate the author of the revisionist

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game Origins of World War II about its historical accuracy. Pournelle desired a decidedly more rigorous form of historical revisionism. Even if McAuliffe and Pournelle didn’t imbibe deeply of the white supremacist Kool-­Aid that the Avalon Hill General served up, as visible members of its community they worked to offer the magazine an air of legitimacy. What’s more, subscribers found themselves one degree of separation from the military brass who were most interested in hobby wargames. Reading Pournelle’s articles allowed hobbyists in the network to learn from the professionals. This proximity to expert knowledge, I argue, offered the Avalon Hill General’s predominantly white audience the tools to thrive in an increasingly specialized world.

Part II Networks

3

The Hobby Diplomacy Scene

It’s late June in 1973, and seven close friends from the New York area pile into a van for a fourteen-­hour ride to Chicago. They’re going to DIPCON VI, a fan convention devoted to play-­by-­mail Diplomacy, a wargame of backstabbing and betrayal that tells the story of World War I. Several of the friends in the van have never met in person, yet they know each other well through weekly postal correspondences in their zines. As if discussing old times, Nicholas Ulanov, Edi Birsan, and Arnold Proujanski engage in what they see as spirited political debate about the nature of justice. They arrive at Chicago’s Bismarck Hotel late on a Friday and stay three nights at an event marked by nonstop gaming. Although fewer than a hundred fans are present, the space bristles with excitement. They return home raving about the new friends they’ve made, the fun they’ve had, and the excitement they share about next year’s event. In fact, Ulanov is so excited he publishes an article about the event in the fanzine he edits with his friends Duncan Smith and Penelope Naughton Dickens.1 At the con, the twenty-­four-­year-­old president of the International Diplomacy Association, Larry Peery from San Diego, is greeting guests. He writes in a different publishing loop based in Southern California and has been an active participant in the Diplomacy scene for several years. For love of the hobby, Peery has been working hard to bring Diplomacy fans together to play. He feels that there aren’t enough new faces in the hobby and that the game is in danger of stagnating if new people don’t get involved.2 Peery is excited to say hello to Edi Birsan, whom he has been corresponding with and would later regard as one of the greatest players ever. When the con ends, Peery returns to San Diego and continues work on one of his other zines, Peerinalis, a magazine for hobbyists interested in learning more about the wargames political scientists play. He passes the presidency of the International Diplomacy Association to Len Lakofka, who would later be instrumental in orga79

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nizing the hobby convention Gen Con and would organize DIPCON in the years to come. For Diplomacy players in 1973, DIPCON was as good as it got. It was a weekend-­long event full of young, enthusiastic hobbyists playing games, sharing stories, and building community. DIPCON was the result of thousands of fanzines containing games of postal Diplomacy being written by excited fans across the country. By looking at the values and beliefs of these fans from the postal Diplomacy scene, we can better understand the mindset of hobbyists in the early 1970s. This chapter highlights the fundamentals of geek identity that still linger today. Specifically, it explains the pervasive hobbyist belief that games should be kept separate from politics and that they should play for the authentic love of the game. These beliefs are related to the white culture of yesterday’s hobby games. This chapter shows how a homogeneously white network of hobbyists formed a network of privilege where grassroots fans and military elites traded secrets, built lasting friendships, and defined the future of hobby games. Additionally, through dog whistles and hate speech, the hobbyists in this chapter also policed the boundaries of the hobby, predetermining the white homogeneity of these networks. Politics in the hobby game space is more closely related to what critical theorist Michel de Certeau would term “the politics of everyday life” than to statecraft or the politics of the presidency. As the examples that follow show, hobbyists constantly refer to the games they play as “serious” or “rational” and the hobby itself as “fun.” Hobbyists in this space hear critiques of hobby games as assaults on who they are as people. Thus, games become political only when they force hobbyists to assess their white privilege. Similarly, white privilege allows the hobbyists in this chapter to be in conversation with and be taken seriously by America’s military elites. This chapter looks at hobbyists through the lens of white privilege in order to better understand how hobbyists understand politics and thus why many geeks still argue that politics does not belong in games today. This chapter begins by situating the Diplomacy fan community geographically and showing how the community’s suburban mindset was a holdover from segregationist policy and white flight. Following this, the chapter takes a closer look at the friends this chapter began with and the New York Conspiracy—­their publishing loop—­in order to show how the

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hobbyist identity oscillates between dynamics of white guilt and white privilege. Unlike the prior chapter, which looked at magazines to understand the makeup of hobbyist community from a top-­down perspective, this chapter examines the grassroots—­fan publications—­to better comprehend how the community understood its own politics. Finally, this chapter ends by showing the deep and privileged ties to America’s intellectual military elite that were found in the Diplomacy fan community. These ties are a mark of white privilege too since the US military had only recently been desegregated.

Networking the Suburban Mindset To understand these conversations, we must first take a moment to better understand the culture of play-­by-­mail Diplomacy. As established in the prior chapter, the Avalon Hill General was predominantly responsible for cohering a network of hobbyists around the games sold by Avalon Hill. Of these games, Diplomacy—­a strategy game primarily played by mail by hobbyists in the 1960s—­would become the most famous. These communities would send each other transcripts of their moves, along with first-­person fictional and historical commentary. In this way, the players of Diplomacy collaboratively constructed fantastic worlds to play their game. Diplomacy simulated the military events leading up to World War I. In Diplomacy, there was a one-­to-­one correspondence between the map of Europe where players shifted their tokens and the material and historical Europe where World War I took place. Within the game’s logic, the tokens on the board represent troops and the largest army perseveres in combat. Players take on the role of powerful leaders and negotiate with other player-­leaders through live conversation. In groups participating in postal play, formally written “press releases”—­ staged as self-­consciously dramatic performances of a country’s military posture—­were circulated by players. These press releases added flavor to the game and occasionally encouraged other players to take military or diplomatic action. Groups consisted of seven players, typically teenage to middle-­age white men. In local games of Diplomacy, these players would all play in the same room, while postal Diplomacy games consisted of geographically disparate networks of players.

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It took a considerable amount of grassroots work to create the issues of Diplomacy that connected this community. Editors would solicit articles from contributors, who were generally participants in games played within the zine. They would then either reprint these submissions with no changes or edit and retype the submissions. Unedited submissions were often directly inserted into the hard copy of the issue with scotch tape during photocopying or mimeographing, which makes them easy to identify. After an adequate number of articles had been acquired—­ about eight pages for the average zine—­editors would use mimeograph (or some other duplication technology—­whatever was convenient) to run off twenty to fifty copies of the issue. They would then fold, address, and mail these copies to subscribers in their network. Postage was prepaid through subscription fees, and editors would often offer a “treasurer’s report” for the subscribers’ benefit (depending on the zine’s size) that would outline the zine’s savings, expenditures, and profits. These tasks required ample time and effort on the part of the publisher—­ expenditures completely distinct from and often unaccounted for by the zines’ limited profits. Very rarely did the proceeds accrued by these hobbyists go toward labor costs. Instead, the treasurer’s reports show that this money was saved to help maintain the infrastructure of the community.3 It is useful to consider these aspects of production through the lens of labor because they highlight how affective bonds organized this community. The hobbyists in this example did not spend their spare time publishing articles about Diplomacy because they hoped to turn a quick buck; instead they produced articles for the love of the game and an interest in corresponding with others who shared their interests. The result of these correspondences was a massive network of fans who were all highly invested in communicating, tinkering, and publishing with one another. While hobbyists at the MIT model railway club were able to find a community of tinkerers locally, the hobbyists in the Diplomacy fan community were far more isolated—­they needed to develop a network of friends to be able to play. As this book will later describe, “love of the game” persists in geek culture today as the great unifier among fans in the hobby. To visualize the fanzine publication network, I used data from Jim Meinel’s hobby publication Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines

Figure 3.1. Example of the Diplomacy visualization constructed with CartoDB, used here to display metadata for Xenogogic. Screenshot provided by the author.

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(North American Release).4 I cross-­referenced the zip codes from Meinel’s Encyclopedia with the dates that each zine was published in software called CartoDB. The resulting visualization shows the growth of Diplomacy zine hubs but doesn’t have adequate information to visualize the sometimes tens, sometimes hundreds of contributors each zine had. Figure 3.1 shows a point on a US map for each fanzine published. Figures 3.2 through 3.6 show the density and growth of fanzines over five-­year intervals from 1963 to 1983.5 It is important to understand the geography of this network so that we can better appreciate the networked structure of the hobby. Specifically, this structure echoes a similar distribution that would be made famous years later as the internet facilitated a similar form of communication in the personal computing hobby where users developed bulletin board systems (BBSs) to communicate. Though postal Diplomacy influenced the framing and context of the hobby, specific geographic regions and cultures remained insulated from the hobby game space. Figure 3.1 shows a mark for every instance of a Diplomacy fanzine in North America. This lets us infer where hobbyists were not: states like Idaho, Montana, Wyoming, South Dakota, and South Carolina. This is likely because hobbyists who were not in the network could not find the network. As I described in chapter 2, the Avalon Hill General’s “Opponents Wanted” column helped connect hobbyists. However, those who did not order a copy of that magazine through an advertisement in an Avalon Hill game they purchased or who had no local hobby shop where they could purchase games or magazines were unlikely to gain entry into this vast network of like-­minded players. I argue that gaming hobbies did not take root just anywhere for other reasons.

Figure 3.2. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1963. This visualization was made in the CartoDB software and is used with permission by the author.

Figure 3.3. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1968. This visualization was made in the CartoDB software and is used with permission by the author.

Figure 3.4. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1973. This visualization was made in the CartoDB software and is used with permission by the author.

Figure 3.5. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1978. This visualization was made in the CartoDB software and is used with permission by the author.

Figure 3.6. Cumulative visualization of Diplomacy fanzines, January 1983. This visualization was made in the CartoDB software and is used with permission by the author.

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The “white flight” that followed desegregation in the 1940s and 1950s set the stage for a predominantly white suburban backdrop in the 1960s and 1970s. Meanwhile, civil rights protests in the sixties and seventies took place within predominantly urban Black communities. In White Flight, Kevin Kruse argues that white flight was a political revolution for the Republican Party. It encouraged white conservatives to “craft a new conservatism predicated on a language of rights, freedoms, and individualism”—­the very same keywords that the white libertarian hobbyists deployed within their network of privilege.6 The context of white flight set the stage for the politics of the hobbyists within the Diplomacy fan community, as they were often white transplants in urban spaces confronted with the tumultuous vibe of civil protest. At first zines were often clustered in urban areas with colleges like Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, Washington, D.C., Philadelphia, New York, and Boston (figures 3.2–­3.6) because they were published on the low-­cost paper “duplication” infrastructure that these institutions provided.7 Over time, as the hobby disseminated through these communities, more college towns became publication hubs, as the fan base of the older zines moved into the suburbs. Additionally, an analysis of publishing hubs over time shows a gradual migration to suburban and rural areas. In 1964, nine of the eleven zines came from major urban centers, while five years later only seven of the thirty-­seven new zines originated in urban centers. These data support this book’s general theory that hobbyists would migrate from suburban to urban spaces for college, often cultivating their interests in Diplomacy through the college community, and then migrate back to the suburbs afterward. The white wanderlust of hobbyists in their early twenties moving to urban centers for college and then returning to the suburbs maps almost perfectly onto the timeline of white flight, which was heavily influenced by desegregation policies like Truman’s decision in 1948 to desegregate the military. In more populous spaces, hobby game stores and the domestic play spaces of hobby games—­basements, attics, and rec rooms—­were created in response to white flight. Hobbyists situated themselves apart from the discourse of hegemonic masculinity, outside traditional spaces of male work and leisure—­the office, the bar, and the basketball court—­yet within the predominantly feminine domestic space of the home. Even so, the hobby networks they participate in allow them to simultaneously

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see themselves within an insular like-­minded network of white players. Hobbyists built a homogeneous, separate social sphere still pervaded by whiteness and a need for control. The masculine and domestic sphere I am describing here echoes that which was already produced in the model railroad community where engagement with the hobby was also a means to control domestic space. It was common to joke about the amount of space needed to maintain and display a model railroad, even serving as a punchline to several of the aforementioned “Silver Plate Road” comics.8 Wargames, and even play-­by-­mail Diplomacy, also required a similar amount of domestic space. I concur with Sara Ahmed’s argument that white male networks find common ground in emotion, in this case the fear of displacement that drives anxiety.9 The geeks whom I describe in this chapter retreated to the basement because they saw themselves as outside both the rapidly integrating public sphere as well as the more public facing and well-­kept feminine spaces of the domestic. The politics of the hobbyists in this network were varied but marked nonetheless by what I assess as a key characteristic of whiteness—­an arm’s-­length understanding of civil rights. Hobbyists discuss civil protest through a rhetorical distancing; regardless of where the protest took place, it was described as a separate social sphere. In Meinel’s authoritative Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines, the Vietnam War works to whitewash and make invisible the Black protests around civil rights that were happening simultaneously. But the war was also described as a barrier that zine publishers worked to overcome: “Zines were still difficult to put out but that did not prevent [these] reams of material [from being] published. . . . The Vietnam war was reaching its peak, college protests were raging and most publishers were high school or college students.”10 The desire for the hobby to remain separate from personal and national politics was an important and recurring influence on the hobbyist identity, which in turn shaped the subjectivity of the old guard of tabletop game geeks today.11 The reach of the Diplomacy fanzine network is broad and has important ramifications for understanding the infrastructural growth of hobby games in North America. This network reinforces the idea that the work of fans is often network-­building. It also draws attention to how many of these fans come from a homogeneous cultural background. Although the

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lonely men within these networks were surely happy to find a community of like-­minded friends, they also established a homogeneous space within which the invisible premise of whiteness guided their design practice, reading interests, and political beliefs. To reinforce this point, we will turn to the publishing circle known as the New York Conspiracy.

The New York Conspiracy Although the New York region extends as far as Easton, Pennsylvania (Robert Lipton’s Mixumaxu Gazette), this particular constellation of players identified themselves as the New York Conspiracy. Its members were mainly high school and college students from the New York area who took on an active role in the stewardship of the Diplomacy fan community in the years that followed. The opinions traded in the New York Conspiracy were more left-­leaning than those in the national community of hobbyists. Some well-­known game designers like Greg Costikiyan—­author of Star Wars: The Role Playing Game—­emerged from this scene. For these reasons, the context of the New York Conspiracy provides a contrast to the offensive right-­wing provocations made by some members of the community that might have gone unchallenged in other publishing loops where there was an unspoken, more conservative consensus around appropriate conduct. This chapter is particularly concerned with two conversations in this community—­the furor around editor Penelope Naughton Dickens’s demands for censorship of hate speech, and the prevalence of columns about the Watergate scandal in The Pouch and the Mixumaxu Gazette—­in order to show how the politics of the Diplomacy community and the politics of everyday life became entangled. The social and political perspectives found in these zines speak to the racism, homophobia, and censorship of the Diplomacy player community and still pervade hobby gaming today. The editors of the New York Conspiracy zines were keen to put real-­ world political debate in its own section, separate from the mostly fictional press releases. In addition to sharing their strategic moves through the mail, Diplomacy fans would role-­play their in-­game encounters with one another through short, often witty dispatches that satirized real-­ world press releases. In one incident, two players—­Conrad von Metzke and Duncan Smith—­used the racial slur “wop” and the term “queen”

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in a derogatory manner to refer to two other players—­Edi Birsan and Evan Jones. This offensive behavior was called out by The Pouch’s editor, Penelope Naughton Dickens. In an article on page 9 of Pouch #31, titled “Censorship and the Press Release,” Dickens advocated for Diplomacy fanzine editors to consider censoring press releases with racist and homophobic language: “Yet these attacks, although not offensive to Edi Birsan or Evan Jones [to whom they were directed], could easily offend an Italian or a homosexual. What does an editor do in this case?”12 For Dickens, the answer was that editors should censor offensive articles.13 Dickens’s admonishment spoke to how white privilege is framed as a conversation around fun. Conrad von Metzke, for example, suggested that fun be privileged by other hobbyists acting in the same space. In his response to Dickens, he sarcastically opposes fun to slander, libel, and viciousness within the community. To this point, he sardonically equates the fun of Diplomacy to its most “rational and pleasurable aspects.” For instance, he values “brotherly interchange, mature reasoning, sensible toleration, and overall moderation.” This was, of course, before using the term “wop” to refer to fellow player Edi Birsan, which punctuated the sarcasm, and therefore the effect of von Metzke’s joke. In the eyes of her community, Dickens was guilty for transgressing the unspoken contract between players that yields an unencumbered space of play. Her call for censorship within the community was received with controversy and distain precisely because she brought her real-­world political beliefs into a space that was supposedly unencumbered by the political tethers of the real world. But despite von Metzke’s exhortations, the conversation was quite political. It invoked the whiteness of all parties involved, both because Black people were completely absent from this discussion and because rationality was invoked as a way to discuss racism. Ultimately, this section shows how the social isolation of the participants in this conversation drove their perceived anxiety relating to current events in the political climate of North America. Even when Dickens and Lipton—­ another fan with progressive political views—­spoke to the political climate, they did so in a way that clearly privileged the safe white activism of environmentalism as opposed to the civil rights activism of the moment that the media connected to riots and Black communities. In 1973, Dickens would quote fellow hobbyist Edi Birsan in a description of Gary,

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Indiana, that was framed as environmental activism on the back pages of The Pouch: “Gary, Indiana is a disgrace to humanity and a revolting spectacle of the ability of massive corporations to over-­power the concerns for health and clean air that miraculously work their way through our political system. The very thought of the town makes me sick.”14 Unsaid and made invisible by this quote is the Black population of Gary, a town that had made headlines in 1972 for hosting the Black National Political Convention. And while the environmental activism that Dickens calls for is left-­leaning, it is clear from her tone that she regards the town, and its Black residents, as if they were in another world entirely. These fans saw themselves as outsiders to contemporary activism around race in America and as such embodied white privilege through their naïveté. By situating race as a point of white discussion and remarking on their fears of a “chaotic” nation, Diplomacy fans participated in what Douglas Kellner refers to as “massification”—­when Black people, the poor, and other minoritized communities are seen as a disordered and aggressive mob bent on challenging white male values.15

Performing Whiteness The politics of the New York Conspiracy came into question through the pronouncements of The Pouch and the ensuing debate prompted by editor Dickens. As Michel Foucault reminds us, “Where there is power, there is resistance,” because points of conflict can help us apprehend the ideological contours of a network.16 Dickens referred to another example in the same issue of The Pouch. In justifying an aggressive in-­game action toward Turkey, player Duncan Smith published a mock interview with a fictional Montenegrin officer who had just borne witness to a Turkish occupation. Within his press release, Smith continued the narrative of a press release previously published by player Evan Jones. In Jones’s press release, the officer being interrogated—­Colonel Nikoplat Poponov—­was being grilled for having smuggled Eau de Saber Tooth Neiger (an allusion to game master Gil Neiger) into the country.17 Smith similarly resorted to name-­calling in this press release and referred to Evan Jones as “Queen Evan.” As Dickens articulated, even though the parties being mocked in these press releases did not mind being teased, other readers may have

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taken offense to some of this language. In this sense, Dickens was speaking for a largely invisible portion of this community when she criticized the careless use of slurs. One must wonder, reading the debate a half century later, if Dickens had heard candidly from friends who were uncomfortable speaking for themselves in this context, or if Dickens—­as a woman writing in a predominantly male space—­was simply attuned to how the language used by the community could feel othering to a potential audience of readers. In either case, Dickens’s decision to speak up illustrates how white guilt animated the political conversation around identity in the New York Conspiracy. White guilt, as defined by critical race scholar Shelby Steele, is the white desire for social redemption that became apparent in progressive spheres of American society following the passing of the equal rights amendment in 1964.18 It is likely that Dickens saw that her friends’ definition of fun was laden with assumptions of the heteronormative white male privilege. Presciently, the conversations around fun echoed many of the taking points still used in predominantly white male social media spaces today. In describing the right-­wing politics of fans in 2016, Suzanne Scott notes the political valences of the slogan “make fandom fun again” and shows how “fun” is used by men to scapegoat people who disagree with their practices by positioning them as “killjoys.”19 This example shows how the ability to decide what is and isn’t fun is itself a mark of white male privilege and thus epitomizes the deep history of this rhetorical maneuver. Even when fun isn’t directly written, it is invoked through its absence as games are labeled serious or rational. Von Metzke jokingly suggested that the real fun of the game lay in its rational and strategic aspects and not the tongue-­in-­cheek racism to which many players stooped when slandering their opponents. Of course, this claim is entirely contradicted by von Metzke’s actions and seems intended to be part of a mischievous performance of rationality that punctuates the playful use of racism in his language. Von Metzke’s joke articulated how the hobbyist community sees itself as a white space for straight men. By speaking out against racism—­as Dickens did—­or haphazardly using racist language—­like von Metzke—­the community situated racism as a separate phenomenon. This approach to racism insulated white hobbyists from its insidious and systemic dimensions that constantly act on communities of color.

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By playing with the distinction between rational strategy and glib name-­ calling, von Metzke and Smith manipulated the boundaries of the play space. They married a discourse of fun to a dark sense of racist and homophobic humor through language. These episodes highlighted how these conversations around race were intergenerational. Some of the hobbyists in the New York Conspiracy were still high school students, and thus their capacity for empathy was still developing. Other New York Conspiracy fanzine editors such as Robert Bryan Lipton, who published the Mixumaxu Gazette, also weighed in on this controversy. His opinions supported the dominant perspective in this dialogue: that press releases should go uncensored. To censor them would reduce the game to a less playful activity. In “The Care and Feeding of Press Releases,” Lipton favored a politics of free speech by supporting von Metzke’s earlier position that the cost of “fun” is allowing for a diversity of perspectives within press releases.20 The discourse around fun, for Lipton, separated the game from a true military simulation: “I assume that’s why we’re playing the game: to enjoy ourselves. Anyone who takes press releases seriously probably agonizes over the board when there is a conflict, thinking we’re actually fighting WWI . . . and what’s more, doesn’t enjoy himself. I pity them. But I won’t change what I do for such.” Here, the binary between the rational and the lighthearted was again refined. Just as von Metzke highlighted that play should be juxtaposed against calculating strategery, Lipton even implies that the game itself is fun because it has very little to do with the serious space of military strategy. For these men, rationality implied military strategy and censorship, opposed to fun. The symbolism of militarism and its connotations of strategic rationality were fundamental to understanding where social status lay in the Diplomacy fanzine community. As this chapter shows through military-­adjacent fans such as Larry Peery and Jerry Pournelle, the white hobby community placed an explicit aura around military prestige that harkened to white militia movements and the invisible policing of the white supremacist state.21 Innocently, this policing was articulated by Conrad von Metzke and Robert Lipton as “fun.” This ideological formation suggests the political boundaries of the community as well as the gatekeeping members utilized to determine who should and should not participate in games. Most importantly, however, fun was used to po-

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lice and control the potential of player action. Fun for these players was simultaneously a description of play and a justification for white male taste. This concept speaks clearly to how the libertarian dynamics of power were embraced by the community work to reinforce a game environment that was undergirded by an invisible white power structure. Thus, the hobby itself took on a representational dimension where all participation led back to the interests and values of the white men who participate within it. In the case of North American game hobbyists, this meant geeking out over World War I, learning about military theory, and being able to joke and converse without considering the feelings of others who were not in this virtual game space. These examples of discourse and debate show how whiteness established the limits of discourse for hobbyists. By establishing a set of conversational parameters that saw race and racism as external to gaming, the hobbyists took their own relationship to race for granted. In doing so, they made whiteness the implicit norm of the hobby. Dickens’s call for sensitivity toward racism through censorship threatened the norms of the community because it revealed how the taken-­for-­granted norms of whiteness shaped community discourse. Robert Lipton, to whom Dickens was responding, saw censorship as a move to politicize fun, which he saw as fundamentally apolitical. While both Lipton and Dickens clearly held separate ideals of play, their conversation showed how hobbyists operated in a space that oscillated between white supremacy and white guilt. This begs the question, what were the real-­world politics of these key members of the New York Conspiracy? To better understand how their political values mapped onto the problem of white supremacy, the next section considers discussions that were had in The Pouch about Richard Nixon and Watergate.

The Politics of “Politics” The Pouch regularly featured political commentary in its pages. Geographically centered in New York City, its contributors were more politically radical and outspoken than others in the Diplomacy fanzine community. In one sense, their more radical political nature makes interpreting the politics of the community easier because they wore their hearts on their sleeves and spoke freely with one another about

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current political events. At the same time, their radicalism also shows how the politics of whiteness operated apart from political boundaries and in fact worked to define the very space of discourse. Simultaneous to the correspondence regarding the censorship of hate speech within other fan publications, the editorial board of The Pouch—­at the time Penelope Naughton Dickens, Duncan K. Smith, and Nicholas A. Ulanov—­published a series of articles regarding the impeachment of President Richard Nixon. In Pouch #33 (1973), the editors issued a statement that evinced their ultimate support for the impeachment of Richard Nixon. Following that statement were a number of details listing best practices for getting in touch with local congressmen and taking an active role in petitioning for Nixon’s removal from office. While this statement certainly did not necessarily indicate a strong sense of partisanship on the part of the zine’s editorial board (by October 1973, most Americans were unified in their dislike of Nixon), it showcased The Pouch’s unique propensity in hobby gaming toward activism and political commentary.22 In the next issue of The Pouch, however, the editors were far more explicit in their rationale for Nixon’s impeachment. First, they reprinted a two-­and-­a-­half-­page advertisement that described where the ACLU stood on the issue and petitioned for donations toward Nixon’s impeachment. The ad outlined a laundry list of problems, including wiretapping, espionage, perjury, burglary, dragnet arrests, and the three-­year secret bombing of Cambodia (a politically neutral country at the time). Given The Pouch’s relatively sizable distribution and the absence of contestation within its letters section, it is safe to say these points reflected the beliefs of many of its subscribers as well.23 One editor of The Pouch, Nicholas A. Ulanov, supplemented this advertisement with an editorial titled “why i’m for impeachment.” In his editorial, Ulanov revealed that he worked for Senator McGovern’s 1972 campaign against Nixon, which suggested that he was likely a Democrat. Ulanov also alluded several times to the chaos of anarchy and virtues of the American political system. Thus, he equated the race riots that were a recent memory in 1973 with anarchy and contrasted them with a top-­down and white form of traditional American governance. Ulanov’s rhetoric, which positioned the race riots as chaos, spoke to how hobbyists saw themselves as outside of Black issues and

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how acutely Black protest threatened their way of life. In discussing the Nixon’s presidency, Ulanov made frequent use of terms like “evil” and “chaos,” perhaps representing his fear of how the social order was being undermined. Ulanov elaborates here on the discord that he believed would follow President Nixon’s impeachment: I also felt that the country would be put through total governmental chaos, and that at the current moment in history, this country had to avoid such chaos at all cost. I based this belief that process would be extremely dirty on the events which followed President Johnson’s impeachment. In addition I was afraid that perhaps I and many of my friends were being too harsh on President Nixon and in the event of impeachment would be judged in the way the Radical Republicans were after the Johnson fiasco. It is now generally felt that the Johnson matter was totally unwarranted and a great miscarriage of justice. Johnson was acquitted by only one vote in the Senate, and this heroic Senator, Edmund G. Ross, never held political office again, after voting the way his conscience and not his constituents dictated.24

Ulanov’s reverence for the American constitution was apparent. Several times he repeated his belief that problems in American politics were due to corrupted participants, rather than systemic failure. Additionally, Ulanov alluded to a general unease with the structural chaos that stems from a leaderless nation. He brought up fear of disorder again at the end of editorial. In his final paragraph, Ulanov reiterated the strength of the American constitution. Then, using President Truman’s firing of General MacArthur as an example, he explained that this sense of democratic deliberation was, in fact, the American system’s saving grace and suggested it helped America prevent World War III. He wrote, “Truman’s firing of McArthur. McArthur wanted to attach [sic] China which might well have caused World War III.”25 According to Ulanov, not only did American checks and balances help prevent World War III, but had the same episode occurred in a parliamentary system, McArthur’s removal from office would have led to the systematic collapse of government. Ulanov repeats several times in this editorial that it is chaos that he is most concerned with. This fear is particular to domestic politics—­both the speculative chaos of impeachment and the perceived anarchy of

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Black protests. American exceptionalism, in this context, was compatible with Ulanov’s greatest fears. Ulanov’s political perspective shows how whiteness was navigated by liberal hobbyists. For Ulanov and other like-­minded hobbyists, the gaming community was a space for political campaigning and where fears about civil chaos could be shared with sympathetic readers. Although Ulanov did not tread deeply into a debate about censorship the way Dickens did, it is clear his thinking was animated by a white anxiety around civic unrest and corrupt politicians. We can contrast his ideas with cotemporaneous civil rights conversations that were being had at the time by leaders such as Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., who characterized American democracy as a dictatorship for Black folk.26 More radically, Malcolm X said at the King Solomon Baptist Church in Detroit that “the government itself has failed us. And the white liberals who have been posing as our friends have failed us.”27 Ulanov’s view that American democracy could still work for the American people spoke directly to his white positionality, given the simultaneous concern in the Black community that American democracy had failed them. If Ulanov epitomized the white liberal approach to politics, others in the New York Conspiracy like Robert Lipton were decidedly more conservative.28 Lipton felt that games were fundamentally apolitical and wanted to keep the game space separate from “real” spaces of politics. His zine, the Mixumaxu Gazette, was never as explicitly political as The Pouch. Within the hobby gaming community, it became known for its satirical tone. First published on June 15, 1973, the Mixumaxu Gazette was published with several lighthearted slogans on the paper’s header, playing on the idea of high-­quality objective journalism. The magazine ran as a “quantity publication” and “All the Press Unfit to Print.” Lipton, clearly, did not take himself too seriously as a publisher or editor and only occasionally inserted political commentary into his zine. Notably, the first issue ran a quick blurb about Watergate, which noted why Lipton had grown bored with the discussion of Watergate in the news. Unlike Ulanov—­who had tried to rally his distribution network around the issue—­Lipton evinced a paranoia that Nixon had taken control of the news media: “But perhaps this was planned, the overinterest gradually fading off to ennui this is what Nixon wants. A frightening idea. But we’re growing tired of being frightened, aren’t we?”29

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Significantly, in this one candid moment, Lipton noted a general fear he felt within the community. Here, like Ulanov, Lipton was particularly nostalgic in the above quote for a government without corruption. But if Ulanov’s commentary came from a desire to return to an idealized form of American democracy, Lipton, in contrast, was producing a space for conservative discourse within the Mixumaxu Gazette. Lipton shows how a libertarian stance toward free speech and expression can overlap with what might be assessed today as white supremacist worldview. At the time, a burgeoning libertarian movement, spearheaded by Goldwater speechwriter Karl Hess, was actively recruiting both leftist anarchists and right-­leaning hippies with antiauthoritarian values. Specifically, Hess encouraged his supporters to distrust the government. The libertarian values of Hess dovetailed with talking points around individual freedom that simultaneously circulated in conservative media.30 The American libertarian during this period adopted a mindset of white privilege that was most commonly articulated by saying absolutely anything that came to mind—­regardless of whose feelings might be hurt in doing so. Lipton’s writing epitomized the right-­leaning libertarian sentiment of the moment. Weary of political discourse in the New York Conspiracy and the news media, Lipton wrote a nihilistic and offensive commentary on politics for the Mixumaxu Gazette where he referred to Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. as a “pushy nigger.” In a December 1973 article titled “If You Love Harpo, Honk Your Horn,” Lipton called for the formation of the Marxist Party of America and nominated Harpo Marx for president. In listing Marx’s virtues, Lipton glibly extolled that candidates should “never have said anything with which anyone could disagree” and “should be dead.”31 Harpo Marx, one of the famous Marx Brothers, fit the bill. Particularly offensive here is the rant Lipton embarked on when describing why he desired a dead candidate. In it, he offered unambiguously racist commentary about the civil rights movements of the 1960s: “[The candidate] should be dead. Think of how despised politicians became noble statesmen as soon as they’re in their graves. Didn’t you despise the Kennedy Brothers until they were killed? Wasn’t Martin Luther King a pushy nigger until 1968? Didn’t the New York Times, which hated Johnson while he lived, give him a beautiful obituary? Wasn’t Lincoln, who couldn’t control his congress, and told jokes at the worst possible

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time, elected to godhood?”32 Lipton’s offensive, carefree, and racist tone epitomized the libertarian sentiment within the hobbyist community. Here, the invisible power dynamic of whiteness empowered Lipton to say whatever he liked because of an idealist understanding of First Amendment rights that didn’t extend hate speech to the realm of satire. Clearly, the civil rights movement was frightening to Lipton, writing from the relative isolation of Lafayette College in Easton, Pennsylvania. His hateful remarks about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., Robert Kennedy, and even Abraham Lincoln constitute a pattern of racism that aligns well with what is described as white supremacy today. Lipton’s example also shows how the white isolationism of suburban life flavored his political views and how his cloistered college environment did very little to expose him to other perspectives. He adorned his zines with news excerpts that stoked paranoia and fear. Like the perspectives on social chaos espoused by Ulanov, they portrayed America as a dangerous and lawless space that was rapidly spiraling out of control. The racially homogenous hobbyist community, in contrast, could be controlled. This made it an ideal space for white Libertarian opinions to run amok. Although Lipton rarely wrote overtly political pieces, he would frequently retype excerpts from interesting news articles as filler at the end of pages. In issue 3 of the Mixumaxu Gazette, he published two articles at the end of the “Letters” section: one related to corrupt police officers and the other on civil turmoil in Oklahoma. “McAlester, Okla, Aug. 2—­Sharpshooters with rifles stood on rooftops,” Lipton transcribed, “at the Oklahoma State Penitentiary with orders to kill if necessary to prevent further bloodshed. Support Peach or I’ll kill you” (New York Times, August 2, 1973). These dispatches were not only nostalgic for an imaginary world free of chaos but also racially charged. Lipton, an avid news reader, was certainly aware of the burgeoning prisoners’ rights movement that had been sparked by the death of George Jackson—­a Black man—­two years earlier at San Quentin State Prison.33 Jackson’s death sparked protests in prisons across America, including Attica Correctional Facility in New York and later McAlester prison in Oklahoma. The prisoners’ rights movement was inspirational to Angela Davis, who said in a 1972 speech at the Embassy Auditorium in Los Angeles, “And in doing this, the prison movement must be integrated into our struggles for Black

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and brown liberation, and to our struggles for an end to material want and need.”34 The characterization and publicization of these protests as “bloodshed” furthered a white supremacist worldview that stereotypes prisoners as poor and/or Black to pigeonhole them as an unruly mob. Lipton believed in a white libertarian worldview where he had the freedom and social mobility to say whatever he wanted, while others, specifically Black people, did not. As noted earlier, Kruse points out that the juxtaposition of racism with a dialogue around freedom and the rights of individuals was swiftly picking up momentum during this period as a set of conservative talking points.35 Lipton bought into this ideology whole-­hog. He evinced it not only through his writing but also through his memeing of news articles related to a chaotic and turbulent Cold War America within the Mixumaxu Gazette. The New York Conspiracy was a space of white discourse, motivated by liberalist white guilt at one end of the political spectrum and a white libertarian approach to free speech at the other. As a microcosm of the hobby, this New York Community demonstrated how the language used could, at best, be read as a series of microaggressions by Black people looking to participate. At worst, it was an explicitly white supremacist space of discourse that maintained a sense of white purity within its boundaries. While the New York Conspiracy stands as an example of how the hobby understood its relationship to white identity, it is important to recognize that this network of privilege was not isolated. The conversations that were had in the greater hobbyist community moved between social spaces. In these pages, high school students learned from political activists and military strategists in turn gleaned tips from high school students. The following sections explore more thoroughly how militarism was exalted among hobbyists, articulating whiteness through an efficient and highly rational fantasy of military control.

TTT Publications The design practices of hobbyists were driven by the community’s structure as a white network of privilege. Hobbyists were given access to specialized and privileged knowledge by other hobbyists in their network who were adjacent to elite spaces. The Diplomacy hobbyist community, like the Avalon Hill Community before them, gained a

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keen appreciation for military discourse on strategy. Hobbyists accessed white papers on military strategy from the RAND Corporation, and in turn military practitioners considered themselves gamers.36 These connections helped hobbyists within this network of privilege innovate elements that are now ubiquitous in game design, like statistical damage tables, science fiction and fantasy themes, and verisimilitude in simulation. The spread of these ideas in popular discourse speaks to the power of white privilege in this community. Military elites from a culture that had been desegregated within their lifetime took the games that the men in the Diplomacy fanzine network played seriously. Their interest speaks to the tight racial affinities structured into their lifeworld. The military elites saw themselves as part of the hobbyist community and participated in the games and the intellectual development of the community in ways that would have been deemed socially taboo, were there more than a handful of Black hobbyists at the time. In the prior chapter, I discussed the influence of Jerry Pournelle in the networks of privilege that formed around The General. In this chapter, I shine a light onto the contributions of Larry Peery—­a hobbyist who was able to popularize a good deal of military literature within the Diplomacy fan community. Taken together, the work of Peery and Pournelle explains how the analytic rationality of game theory became the dominant framework of gameplay and game design.37 Not only was the practice of knowledge sharing enabled by the invisible dimension of whiteness latent within the hobbyist community, it also pointed to the compatibility of game theory’s ideological fundamentals within white culture. Like the fanzines published by members of the New York Conspiracy, TTT Publications was a similar fan publishing loop based in San Diego and founded by Larry Peery. Its name was derived from a column he wrote for his 1962 high school newspaper titled “Trivial, Trite, Trash.”38 The flagship zine for TTT Publications was Xenogogic, which hosted a number of Diplomacy games that Peery ran. Peery began the first issue of Xenogogic by writing, “The sole purpose of xenogogic is to add to the debate, conflict, frustration, chaos, and heartbreak that already abounds in the world of postal Diplomacy.”39 With this quote, Peery sarcastically explains that his zine will be no different than any of the other publications: full of conflict, debate, and controversy. But Xenogogic was different in a crucial way—­it was where the proto-­geek

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culture of hobbyists intermingled with game theory espoused by the military establishment. The establishment of military experimentation in the TTT fan community was announced in Xenogogic 4, no. 4.5. Peery wrote that he was devoting a new zine, Peerinalis, specifically to the study of war gaming.40 Launching of another zine was not a particularly strange decision for an editor like Larry Peery, who has housed many spin-­offs to TTT Publications. His catalog of zines included titles like Peeri Uber Alles, Peericomo, Peericon, Peerigogic, Peerilandra, Peerilytic, Peerimania, Peeriphanalia, Peeriphobia, Peerisitis, Peeristerics, Peerithisandpeerithat, Perryara, and Xenogogic. Convinced that military wargames would be extremely popular in the postal Diplomacy scene, Peery bridged ideas incubated in corporate and military games from the RAND Corporation, the MIT Institute for Foreign Policy, the Hudson Institute, Stanford Research Institute, and Northwestern University with the hobbyist communities that enjoyed postal gaming.41 In this way, Peery brought about a concrete exchange of ideas between hobbyists and military elites. His publishing mixed the strategic minds of the hobby wargame community with the gaming structures used by the military think tanks that played games professionally. In so doing, Perry also furthered a structure of white privilege that facilitated an intergenerational set of links between hobbyists in different social stations. What were Peery’s aims with this project? In a late issue of Xenogogic, Peery described his rationale: An understanding of these new weapons systems, and the strategic and tactical theories behind their acquisition and deployment is vital to all of us, as concerned citizens and as serious gaming students. These new systems, now coming to the public eye, will be the mainstay of American military power for the next generation. They will be, in effect, the tools available to future gaming students. With them, or in spite of them, they may prevent, fight, or end, future politico-­military crises. As we move increasingly toward activities oriented toward future conflicts we will need an active understanding of the uses, and limitations, of the systems as they apply to us. For these reasons we are making available a series of monographs on some of the key systems, problems, and issues facing us.42

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This rationale made clear that Peery saw an intuitive and natural connection between the military applications of gaming and the Diplomacy fan community. Additionally, his sense of vigilante patriotism in this write-­up reinforced that Peery considered it his responsibility—­along with the many other hobby players he has published with—­to prevent emerging military crises. This sense of patriotism is the foreign policy equivalent of Ulanov and Lipton’s responses to anxieties about domestic chaos. It also again elicited a sense of white privilege among hobbyist gamers, who felt their way of life was being threatened. Peery’s work eventually crystalized in an institutional form. In 1973 Peery founded the Institute of Diplomatic Studies, which became the moniker for all things related to politico-­military wargaming in TTT Publications. He related its impact as unique and promising: “Initial response to the call in peerinalis . . . has been remarkable. I don’t know of anything like it in postal Diplomacy history. Inquiries have poured in from all areas and all types of people interested in most everything.”43 Despite this promising start, Peery later consolidated and moved discussion on politico-­military wargaming back to his flagship zine Xenogogic in 1973. Here he compiled a recommended reading list drawn from the RAND Corporation. He requested that interested readers write RAND to request the following white papers: “War Gaming Methodology,” “An Extended Concept of ‘Model,’” “An Introduction to War Games,” “Strategic Gaming,” “Some Observations on Political Gaming,” and “On Gaming and Game Theory.”44 This reading list was intended to help readers prepare for the in-­depth discussion on political games that would be hosted in later issues of Xenogogic. In the following issue of Xenogogic, Peery dug deeper into the documents housed at RAND in order to guide what he saw as “serious” hobbyists interested in researching political military wargames. Peery had access only to RAND’s publicly published and distributed documents. From this swath of publications, he made the deliberate choice to consider only documents appearing under the subject categories of “Gaming” and “Game Theory.” Many of the documents analyzed by Peery show an interest in the mathematical aspects of game theory as opposed to the social affordances of games. In these pages, Peery brought the secrets of the political-­military elite into the popular imagination of the hobby game scene and popularized game theory as a way to model strategy within hobby games.

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Peery shared with other members of the hobby the skills necessary to mathematically abstract conflicts and determine the most efficient and safe solution forward. This was an appealing prospect for anxious men in the hobby who equated civic protest with chaos. Game theory may have provided order to what they saw as disorganization, if not outright pandemonium. To accomplish this, Peery argued that the document “War Gaming Methodology” by M. G. Weiner was fundamental to the study of wargames. Peery concluded his description of the paper by writing, “An understanding of this document is required for the serious wargaming student.”45 Peery’s use of the word “serious” highlights how hobbyists viewed the games they played—­as work or study as opposed to the frivolity typically associated with play. By sharing these military papers with fans, he positioned himself as an expert in political strategy. In the process, he established himself as a key figure in the discourse by moving ideas between radically different social spheres. Despite his centrality to the discourse and work as network builder, Peery’s aims were quite modest. As he was president of the International Diplomacy Association and the eventual founder of the Institute for Diplomatic Studies, his writing was always done in service of the hobby. In a written review of 1972’s DIPCON V, Peery related the joy he took in seeing new faces—­and thus potential new zines—­at the event.46 Game theory proved a useful vehicle to Peery insofar as it made for a more lively and engaging strategic space of play and thus could be influential to growing the hobby. Although Peery’s interest in game theory only tangentially intersected with his goals as a community builder, he voraciously consumed texts on military strategy. Between 1965 and 1967 Peery attended San Diego State College, where he earned an associate’s degree in political science. He would refer to this network and training time and time again in his writing. Although the renowned Black political scientist E. Walter Miles would join the faculty in 1967, while Peery attended there were no Black faculty on campus. Thus, it can be inferred that Peery was taken under the wing of the white faculty working in the university’s political science department. They helped him learn about the wargames being played at schools like MIT and at institutions like RAND. RAND’s impact on the hobby game scene was focused. The company’s military simulations interested Peery more than the documentation con-

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cerned with business simulations. He explained, “It seems likely to us, that no one, not even RAND, can keep up with everything going on in the gaming and simulation field today.”47 He offered business simulation texts such as Alfred Hausrath’s book Venture Simulation in War, Business and Politics as examples of writing on this topic outside of RAND. Although he offered little rationale for his interest in RAND—­as opposed to work being done in the business sector—­we can infer that there was a distinct synergy between military wargames and hobby wargaming. As Peery endeavored to replicate the work of the military in his hobby communities, members of the military elite—­political scientists such as Lincoln Bloomfield, lead researcher at the MIT Center for International Studies—­were watching with interest.

The Serious Games White Men Play In addition to his fascination with RAND, Peery inserted himself into the discourse of political games being played at the MIT Center of International Studies. While hobbyists at MIT were hard at work on Spacewar!—­the first computer game—­across the campus social scientists dressed up to role-­play foreign policy in a series of experiments spearheaded by Lincoln Bloomfield. The seriousness with which both groups approached the different games they designed and played is telling. In both contexts, ironically, fun takes a backseat to rationality as games are used to learn more about other things—­be it computers or international politics. Meanwhile, whether gaming the politics of an alien invasion or the politics of South American coups, neither Bloomfield’s lab nor the Model Railway club made mention of the burgeoning civil rights movement that was making headline news at the time. The white men designing political games deemed discourse on politics appropriate as long as it was contained to “serious” topics like foreign policy. The games that simulated foreign policy became hallowed by hobbyists in Peery’s publishing loop. Peery included an article titled “Games Foreign Policy Experts Play: The Political Exercise Comes of Age” in Xenogogic 6, no. 4. Within this essay, Lincoln Bloomfield explained that political role-­playing experiments at MIT, such as CONEX II, were designed to model and understand the behavior of small nation-­states in

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any number of probable and hypothetical situations. Bloomfield and Cornelius Gearin explained, As early as 1963, a group at M.I.T. began to investigate the nature of local conflict, and the relevance of arms control and conflict control measures aimed at minimizing the chances of small wars, particularly those that might involve the nuclear powers and thus contain the danger of escalation. This initial project, sponsored by the U.S. Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, was completed in 1967. Among the fruits of that research was a series of hypotheses bearing on the causes and effects of the United States policy toward local conflict in the developing world.48

Bloomfield’s suggestion was meant to explain how better understanding the politics of escalation in small nation-­states can help to prevent a nuclear strike. In his mind, role-­playing games had great potential to ascertain intelligence on the subjectivities of nations that were otherwise inaccessible to government officials. He held at least a passing curiosity in the work being done by Larry Perry with TTT Publications, evidenced by the copies of Xenogogic preserved in his file at the MIT Center for International Studies Archive and his contributions to an article in this issue.49 This issue of Xenogogic also included a review of Stefan T. Possony and Jerry Pournelle’s book, The Strategy of Technology.50 In this review, Larry Peery described Pournelle as “a well-­known figure in wargaming publications who needs no introduction.”51 By all accounts, Peery was right. Pournelle was a famous writer who was equally well known by hobbyists, science fiction readers, and military brass. President Ronald Reagan cited his writing when developing the Strategic Defense Initiative. Additionally, Pournelle’s writing had been circulating in the Avalon Hill fan community, where there was a substantial overlap with the Diplomacy community. As I described in the prior chapter, the views advanced in The Strategy of Technology were partly responsible for the neoliberal attitudes that were to become ubiquitous among gaming hobbyists and defense contractors in subsequent decades. It offered a vision of technological advancement that positioned wealthy and technologically advanced nations such as the United States as global watchdogs.

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Interestingly, these attitudes were not initially taken for granted by fans such as Peery; he was critical of some of the perspectives contained within the text. He referred to the book as overly theoretical to a fault, though he was clear to explain that the overall thesis was both important and useful.52 In this sense, there was a constructive back-­and-­forth of ideas between the fan cultures curated and epitomized by Larry Peery and the military elite as epitomized by Jerry Pournelle. The networks of discourse that Peery established through the play-­ by-­mail Diplomacy community became legitimated as avenues of discussion between the grassroots and the political elite. Peery’s work reflected a sense of grassroots interest because his readers self-­organized around his publication due to their own personal interests in the work being done in role-­playing within the usually closed walls of military think tanks. Peery was also careful to close the loop and publish the military elites that he so admired. A “review copy” of Xenogogic 6, no. 2 was recovered from within Lincoln Bloomfield’s file archive. A section on page 33, which offered an overview of the MIT Center for International Studies, was highlighted. Peery’s publications—­and the resulting influence of game theory among hobbyists—­were most definitely closely watched and read by Lincoln Bloomfield and his colleagues at MIT. The articles published in Xenogogic offer strong evidence of how TTT Publications relied on ideas produced by institutional frameworks of education and the military. Zines were the site of discussions between the political-­military elites at RAND Corporation and the MIT Center for International Studies with members of the wargaming fan community. By standing at the intersection between fan culture and military institutions, Xenogogic offered readers a comprehensive review of RAND literature on games and game theory. Additionally, because Peery was also in contact with Lincoln Bloomfield—­a consultant for the US military and an academic working at MIT—­we can infer that TTT Publications was also drawing from cutting-­edge research on gaming from university-­based political elites. Finally, Peery’s interest and engagement with Pournelle shows that the relationship between fan communities and military elites was not entirely one-­sided. Instead, there was open dialogue between the fans and military elites working in a variety of social and institutional registers. Through these links, we can see how TTT Publications infused hobby networks with military ideology.

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A White Hobby This chapter has made the case for how approaches to “politics” in games have come to refer to the separate realm of civil rights and everyday life in games as opposed to the explicitly political realm of statecraft and war that the term would otherwise imply. I have demonstrated why hobbyists in the Diplomacy fan community were eager to embrace the politics of statecraft as serious play. They even played and developed their brand of “political” games alongside military elites, and hobbyists were very willing to share their perspectives on presidential politics in the early 1970s. Because these explicitly political topics were embraced by the hobby community, the valence of politics came to refer to topics that were taboo. Headline news about the civil rights movement was largely invisible in the discourse of hobbyists at this time, even among hobbyists like Nicholas Ulanov and Penelope Naughton Dickens, who advocated for a kinder and more inclusive hobby. The enduring whiteness of the hobbyist identity can be glimpsed in the culture of play-­by-­mail Diplomacy games. In this chapter I argued that the hobbyist identity became predicated on a zine-­publishing infrastructure geographically defined by white flight. This geographical and demographic observation is reinforced by a close reading of mostly progressive zines in the New York Conspiracy publishing loop, which addressed safe white activist topics such as environmentalism and free speech. Yet rarely—­if ever—­did they address the burgeoning civil rights and Black activist dialogue that was happening simultaneously. Finally, this chapter analyzed Larry Peery’s work in San Diego running the TTT Publications loop to show how the white subjectivity of hobbyists found a compatible ideological tool for compartmentalizing and negotiating conflict in military writing on game theory. In sum, this chapter showed how the subjectivity of geeks is predicated upon situating itself outside of the tumultuous world of what it sees as political discourse and adopting a hawkish and militaristic mindset in order to accomplish this. A key takeaway from this work is that, as Tara McPherson implies in her writing about the racialized separation between culture and code, the absence of an understanding or dialogue about civil rights in America within these zines fundamentally defines their white identity.53 The fallout of segregationist policies and the ensuing white flight of deseg-

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regation led to a unique hobbyist identity that enjoyed the privilege of whiteness by not addressing Blackness—­or even worse, addressing it only through slurs and pejorative language. While this chapter focused on how the Diplomacy fan community negotiated white identity, the next chapter considers how sexuality became a key agent of trust comradery within the hobby. The next chapter zooms in on the Alarums & Excursions fan community to consider these findings from a different perspective.

4

The Alarums & Excursions Community and Belonging

Lee Gold played Dungeons & Dragons for the first time in 1975. Thrilled by the experience, later that year Lee would send sixty copies of her fanzine Alarums & Excursions to friends around the country.1 Thus began the longest-­running Dungeons & Dragons fanzine in history—­one that continues even today. The articles printed in Alarums & Excursions would be highly influential among role-­players. Several of its contributors would become noted game designers in subsequent years,2 as the creative energy of fans was incorporated into a feedback loop with designers, co-­constituting the budding game industry. Importantly, Lee Gold was a hobbyist herself, publishing Alarums & Excursions from her suburban home in Los Angeles. This chapter considers how Gold and her contemporaries navigated a libertarian ethic while publishing in Alarums & Excursions, while also finding solace for other similar outcasts and outsiders enthusiastic about Dungeons & Dragons. In 2016, I had the opportunity to sit down with Lee Gold to discuss the Alarums & Excursions fan community. I had reached out to her in an effort to acquire early fanzines that might offer insight into the grassroots 1970s role-­playing game fandom. Gold was notoriously fastidious with retaining intellectual property control over the writing she had compiled in the Alarums & Excursions fanzines; so careful, in fact, that few copies of her zine—­essential for my scholarship—­could be found on the internet. Gold told me not to distribute or resell the PDFs of the zines she sold to me for two dollars apiece. In our correspondence, I learned that she happened to live in the neighboring town of Mar Vista. When I came to visit, Gold was gracious enough to host me for a four-­ hour interview about her experience as a woman publishing in a homogeneously white male space. Gold’s sepia-­toned bungalow was two miles from the beach. It had brown wooden walls, beige carpet, and numerous orange and yellow blankets draped over the furniture. We moved from room to room 109

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frequently during our interview as Gold would excitedly show me gaming artifacts to emphasize the materiality of the different games, people, and fanzines we were discussing. She had copies of each issue of Alarums & Excursions stacked from the floor to the ceiling of closets throughout the house. The stacks were imposing, dwarfing her five-­ foot frame. Gold treasured her zines; they may as well have been the frame of her house. Alarums & Excursions was Lee Gold’s life work. These fanzines not only benefitted the Dungeons & Dragons fan community but were also a record of her friendships, relationships, and passions. Sometimes, Gold would publish “filk songs” in these zines, parody songs in which words of actual songs were swapped out with new lyrics.3 When I asked about them, her eyes lit up! She encouraged her husband Barry to grab his guitar so they could perform. I was treated to an impromptu rendition of “Let’s Bash the Balrog” that brought tears to my eyes; I felt the care, craft, and enthusiasm radiate from the Golds harmonizing and singing in unison. I began this chapter with this brief anecdote because I think that it’s important to recognize how the hobby—­because of its homogeneity—­ can be sentimental, touching, and earnest. When Gold described her experiences as the editor of Alarums & Excursions to me, she wasn’t just relaying her hobby or passion; she was describing the most important moments of her life. Through A&E she worked alongside her husband Barry, who helped her manage the zine. Playing role-­playing games was the first she felt like she “fit” with a social group. By narrating these moments, she was telling me about the best memories and the fondest friends she had ever made. Alarums & Excursions was born out of the mostly white Los Angeles science fiction fan scene in 1975. In our interview, Gold confided with me that there was one Black man who was an active participant in the scene at the time. One reason for this homogeneity was that race relations were far from an explicit topic of conversation in the hobby. The geeks who made up nascent gaming communities were instead excited to finally have friends who shared their deep passion for gaming for the first time in their lives. As Gold described it to me, there was a “buzz in the air” as the group accumulated other nerdy outsiders that they could socialize with. Inspired by her experience playing Dungeons & Dragons,

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community buzz about the game in other fanzines, and the publishing traditions of science fiction fans, Lee decided to create a fanzine dedicated to role-­playing games. Alarums & Excursions, as stated in the front matter of several early issues, was to be a cross between an amateur publishing association and a fanzine. The division between fanzine and amateur publishing association is undoubtedly complex. Fanzines were usually single-­author collections distributed by mail to a small, intimate network of subscribers. An amateur publishing association, in contrast, is typically understood as a network of fan authors and readers who would collect and collate submissions from each other for distribution to that same network of privilege. Alarums & Excursions is a hybrid of the two models. Like a fanzine, Alarums & Excursions was published and edited by a single person and distributed to a network they cultivated, but like an amateur publishing association this content was crowdsourced from others within this publishing network. Lee Gold’s hybrid model opened space for radical conversations because readers of Alarums & Excursions were also writers for Alarums & Excursions.4 One popular way of understanding the relationship between fans and “fan culture” is advanced by Henry Jenkins in Convergence Culture. Jenkins argues that fans who operate through grassroots channels can potentially challenge the logic of media producers.5 This fan culture also worked in a tight loop with the media producers who released the content. The loop was so tight, in fact, that it makes little sense to compare the fans publishing Alarums & Excursions with the sort of work being done in a more traditional magazine publishing model like that which Avalon Hill used in the Avalon Hill General or that which TSR Hobbies used in The Dragon. Gary Gygax, then the owner of TSR Hobbies, had just graduated from the world of small-­distribution fan publishing (Diplomacy fanzines) to the world of medium-­distribution business management due to the success of Dungeons & Dragons. He was initially close to the fan community even contributing a letter to the second issue of Alarums & Excursions where he even tried to clarify some game rules. He wrote, “D&D players are far too individualistic and imaginative a bunch to be in agreement, and I certainly refuse to play god for them.”6 Later in the letter Gygax would rail against “standardization,” encouraging his players to wildly reinterpret the game rules,

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while also reinforcing the ideological overtones of individualism that animated the libertarian community at the time. Recognizing the intimate relationship between fans and industry helps to contextualize the work of Lee Gold and her cohort at Alarums & Excursions against a perspective of Gary Gygax as an auteur. A lens of fan culture reveals that gamers and game designers are often one and the same. It also helps to show how the political views of designers and fans in this space were the result of long-­standing discussions and battles that are still being fought. Gamers in 1975 and 1976 were actively grappling with problems of feminism and intersectionality that are still being negotiated within the gaming community today. Alarums & Excursions helps us understand why fans were so excited to make meaning in this homogeneous space, even if they were unable, and in some cases disinterested, in changing the white male discursive space of the hobby. While the prior chapter looked to the Diplomacy fanzine scene to argue that hobbyists were cloistered within a series of isolated white suburban networks, this chapter explores the relationship between these networks and hegemonic historicity. While it is certainly true that Gold and her collaborators were writing in a homogenously white male context, they also engaged in conversations that were curious and even critical of macho proclamations. At its heart, the Alarums & Excursions community illustrates how messy the lived politics of inclusivity are. For its time, the community was relatively diverse, women regularly wrote for the zine, and a handful of Black folk and other people of color were active in the convention circuit that the zine was most affiliated with. Within the publication this group found ways to cajole one another into design-­focused conversations that questioned how topics like sex, consent, and sexuality might be represented in role-­playing games. But despite the group’s relatively more integrated nature, these conversations took place within the context of both hegemonic masculinity and the community’s predominantly white demographic. Indeed, the Alarums & Excursions community was defined by its whiteness, which negated dialogue around Blackness. Despite the invisibility of race and visibility of sexism within the Alarums & Excursions community, the women and people of color participating within the community endured because they felt a meaningful sense of belonging from their peers. As the research I describe in this chapter

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shows, although the community also participated in unfortunate prattle that relegated gaming to a position of hegemonic masculinity, community leaders like Gold pushed back.

Nick Smith I asked Lee Gold if she could put me in contact with the Black contributor from the Alarums & Excursions scene, and she put us in touch. His name was Nick Smith, and he knew Gold from Los Angeles science fiction fandoms as well as the Alarums & Excursions community. Smith was born in Ohio but grew up in a diverse San Diego community. He got deep into role-­playing games in the 1970s while he was one of about six Black undergraduate students at Cal Tech. Smith was relaxed in our conversation, fondly remembering the friends that he had made through hobby games. Like many of his generation, Smith identifies as African American. I asked him if he felt included within the networks of privilege that he ran with, and his answer was an unequivocal “yes.” Although there were rarely other African American folks at conventions or in his game groups, he explained that he would game with a number of somewhat diverse groups that included Asian and Latinx participants. He was hired by Avalon Hill as a developer for their sequel to Panzer Blitz, Panzer Leader—­a game that focused on the Western Front of World War II. Given the proclivity Avalon Hill had in publishing white supremacist symbology, I asked Smith what his experience working with them was like. Smith confided in me that he only spoke with them over the phone. Because Smith grew up in suburban spaces and didn’t possess any urban affectations in his accent, he likely passed as white. In this regard, Smith’s experience working with Avalon Hill was straightforward; they hired him to develop a game because he was part of their network of privilege and he delivered. Although Smith felt included in the Alarums & Excursions community, he did take note of white supremacist participation in the hobby. The presence of ideological white supremacy wasn’t subtle, but it also wasn’t popular. “Frankly there were some really creepy people out there. The guys who would show up in SS uniforms wanting to play Stalingrad,” Smith told me. He thought that the white supremacists in the commu-

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nity were mainly interested in wargames and connected through the networks of privilege established by the Avalon Hill General. Wargames required expensive miniatures to play, he explained, while Dungeons & Dragons just needed a few manuals. Smith was able to meet a more diverse group of hobbyists because of the socioeconomic differences in the hobby. In other words, the BIPOC network of hobbyists that Smith befriended were able to find belonging in the Alarums & Excursions community because there were few economic barriers to entry. Similar to how model railroads were sold to a predominantly wealthy audience of white hobbyists, tabletop role-­ playing games made participation in the hobby far more affordable. It was clear from our conversation that Smith felt that Alarums & Excursions was an overwhelmingly positive experience in his life. Through the community he was able to make friends and even develop and design games. Because most of his correspondence with the community was through fanzines and the mail, he felt that he passed for all but those like Lee Gold who also knew him from the local con scenes. Smith’s experience shows that there were BIPOC folks participating in the hobby as early as 1975, even if this participation may have been invisible to the predominantly white demographics of the hobby overall. As much a part of the Alarums & Excursions community as Smith may have been, the community didn’t discuss race among one another—­and like Smith implied, through the mail race remained mostly invisible.

Historical Hegemony To understand a game’s historical importance, we should look not to the designers who developed it but instead to the hobbyists. They played it, tinkered with it, and even loved it. My thinking about the relationship between gaming and hobbyists has been informed by the similar, interrelated history between geeks and technology. As I have noted earlier, I advocate for a definition and understanding of “geek” that is deeply rooted in everyday life as opposed to media representation. In this way, the sense of “belonging” that both Lee Gold and Nick Smith were able to locate in the Alarums & Excursions community is what unites their story with the other stories of hobbyists who were operating in similar networks of privilege.

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As I have noted throughout this book, the most popular histories of games are histories of the white male designers who develop them. If the knowledge circulating within published manuscripts was used to tell a narrative, it would be a familiar tale of the canny white-­male entrepreneurs whose innovative spirit laid the foundation for Silicon Valley and the American tech industry. But the problems of this narrative go far deeper—­they extend also to a historical mode of storytelling that completely obscures all voices, objects, and events that sit at the margins of society. While Steve Jobs was famously conning Steve Wozniak into developing an agile forty-­two-­chip prototype of the game Breakout for Atari in 1975 in Northern California, two young science fiction fans—­Lee and Barry Gold—­were playing Dungeons & Dragons (1973) for the first time in sunny Santa Monica. Although Lee’s life work has been tremendously impactful to gaming subcultures, it has been all but forgotten in comparison to gaming’s dominant narrative of white-­male entrepreneurs in Silicon Valley. My juxtaposition of Gold’s cottage publishing endeavors against Jobs’s white-­collar trickery showcases several problematics of historical narratives: First, they tend to shine a spotlight on the wealthy while neglecting the poor. Jobs, Apple, and Atari receive a disproportionate share of the spotlight because they are history’s “winners” and are therefore objects of fascination for the general public. Relatedly, this juxtaposition highlights how narratives of the “digital” are cloistered and seen as disconnected from narratives of the “analog”—­as if digital technologies were developed in a cultural vacuum. Third, this comparison shifts attention to how the domestic labor of women is often subordinated to the work of men in historical narratives. Gold’s domestic work of community building and publishing is left out of the spotlight in favor of a problematic male antihero. The history of videogames is not only “all about the boys,” as Nooney claims, but also all about the ways that our validation of men with money and electronics obscures alternate labor practices. Similarly, the story that has been told about the development of role-­ playing games often starts with a top-­down origin story about the publication of Dungeons & Dragons in 1974. Despite the fact that it is well documented that Dungeons & Dragons and the role-­playing game genre emerged from a complex network of hobby designers and players,7 the

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game’s popularity is frequently attributed to the sole efforts of D&D’s putative authors, Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson. Gygax is particularly fetishized by the media. For example, game news publications like Polygon frequently document the latest developments of the Gygax estate, the “geek news” website BoingBoing has highlighted those portions of Jon Peterson’s history of D&D that deal most specifically with Gygax, and Wired ran a feature-­length article dedicated to Gygax.8 If we relied upon this media discourse to understand the success of Dungeons & Dragons, we would be inclined to attribute the popularity of role-­playing games to the singular efforts of Gygax and his close collaborators. In other words, we would understand role-­playing games as the historical invention of a handful of determined and visionary white men. The problems of this narrative go far deeper—­they are a historical mode of storytelling that completely obscures all voices, objects, and events that sit at the margins of society. What if a history of role-­playing games began with the communities that played the games as opposed to the designers who published them? There are hints of such historiography in existing work. For example, Jon Peterson’s influential Playing at the World casts game design as a bottom­up, community-­driven practice, despite attempts to cast D&D as the product of Gygax and Arneson.9 William White’s treatment of the design communities that constitute The Forge is also an excellent example of how such a history might help illuminate how such paradigms might yield insight toward against-­the-­grain design practices.10 Nick Mizer’s cultural anthropological explorations of role-­playing game play center the engagement of players at the table, as opposed to valorizing game designers.11 Finally, Gary Fine’s classic Shared Fantasy offers a close sociological reading of role-­playing game players in the late 1970s; in it, he interviews Gygax but doesn’t regard his claims as necessarily authoritative.12 Despite these important strides forward in understanding the community-­driven design practices of the early Dungeons & Dragons scene, there is little historical work that attempts to address the cultural dynamics of early role-­playing game communities. For better or worse, the brand of Dungeons & Dragons has become synonymous with “role-­playing games” as a force in popular culture. For this reason, I am interested in the discursive impact of rules that capture the essence of hegemonic masculinity.13

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In addition to this, Alarums & Excursions, like many of the other fan communities explored by this book, adds a wrinkle to narratives about fan culture that centralize the role of women as publishers of fanfiction.14 The Alarums & Excursions community at first mirrors the structure of other fanfiction publishing loops in the 1960s and 1970s, foregrounding the role of women in publishing fanzines and fanfiction. Lee Gold, after all, was also an active part of the Los Angeles science fiction fandom and an active participant in those publishing loops. The comparisons end here, however, as the networks of role-­playing fans that Gold inherited from the wargaming community were predominantly constituted of white men. Like Michael Saler’s historical work on how science fiction fans replicate and reinforce ideology,15 I use fanzines as a primary source to consider how these communities negotiated hegemonic masculinity. Through Alarums & Excursions, the largest fanzine community devoted to Dungeons & Dragons, I explore the reception of the home-­ brew Damsel and Courtesan classes.16 The reception of the community to role-­playing game classes helps us understand how fans understood their own identities and learned to better understand others as part of a slow process of negotiated cultural change. Specifically, I argue that the culture of hegemonic masculinity within the Alarums & Excursions community—­even as they criticized specific individuals as “male chauvinist pigs”—­effectively validated and normalized efforts to engineer and implement quantitative mechanics of negotiating consent in role-­ playing games. This validation, I suggest, has affected how consent in games is treated today and deserves reexamination.

The Damsel and the Courtesan While sorting through my archive of articles from Alarums & Excursions, I looked specifically for moments when conflicting perspectives, debate, and discourse would emerge among fan-­authors. These moments signaled to me that something greater was at stake in the conversation. In other words, rather than merely seeking consensus, clashes in discourse signaled to me that what Michel Foucault would term the “hazardous play of dominations” may have been at play. I used moments of contention and conflict in the historical record as a deliberate effort to

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reveal invisible systems of subjugation. Thus, my work offers a glimpse into how this early player community grappled with consent and masculinity, so that we can better reflect on how these issues are negotiated by players today. One such moment of contention emerged in the discussion surrounding the Alarums & Excursions articles about the Damsel and the Courtesan. These were two optional character classes that players could choose to play or that Dungeon Masters could incorporate as non-­player characters, also known as NPCs, with which to confront players. As fan creations appearing in a fan publication, the Damsel and the Courtesan were not official or authorized additions to the game. Rather, they were articulations of their authors’ particular visions of Dungeons & Dragons, shared with like-­minded gamers. Authors offered them with some communicative intent, even if only provocation. Certainly, the charges of “male chauvinism” that were levied against the authors did not seem to faze them much. I approach the Damsel and the Courtesan as not so much indicative of the overarching culture of D&D fans as they show how fans at the time reacted to and managed provocatively sexist material. By analyzing snippets of discourse and game mechanics, I present a grassroots-­level account of how masculinity and consent were negotiated by the designers and players in the Alarums & Excursions fan community.

The Courtesan The rules for the Courtesan appeared in the 1975 November–­December issue of Alarums & Excursions.17 The author of the Courtesan was Dick Eney. Lee Gold described Eney to me as being known for his argumentative nature and his track record for publishing provocative articles in the community. In describing a rationale for the Courtesan character class, Eney writes, I remember Lee Gold commenting once that she wouldn’t allow Characters to loan each other items free unless they were lovers. That’s a slight hint that there is an aspect of the Dungeon which has escaped regularization so far: our Characters’ sex lives, or rather the various means we have to simulate these. Naturally, since everything in the Dungeon has a

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probability table to go with it, we ought to have something for this too: and it might be a Good Thing to allow them to set up special relations with other Characters in a regular fashion. Thus three new draft rules for your consideration, covering the three essential aspects of making Love as well as War; or, Dungeons and Debauchery!18

Eney thus advocates for a game mechanics of love, instead of war. He notes that sex is a repressed aspect of role-­playing games, which tend to focus on ways to combat other characters. But Eney’s seemingly sex-­ positive intentions stand in contrast with his employment of explicitly sexist tropes that present women less as partners in a consensual sexual relationship and more as mere objects to be interacted with. It is consistently implied that Courtesans were intended as NPCs to be patronized by male player-­characters. For example, the mock advertisement for the business called “Marilyn’s Magic Massage” (figure 4.1) presents an idealized and sexualized female body. She may be one of fifteen woman available round-­the-­clock to offer services such as “bikini baths” in “complete privacy.” The tag line “Maybe there’s a branch in your dungeon” is addressed to the reader both as Dungeon Master (here is a resource for play) and as player-­character (here is a titillating service of which your character can partake). The article then describes a number of game mechanics that cement the relationship between femininity and subservience. As Courtesans gained experience they would earn titles (figure 4.2) that highlighted their explicit connection to sexuality: “Jillflirt,” “Painted Hussy,” “Pleasure Wench,” “Temptress,” and “Joy-­Bringer” are among the titles given to the Courtesan.19 “Advancement” signaled that the Courtesan had become a more practiced and higher class prostitute, as level titles such as “Fair Cyprian” and “Hetaera” signify. Finally, rules are also included for how the Courtesans should misrepresent themselves to clients when seeking to earn money: “When negotiating Courtesans will misrepresent themselves as being 3–­6 levels (D4 roll +2) above their actual level.”20 This rule tells the game’s referee, or Dungeon Master, how Courtesans operate: They lie about their social status in order to earn more money from the John. Eney’s rules for bringing sexuality into the game, in other words, were less about raising sexuality as a point of conversation or play. Instead,

Figure 4.1. Comedic banner framing Eney’s Courtesan class. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from a PDF copy of Alarums & Excursions purchased by the author.

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Figure 4.2. Advancement titles for progressing in Eney’s Courtesan class. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from a PDF copy of Alarums & Excursions purchased by the author.

they were a set of algorithms for transforming the female body into a sort of sex robot. Sex and sexuality are not described as facets of the role-­playing experience. Instead, they are situated as new ways in which an idealized male player can exert his gaze on women in the game world. Eney’s Courtesan is more of an interactive sex toy than she is a woman with agency. The algorithmic sexuality of Eney’s Courtesan is different from the scopophilia that Michelle Nephew critiques role-­playing games through.21 Nephew draws on film theory to explain that role-­playing games commonly foreground the sexuality of women because they are made for men to consume. While I agree with her reading of role-­ playing games generally, I read Eney’s robotic Courtesan more as a simulation. She is more than the object of the male gaze—­she is the embodiment of it. Eney’s rules for interacting with the Courtesan imply that she is an object for men to play with. Sexuality, in this case, is converted into tables, charts, and numbers. Eney’s Courtesan draws attention to the ability of games to represent sexuality by developing game mechanics that perform this work, while at the same time reducing sexual interaction to that of a set of numbers. Despite the ways Eney’s algorithm works to flatten sexual encounters to numbers and not compassion, it was visionary in the history of game design. It saw sexuality as an equally compelling sphere of human interaction as combat. As Eliot Wieslander points out, while many games are developed around combat as a core mechanic, far fewer are developed with love and care in mind instead.22 The rules that Eney proposed for “making out” work as follows. Players choose a target person that they wish to make out with. They then

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calculate the difference in their Charisma statistics and use this difference as a positive or negative modifier for their saving throw. For instance, a character with a Charisma score of eleven who tries to make out with a character with a Charisma score of thirteen has a two-­point difference. In the case of this example, if the character with a lower charisma were targeted by the other character, they would add two to their saving throw statistic, making it more difficult to resist the advance on the roll of a twenty-­sided die. When making out with other players, this logic of seduction becomes especially invasive. Eney writes, “Player characters, having free will, may choose to roll twice; if so, they resist seduction by a saving throw on either roll.” Free will—­the difference between humanness and objectness—­is captured as an extra die roll. Although we ought to give Eney some credit for considering that a second player may desire more agency when deciding to opt out of a sexual encounter, it is concerning that this sense of agency is reduced to a second roll of the die and not a conversation. The idea that consent can be captured by the roll of the dice implies that, in the algorithmic space developed by Eney, consent was simply a number to be draped upon one of the hollow puppet character bodies included in the game. The implication that consent could ever be represented as a die roll also underscores the degree to which objectification permeates most early role-­playing games. For example, one DM—­the editor of a well-­regarded codification of D&D rules and a practicing psychologist—­described making a female player roll to see if her female character was still a virgin and could thus successfully interact with a unicorn.23 The mechanics and rules of role-­playing games utilize dice and resolve encounters. They transform all bodies—­player and otherwise—­into objects within the game world. The crucial question that we must ask of the algorithms in games is whether the player has been given agency over their own body or if the game’s machinic logic has denied the player agency. The way that agency is algorithmically allocated is visible in Eney’s article related to the intensity of a make-­out session (figure 4.3). Here, a six-­sided die is used to determine how a Courtesan’s interaction in a sexual encounter will escalate. He implies that the Courtesan’s body is not her own, given that the difference between a conversation and

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Figure 4.3. Eney’s rules for “makin out” in Dungeons & Dragons. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from a PDF copy of Alarums & Excursions purchased by the author.

going “all the way” revolves only around a roll of the dice. This bizarre rule codes intimacy as the result of mathematical negotiation and not affection, dialogue, or bodily capacity. The benefits to “morale” and “confidence” as well as other positive effects accrue, of course, to the player John, becoming greater as he achieves more intimate sexual congress. There is no word about any positive or negative effects on the Courtesan. Eney and Konkin both identified as men and created these rules for the pleasure primarily for other men. I counted the number of women publishing in Alarums & Excursions over the course of the first year and found that the number consistently dropped with the publication of each issue. Although the reduction of sexual relations to that of an encounter with an object is concerning, there is also a question of whether these rules may have worked as a boundary object to negotiate homoerotic desire. Reducing sexuality to an algorithm where one has no control over one’s body is such an extreme form of dissociation and objectification, one is left to wonder how these rules were used in practice. Consider a scenario in which a male dungeon master uses these rules as a way to negotiate a sexual encounter between a female NPC in the game and another male player. Reducing sexuality to mathematics allows both presumably heteronormative players an alibi for what could otherwise be seen as an exercise in gender bending and playing with sexuality.

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Reducing sexual encounters to a set of numbers allows players to play with sexuality in a way that avoids the dangers of intimate bodily encounters. At the same time, it furthers a discourse of objectification that pervades the logic of role-­playing games. In the seventies, efforts like Eney and Konkin’s were a radical departure from the rules that constrained wargames to mechanics of human warfare. Similarly, these rules must be read as the byproduct of a time when sex was the focus of a cultural conversation around free love. Some feminists, most famously Andrea Dworkin, were entertaining a conversation that questioned the social value of men and pornography. Based on this work, feminism was sensationalized by the media as being antimale and antisex, and thus culturally stigmatized.

The Damsel The fan community did not embrace the Courtesan with open arms. One fan, the notorious Samuel Konkin III, agreed with the premise that Dungeons & Dragons ought to provide players with an opportunity to role-­play love as well as war. To this end, Konkin also devised a character class—­the Damsel.24 The Damsel was a typical Disney princess. Konkin critiqued Eney’s Courtesan for not being courtly enough and developed the Damsel as a lawful counterweight to the roguish Courtesan. Unfortunately, Konkin’s Damsel fell prey to many of the same sexist pitfalls that Eney’s reductionist Courtesan fell into. Samuel Konkin III was a Saskatchewan transplant with strong libertarian and anarchist beliefs living in Los Angeles. While Dick Eney’s writing was often grounded in militaristic and conservative philosophy, Konkin was ultimately very idealistic and left-­leaning. Konkin edited and published several political zines, like New Libertarian Notes, New Libertarian Weekly, and New Libertarian, in addition to his contributions to Alarums & Excursions. Konkin’s work as a fan was often explicitly political. A drawing he published in Alarums & Excursions featured several women in the fan community hanging effigies of Gary Gygax, Len Lakofka, and Tim Kask (figure 4.4).25 Konkin also often incorporated themes of social justice into his writing. The Damsel was a counterpoint to the Courtesan: a class for women who embraced stereotypes of sexual purity as opposed to sexual trickery.

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Figure 4.4. Illustration by S. C. McIntosh published as the cover of Samuel Konkin III’s Clear Ether within Alarums & Excursions 19. It depicts feminist pushback toward The Dragon editorial team. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from a PDF copy of Alarums & Excursions purchased by the author.

Despite Konkin’s well-­meaning objectives, the Damsel was nonetheless an exaggerated stereotype of femininity. In playtesting the character, Konkin ran a character named “Cheerlieder [sic]” who was unable to find a suitable mate in the party. They were reduced to holding the lantern while the other characters brandished their steely swords. For me, the most problematic characteristic of the Damsel is her sense of honor. Not only did Konkin’s Damsel play into stereotypes, but the rules

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implied that she was again required to reduce her own identity to one of sexuality: “Damsels choose death before dishonor (in classic sense), yielding their chastity only to males married by Cleric. The damsel then becomes a ‘consort’ and may raise children. Failure to maintain honour (including submission to rape without suicide!) drops the Damsel to a Courtesan. Clerics may absolve (neutral) Courtesans to damsel status—­ but only for sincere repentance.”26 Konkin not only equates purity with virtue and chastity in this passage but also suggests that suicide is an appropriate response to rape. By proclaiming that a victim of rape is expected to “repent,” he is playing into rhetoric of victim blaming. He also insinuates that the Damsel’s main (and perhaps only) use is for sex. Like the Courtesan, the female body of the Damsel is again reduced to a sexual object. Konkin struggles in his writing to articulate the female body’s relationship to sexuality. He would consider the possibility of including male damsels. He writes, “Male Damsels? If some group wishes to go ‘gay,’ and remain lawful, it could be conceivable that a gay damsel could make fourth level, and higher toward Gay Vampires, etc. However straights will be utterly repelled and immune. Lesbian damsels are undetectable unless they deliberately turn-­off males.”27 Not only does sexuality persist as the defining characteristic of the Damsel, but Konkin limits the degree to which gay men can pass as damsels. He also suggests that we understand gay women by observing the degree to which they reject the advances of men. Through his writing, Konkin reifies the idea that women are sexual objects and even suggests that gayness is problematic in a women only if she resists a man’s advances (thus challenging the essentialization of her as an object). In the context of this period, Konkin may have had good intentions. His clumsy acceptance of gayness as an acceptable sexuality shows that (unlike many others in the community who were explicitly homophobic) Konkin held progressive values and wanted to include a greater diversity of people in the hobby. That said, Konkin’s depiction of the Damsel was just as (if not more) dehumanizing as Eney’s Courtesan. Konkin’s writing reduces women to a sexual stereotype of purity, while Eney’s reduces women to a stereotype of vice. Both flatten the representation of women in Dungeons & Dragons and regulate character and intimacy through mathematical equations. As noted above, these equations continued to

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circulate within tabletop and computer role-­playing games. But while the algorithms that governed intimacy in games crystalized in these misogynist frameworks, the player community was able to negotiate and manage any feelings that were hurt through conversation.

Discursive Action with Male Chauvinist Pigs My goal in this chapter was to excavate moments of historical conflict in an effort to reveal the invisible forms of subjugation at play in the community. Through my research, the fan conversations around these character classes revealed that, on a surface level, the community was discussing new rules for Dungeons & Dragons. However, they were truly interrogating their deep-­seated beliefs, stereotypes, and biases. For this reason, I end this chapter by returning to these conflicted conversations as a way to better observe how the community was negotiating the currents of hegemonic masculinity flowing through it. The community was deeply involved with conversations about the Damsel and the Courtesan. Many questioned whether these characters offered an accurate representation of sexuality. In the excerpts analyzed below, it is clear that many considered Konkin and Eney to be MCPs, or Male-­Chauvinist Pigs—­t he 1970s equivalent of the MRAs or Men’s Rights Activists—­for so brazenly engaging with female sexuality in their writing. Even conservative Eney was concerned with how Konkin connected suicide and rape through a game mechanic. Despite these disagreements, the community continued to publish. However, many of the women who contributed to Alarums & Excursions in the early years eventually dropped out. I have provided in this chapter a good deal of circumstantial evidence to support my argument that their disappearance was a consequence of the objectification of women. The fans who discussed the politics of inclusion with Konkin and Eney were surprisingly civil. In negotiating the politics of bodies and sexuality, they offer polite but firm pushback on the points that are most concerning. It is imperative on me—­a visitor to an earlier time from the future—­not to coarsely judge the Damsel and the Courtesan by our present moral standards. Rather, we might instead recognize ourselves in this earlier moment of gamer culture where things were seemingly

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more naïve. Writing now in a post-­Gamergate and post-­#MeToo world, we must revisit the past to remember that the politics of popular culture were then understated. To this end, we must recontextualize this chapter with player accounts drawn from players who lived through this moment. I end this section with a conversation players had with each other about the Damsel and the Courtesan in Alarums & Excursions. Even as Gold, Eney, Pierson, and Sherna critique the problematic tropes of these classes in the pages of their publication, they find space to critique the absurd. They wonder how long it takes to lace armor in the bedroom, tease the MCPs in their lives for their abject ignorance, and even find time to acknowledge and accept queer folks. It is important to remember that the fans participating in these discussions saw these as private conversations occurring within the private boundaries of a community. They never expected these conversations to be observed by researchers from the future. They were friends candidly communicating and negotiating radically different understandings of gender, sexuality, and consent at a time when misogyny stood as the dominant cultural paradigm. Lee Gold wrote to Samuel Konkin: Like your Damsel character, but I sort of object to the MCPism of it all, particularly the fact that a damsel loses honor after rape unless she commits suicide. Seems to me that isn’t medieval but Victorian mores, hence highly anachronistic. //By the way, removing plate armor in medieval days usually took a good hour and even leather armor about ten minutes minimum.28 Dick Eney wrote to Samuel Konkin: Damsel unable to use her wiles unless she is dressed revealingly is Bad Stuff, but might be justified by the pleas that some grossly evident attraction is needed in a rushed situation (That would indicate that you’ve never seen how good a pretty girl can look in armor or other protective gear, but let it pass.) But then you go on to have these attractions also destroyed when she does something that shows high intelligence, and to that I can only say, oink oink oink! **

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** Mighod, mandatory suicide after being raped? One seldom thinks of the medieval church as more liberal than faaans, but bedamned if it isn’t in this case.29 Dan Pierson wrote to Lee Gold: Were-­armor is a good idea’ I’ll have to include some. I agree that Courtesans need not be female; I also accept homosexual lovers.30 Sherna wrote to Sam Konkin: Your Damsels are a really fine satire, although I might choke a bit at anyone actually trying to play one. (On the other hand, I do have a[nother] Unique [character class], called a male chauvinist pig . . .)31

Reading these candid messages today, I am struck by how the community confronts Konkin’s Damsel with an earnest dialogue about how it was problematic. The community takes great care to participate in something similar to what we now call “restorative justice,” where the goal is reconciliation rather than punishment.32 They try to explain to Konkin what he got wrong and why his character class is profoundly unfun for a diverse group of players. In the snippet above there is even an inspiring note of acceptance for LGBTQ characters. Even though some of the mechanics the Alarums & Excursions community developed were toxic to their community, it’s important that we recognize that these players were in explicit dialogue with challenging cultural tropes. Although they struggled to make sense of cultural practices of consent, they also collaborated to raise their consciousness about negative representations of women in games. Nonetheless, the Alarums & Excursions discussions about the Damsel and the Courtesan remain infused with hegemonic masculinity. Research on hegemonic masculinity grows out of sociological theory that identifies patterns of action among men. The culture of masculinity in games relates to a set of deeper questions about what is taken for granted about player and avatar. The assumption in these contexts is not just that games are designed for a stereotypical male player, but that they are constructed in a way that aims to provide this player with a masculine power fantasy of unlimited agency. In the open worlds of

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role-­playing games specifically, the masculine player is presented with a veritable buffet of bodies that they are encouraged to interact with. As this chapter shows, rules were engineered to manage these interactions (and their consequences) through dice rolls, charts, and tables. Thus, quantified systems of consent are an example of a classification that reinforces hegemonic masculinity. The unique idiosyncrasies of hegemonic masculinity within the context of Dungeons & Dragons are precisely what make the Alarums & Excursions community so fascinating to study. The Alarums & Excursions group offered home-­brew rules for Dungeons & Dragons and offered a different approach to gameplay from that advocated for by Gary Gygax in Dragon. The above research on Alarums & Excursions shows a community working through the messy and conflicted space of ideology by discussing how consent and gender should be approached in character design. This chapter examined home-­brew classes in the Alarums & Excursions community to understand the lived cultural politics of role-­ playing game fans in the 1970s. This approach traced a prehistory of the toxic masculinity that persists within gamer communities. There was a familiar absence of Black community members contributing and participating to the discourse. Yet, much as today, the community negotiated and resisted toxic masculinity, rather than completely embracing it. The fact that race was absent from the conversation while discourse on gender was present supports this book’s overall argument that the homophily of hobby communities in the suburbs led to a homogenous set of white values in the space. Discourse around gender, in contrast, was present and helps us understand how even though the group held a set of values that colluded readily with hegemonic masculinity, some members of the group with a good deal of clout, like Lee Gold, were able to push back. One of the historical strengths of role-­playing has been its ability to bring people from radically different walks of life together around the game table. The class design of the Damsel and the Courtesan shows game players doing just this. The case study described above is a real story of real friends confronting cultural problems that still arise today. However, the Damsel and the Courtesan also show how the early players of Dungeons & Dragons unconsciously reinforced hegemonic

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masculinity through these bonds of friendship. Their gendered performances produced the stereotypical architecture of character classes, while reinforcing a more insidious belief in quantification as an essential component of game design. In these ways, the Alarums & Excursions community helps us to better understand the unique politics of the hobby. As players negotiated consent and sexuality in the design of the character classes, they designed rules for managing gender with a tacitly individualist and libertarian perspective that presumed a common set of communicative norms. The intimacy of the community allowed them to broach ideas about sexuality that would be unacceptable in other contexts. Norms such as candid conversations around character sexuality show a hobbyist community that defaulted to a cisgender and heteronormative worldview; to a limited extent, they remained open to diversity and difference within their numbers. Diversity, in this sense, would remain individualist. As such, the community was happy to include other nerdy “outsiders” as long as they shared the same interests, despite the otherwise conservative politics of hobbyists. The mastery of arcane knowledge, a hallmark of geek masculinity, in this sense was a form of merit that could earn both women and Black people space in the hobby. Yet the candor of hobbyist conversation may have paradoxically alienated women and people of color from participating in the community. As I show in chapter 6, this tension remains today as a new generation of geeks fights to make the hobby a more inclusive space. Still the members of the Alarums & Excursions community felt that despite these tensions within the group, the space itself was inclusive. The relative absence of Black hobbyists was overshadowed by a community dynamic of belonging that did a better job including a spectrum of women and BIPOC participants than the hobbyist communities that had come before. In this regard, the relatively diverse coalition of fans who composed the Alarums & Excursions community was a harbinger of what has to come in the hobby. Ultimately, revisiting Alarums & Excursions today, I am caught between admiring the idealism of the community and the social hurdles they overcame, and cringing at how heteronormativity and masculinity defined the conversations within its pages. There was a clear passion within the community for Dungeons & Dragons and for the sense of be-

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longing they were able to locate within each other. However, this passion was tempered by a libertarian sense of individualism. The prior chapter noted that this individualism had ideological roots in the burgeoning sixties and seventies conservative movement. This movement sought to leverage invisible systemic and structural barriers to invisibly discriminate against Black folks. I was heartened to meet Nick Smith, a Black participant in Lee Gold’s early Alarums & Excursions network. Yet at the same time it is clear that the larger structural barriers of racism prevented most Black people from even finding the Alarums & Excursions network in the first place or feeling comfortable participating.

Part III Mainstream

5

Geek Culture Goes Digital

This book has shared the stories of hobbyists whose work has been fundamental to understanding the mise-­en-­scène of geek culture today. It began with model railways, moved on to wargames, and then Dungeons & Dragons. Each scene brought insights into how white privilege cohered in these communities. White privilege, encoded in symbols and logics of white supremacy, was how the hobby related to its own predominantly white suburban demographics. Recognizing the dynamics of these networks of privilege is essential to understanding the zeitgeist of the old guard of hobbyists—­the membership in which white supremacy continues to thrive in the hobby. But today, participation in the hobby is rapidly integrating. No longer are hobby games simply a playground for an aging white male demographic; women and people of color have found the hobby and are challenging many of sexist and racist attitudes that have come before. This chapter attributes this shift in culture to the shift toward digital publishing that took place at the turn of the twenty-­first century. When hobby publishing went digital, a new and diverse generation of hobbyists were able to glimpse the networks of privilege that had already been established by the old guard. And while these early online networks were far from revolutionary, understanding how they have iterated on their publishing practices is essential to discerning the landscape of the hobby today. Online fan discourse about today’s hobby games continues discussions that took place over postal networks from the 1960s to the 1980s. Avalon Hill’s “Opponent’s Wanted” column set the blueprint for fans seeking community, and this community entered the twenty-­first century on the role-­playing game site The Forge and the board game site Board Game Geek. In addition to fanzines like Alarums & Excursions and the Mixumaxu Gazette—­which continue to be published—­magazines like The Dragon and The General normalized and popularized the dis135

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position of the old guard toward the hobby.1 Even though Gary Gygax, one of the designers of Dungeons & Dragons, may have passed on, his children Luke and Ernie enjoy infamy—­albeit for different reasons.2 While such familial legacies are uncommon, the inheritance of clout among members of the community speaks to how traditions are maintained within it. Viewed this way, communities that manage the hobby today are a continuation of the communities from the 1970s, rather than a radical break. The old guard of hobbyists is defined by an uncritical acceptance of the white privilege they enjoy within the community and a set of practices they cultivated. These practices include a DIY (do-­it-­yourself) ethic that was fundamental to the community’s early growth, an appreciation of brick-­a nd-­mortar (or FLGS) game spaces and vendors, and an indifference to the representational character of the games that are consumed.3 While this book mainly focuses on how these values reflect the white privilege of hobbyists, I hold deeply ambivalent feelings about the old guard as a whole. Having grown up playing hobby games, I maintain a nostalgic and earnest appreciation for how the old guard maintained a cottage industry somewhat insulated from the dynamics of global capital. This insulation means occasionally swimming against the current. Where small and developing enterprises often seek publicity, the old guard holds a conservative and possessive stance toward intellectual property. At one point Gary Gygax threatened to sue fans who were illegally photocopying Dungeons & Dragons manuals. When I interviewed Lee Gold, she sold me several copies of Alarums & Excursions on PDF for two dollars each. After I copied these files, she warned me that distributing them would undermine the integrity of her business. To respect her wishes, I continue to keep these files in a folder on my hard drive to this day. The old guard of hobbyists has always produced games, writing, and art for the sole benefit of the community’s development. The community, however, has also been fundamentally shaped by white privilege in ways that are often difficult to discern. This chapter looks closely at Board Game Geek and The Forge to show how the practices of the old guard continue to shape the hobbyist community today. Although Board Game Geek is just one of many sites for hobby discourse, it is pivotal for understanding how the hobby ex-

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panded into digital spaces. This expansion centralized the many conversations that were happening in grassroots publishing circuits similar to Alarums & Excursions globally. It created a centralized space where the creative labor of hobbyists was easily found on the internet. The wealth of creativity that coalesced on sites like Board Game Geek allowed the crowdfunding platforms that took advantage of it to thrive. By examining how a new paradigm of crowdsourced and digital work has disrupted the community practices that have been instantiated by the old guard, I show how these early hubs of digital community were a first step toward expanding the hobby to include a diverse array of participants.

Board Game Geek When I began to seek out modern board games in late 2007, online details were scarce. As a transplanted doctoral student living in the rustbelt town of Binghamton, New York, I had a good deal of time on my hands and few things to do with it. Seeking out activities that might break up the tedium, I found myself frequenting the local hobby stores where board games were sold alongside popular sellers like Magic: The Gathering cards and Dungeons & Dragons rulebooks. My interest in board games began modestly, with the silly and widely distributed games that were common at that time. Light card-­driven games like Munchkin, Killer Bunnies, Fairy Tale, and Bang! would hit the table when I entertained friends. One day, my sister gave me a copy of Ticket to Ride as a gift and I was hooked. Eager to explore the latest board games, I made checking in at the local game shop a part of my weekly routine. My new fascination with board games led me to seek out reviews so that I could make wiser purchasing decisions with my limited graduate school budget. I had been used to locating reviews for video games on magazine-­like websites such as IGN and GameSpot, or in subscription-­ based paper magazines like Game Informer. I also checked in on the hobby game scene through Dragon Magazine, which offered readers content geared toward fans of tabletop role-­playing games. Given the ecosystem of periodicals I consumed as a game fan, it should come as no surprise that I sought the equivalent of a paper magazine for modern board games first. Finding none, I repeated my search online, which led me to an enigmatic forum called Board Game Geek.4

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The Board Game Geek forum was full of user reviews, with a cartoon of a bespectacled and blond white man in the upper corner running with what looked like checkers. Reviews were a mixed bag—­short or long, full of typos or meticulously proofread. Having been acclimated to the politics of the old guard from my days reading Dragon Magazine, I braced myself for casual microaggressions on the forums. At first, I found the forum to be welcoming, and even inclusive. Contributors had bio pages where they could list not only their favorite games but also their “flair”—­badges and GIFs used to communicate their personalities. Perhaps most important of all, contributors proudly boasted their country’s flag on their bio page. Browsing the website, I was awestruck at the global community that had gathered to discuss modern board games. My experience browsing other game review websites like GameFAQs, where there was not an equivalent culture of self-­disclosure, cast Board Game Geek’s user profiles in stark relief. Digging deeper into the interface, I learned that Board Game Geek’s entire content base was submitted by users. The site was just a skin for a massive database of user-­generated content that lurked beneath the surface. Along the left side of the site was a simple list of trending games titled the Hotness. Although the site contained user-­ generated content pertinent to each board game, it also tracked user behavior. Board Game Geek could use behavioral data to curate lists that helped users better discern what exciting games were to them. Board Game Geek is a website that aspires to be the worldwide locus of all board game data. It is driven by a sprawling database populated by over a million and a half users. The site contains so many features that have been smashed together that it is inscrutable to outsiders. The site’s modular but counterintuitive interface hasn’t evolved much since the site’s original development. Its modularity allows for configurability. Perhaps that is the point. The “geeky” core of Board Game Geek demands that users be committed enough to learn to navigate the interface as well as the content. Like on Reddit, on Board Game Geek enthusiasts maintain a profile where they can list, rank, and review the contents of their board game collection; contribute to game-­specific forums that contain reviews, errata, news, play logs, design notes, articles about strategy, and images; participate in user-­and company-­driven giveaways and contests; trade and sell games from their collection; buy games from other

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users through the site’s market or linked marketplaces like Amazon and eBay; manage a blog; advertise their projects and local conventions; and access a majority of the site’s user-­populated database to conduct quantitative research on board games. Since its development in 2000, Board Game Geek has achieved creator Scott Alden’s ambition of being the “worldwide definitive resource for board games.”5 The reviews on the site drive the board game industry. In digital games, reviews are curated through online magazines like IGN, GameSpot, and Polygon. By comparison, Board Game Geek places reviews established syndicates like the Dice Tower and Shut Up & Sit Down next to those by amateur contributors like Richard Ham (Rhado) and Lance (The Undead Viking). Beneath the surface of Board Game Geek lies a modernization of the same formula that has historically connected members of the old guard through networks of privilege. Board Game Geek updates the fanzine formula of the Mixumaxu Gazette and Alarums & Excursions by streamlining distribution costs and offering content to users for free. They offer to contributors “geek gold,” which can be used to buy cosmetics and “flair,” in an annual end-­of-­year fundraising drive. The money earned in this drive supports Board Game Geek staff and pays for the administrative tools to keep the site up and running. Because the old guard of hobbyists perceived themselves as nerdy outsiders, they were able to form communities of practice that embraced a white suburban libertarian and even isolationist ethic. These communities of practice were often beneficial to predominantly white hobbyists. Within these communities, members were able to parlay specialized knowledge to access opportunities that weren’t afforded to outsiders. The overall effect of the community was to fortify the structure of white supremacy—­helping white suburban youth gain the social and intellectual skills necessary to inhabit positions of power within broader society. A more accessible iteration of the above formula persists on Board Game Geek. Because the site can be easily located through all major search engines, people from all over the world participate in the community. Despite the ease of access provided by the site, rhetorical and symbolic holdovers from The General and the Alarums & Excursions discourage BIPOC people from participating in the community. Users with detailed biographical statements note their appreciation for Lee

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and Rommel’s tactics and compose reviews that heap praise on games like Gettysburg and Afrika Korps.6 Debates around colonization and slavery in board games are endemic, with many users dismissing critiques of these themes in board games. Even though Board Game Geek is far more accessible than the paper fanzines and magazines that have historically been the home of hobby gaming, the techniques of exclusion that have been cultivated in paper magazines continue to shape who is encouraged to participate to this day.

Precarious Success Board Game Geek, like the many fanzines and magazines that focused on hobby gaming before it, is neither all good nor all bad. Perhaps inadvertently, the old guard created a white supremacist enclosure that incentivizes participants to accept the status quo of white suburban values. However, I want to make space to appreciate the autonomy of the self-­sustaining communities that this isolationism has produced and recognize how the work of community members and organizers has helped hobby games to thrive. Not all hobbyists jive with the white suburban values of the network, and Board Game Geek’s global community has helped to accelerate this change. In pursuing the utopic values that defined the early internet, the modern board game community has found a similarly fertile ground for growth. The self-­sustaining (although not tremendously profitable) hobby model of economic growth has predominantly catered to an audience of geeky “outsiders.” Scholars of technology refer to the ideology that has governed economic growth in the late twentieth century as “cyber utopianism.” Cyber utopianism is the idea that through the collective and participatory work of many, we might come to build platforms that cater to the values of the many. Like the communal vistas that drove migrations to California in the sixties and seventies, cyber utopianism replicates this sense of adventure, community, and frontier online. Board Game Geek’s structural ambitions align with the utopian visions of the internet that proliferated before the dot-­com bust of 2001. The site’s original structure had been pulled from Scott Alden’s earlier 1996 endeavor 3DGameGeek, a similar site that hosted discussions about digital games with three-­dimensional graphics.7 Alden created a flat-

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tened space of utopian discourse where the community collectively engaged in the leisurely work of game punditry in order to better support and engage their leisurely play with board games. Such online forums are a holdover of what Fred Turner links to ideology of communalism from the 1960s. Communalism discourse entered the tech sector and shaped a new motif of labor where work could be joyful and individuals could form communities free of institutional and government scrutiny.8 The utopianism that Turner describes was very much alive in conversations about digital technology in the 1990s. Thinking through the potentials of immaterial labor, Pierre Lévy optimistically termed this utopian strain “collective intelligence.” The acceleration of communication provided by web technologies would yield things like “a deterritorialized civility that coincides with contemporary sources of power while incorporating the most intimate forms of subjectivity.” In other words, by working and thinking together—­for example in fan discourse on Board Game Geek—­folks might find a common ground of understanding that transcends state borders.9 With the benefit of time, it’s clear that social media did not achieve the transcendent ambitions of collective intelligence. Nonetheless, it’s important to situate the work of Board Game Geek within the larger motif of digital networking and collective intelligence. After all, all users present a badge that identifies their country of origin as they coordinate to flesh out Board Game Geek’s tremendous knowledge base.

The Communal Development of Indie RPGs Perhaps the best proof of the impact of cyber utopianism on the hobby is its embeddedness in other portions of the industry. One of the most influential sites for fan discourse about role-­playing games online is The Forge, which was intended for fans of story games, a subgenre of role-­playing games that focused less on the mechanics of combat and interaction. Instead, they provided players with an agile set of mechanics for staging impromptu improvisational “scenes” with characters. Story games like Vincent and Meguey Baker’s popular Apocalypse World offered players light game mechanics to interact with the world, affording players a streamlined experience similar to games like Dungeons & Dragons. In contrast, Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco steered away from

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using any mechanical interventions that might guide the action of a “scene.” In Fiasco, players simply chose how a scene ended for the characters involved and then acted things out accordingly. Poignantly, these conversations about how to structure player action in story games predominantly were had online. On websites like The Forge, fans gathered to talk about the games they loved and tinker with game designs they were developing. The Forge was moderated by Ron Edwards, a developer known for designing the game Sorcerer, and infamous within the hobby for the theory of play he called the Big Model. His theory was a zealous attempt at explaining what makes a role-­playing game engaging. Theories of fun, interaction, and play have been developed within the community.10 As summarized by Emily Care Boss, the Big Model incorporated social activity, exploration mechanics, and style (referred to as “creative preference”) into techniques organized in a system of rules.11 In his essay on fan theorizing within role-­playing communities, Evan Torner underscores the influence of the Big Model: “[It] arguably integrated the functional components of an RPG, from hit points to artwork to audience assumptions to the way it is discussed out of game as integral to its design.”12 White’s account corroborates this claim, while showing that other players were uneasy with Edwards’s prioritizing discussion about the Big Model on The Forge. John Tarnowski, a member of The Forge community, went as far as to write that if he dared challenge GNS (Games, Narrative, Simulation) Theory,13 “[Edwards would] probably just close the thread and tell me that before I can post I have to read 23 of his essays that explain how when I or others claim we’re having fun playing [Dungeons & Dragons], we’re in fact lying to ourselves and others.”14 Undoubtedly, the Big Model’s rise benefitted from Edward’s heavy hand as a gatekeeper at The Forge. Edwards’s authoritarian style as forum moderator highlights an early example of how the digital spaces like The Forge cultivated ideas that would inspire the development of hobby games. As I noted earlier, Vincent Baker cites the Big Model and The Forge as important inspirations for the design of Apocalypse World (2008) and its predecessor Dogs in the Vineyard (2004). In a post for Story Games—­another highly influential hobby game design community—­Baker explains, “The Big Model was nifty when it was current. It was fun and useful to me, and I owe it my games from Dogs in

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the Vineyard to Apocalypse World, but role-­playing game design has left it behind.”15 The creative work highlighted in this example shows the immaterial labor that goes into role-­playing game design. Torner refers to the tradition of community-­centered iteration and design as “RPG theorizing.” Using this term, he highlights how participants in these communal endeavors often go unacknowledged and undercompensated.16 Critic of immaterial labor Tiziana Terranova would refer to such fan theorizing as another example of work that was once done in factories being outsourced to society: “The free labor on the Net includes the activity of building Web sites, modifying software packages, reading and participating in mailing lists, and building virtual spaces on MUDs and MOOs.”17 The Forge ticks almost all of these boxes as a community-­built web forum that followed a model set by fanzines in the sixties, seventies, and eighties, where game design theory was debated. The Forge only accelerated the pace of the RPG theorizing that was once done in snail-­mail publications like Alarums & Excursions. Placing the assemblage of creative work at The Forge into dialogue with theory about post-­Fordist work reveals how hobby game design fits into the digital economy. Grassroots fan labor and the ideas that circulated in this community took on lives of their own after the site closed in 2010, particularly on forums like Board Game Geek.

The Assemblage of Work Although the context of the creative labor harnessed by the community may have changed, users of Board Game Geek were also engaged in a similar “assemblage of work.” As I mentioned earlier, each feature on the site is the result of millions of hours of user-­driven labor. For this reason, it’s important to recognize that the very fabric of Board Game Geek is built on labor that aims to further the success of its community. In the context of hobbyist history, this community has flourished within a white space. In describing the community space of Board Game Geek as an “assemblage of work,” I am building on the scholarship that T. L. Taylor has done to define the “assemblage of play”: Games, and their play, are constituted by the interrelations between (to name just a few) technological systems and software (including the imag-

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ined player embedded in them), the material world (including our bodies at the keyboard), the online space of the game (if any), game genre, and its histories, the social worlds that infuse the game and situate us outside of it, the emergent practices of communities, our interior lives, personal histories, and aesthetic experience, institutional structures that shape the game and our activity as players, legal structures, and indeed the broader culture around us with its conceptual frames and tropes.18

Each aspect of Taylor’s assemblage reveals the deep interconnection of technical and social structures surrounding gameplay. We can read a similar set of relationships into the work required to produce and maintain the hobby. It is the product of discussions between designers and players with social and technical skillsets necessary to work modern social media networks. The hobbyist community was also produced by technological savviness with the Adobe design suite (or similar software) and calculations on digital spreadsheets. Building the games that sustain the community required an enthusiasm for crafting paper prototypes, then playtesting them alone and with others. The success of the resulting games depended on obtaining advice and support from other players through community discussions. The assemblage of work for hobbyists is just as broad as their assemblage of play and reveals the often uncompensated and always uncredited creative labor. For better or worse, new crowdfunding models reflect the labor practices of the industry and have ushered in a paradigm shift between overlapping generations of hobbyists. Where the old guard had developed a handshake network of publishing opportunities, the shift toward crowdfunding sites like Kickstarter and Patreon has allowed a new generation of geeks a path to publishing in the hobby. Crowdfunding takes advantage of the creative work that sites like Board Game Geek have produced in abundance, yet requires a new kind of savvy. It asks the new generation of geeks to reevaluate their relationship to the hobby as they present themselves as the face of their own games on social media. So while the hobby was historically driven by fan cultures engaging in an assemblage of work, crowdfunding harnesses this work and asks how to best market it. Thus branding lies at the heart of the generation shift and distinguishes newer forms of community like Board Game Geek from the older community publishing rings like Alarums & Excursions and The General.

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Branding the Hobby Brands in the twenty-­first century have been positioned by neoliberalism as key drivers of identity and the self. Fan identity, by extension, has just as much to do with ethical bearing as with consumption decisions. All these branded moments of the self are broadcast through social media and exchanged for social capital through likes, shares, and retweets. Sharing the products of queer game designers says as much about a player’s identity as sharing media from the Dice Tower. Some players share media intentionally to align themselves with social justice campaigns, while others avoid politics in their discussions in order to brand themselves as neutral and apolitical. These moments of online discourse are wrapped in authenticity—­critical for defining the self. Any discussion of digital media is bound to elicit questions of authenticity. Twitter and Facebook award “verified” status to public figures who use their platform. Emerging media allow for “deepfakes,” promising to keep digital deceit alive for years to come. Questions of authenticity have also been explored by academic scholars working in this space. Lisa Nakamura introduced cultural tourism in massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs) with the old saying derived from a New Yorker cartoon, “On the Internet, nobody knows you’re a dog.”19 It was a way to introduce a frank discussion about the politics of racial appropriation. Specifically, she questioned the ethics of using avatar bodies to fetishize and enjoy living within a different body online. Sarah Banet-­Weiser situates authenticity as driven by network culture and technological innovations that have become a vehicle for neoliberalism. She explains that, alongside goods and services, aspects of one’s ethical identity praxis—­Black, feminist, queer, or conservative—­ are designed as brands to be presented on social media. Banet-­Weiser suggests that one’s own social media brand helps one acquiesce to the logics of neoliberalism, allowing it to structure one’s identities and practices.20 She explains that being “authentic” in the twenty-­first century involves acting in a way consistent with one’s brand image: “To be authentic to yourself, one must first be authentic to others; it is about external gratification.”21 In this regard, Banet-­Weiser might update the old adage to read, “On the internet, if everyone thinks you’re a dog, then you’re a dog.”

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Just as digital games and other computational media present a troubling narrative about the toxic masculine “gamer,”22 tabletop players brand themselves in a nostalgic and even sophisticated fashion. These connotations are the result of a top-­down corporate effort to expand markets. Old Spice has developed a character class for Dungeons & Dragons, “the gentleman,” epitomizing this shift in marketing. Their decision to market their product to Dungeons & Dragons players was an effort to refurbish and repackage an aging consumer market’s nostalgia for role-­playing games as well as stereotypes of the feminized “smelly” geek gamer.23 Critical media scholar Megan Condis recalls how Wendy’s made similar moves with their role-­playing game Feast of Legends, which encouraged players to gallivant around the realm of “Beef ’s Keep” to serve “Queen Wendy.” The game invokes puns such as character classes like the “Order of the Baked Potato” and a mysterious evil titled “Deep Freeze.” Queen Wendy frequently reminds players that “We Don’t Cut Corners,”24 referring to their square beef patties. These “gamified” advertisements are part of industry’s push to recapture aging markets. A turn toward mature and cosmopolitan content exists in other spaces of the community. Board Game Geek users highlight their international userbase (all avatars include a flag denoting country of origin) and distribute academic papers at Knudepunkt, one of the live-­action role-­playing community’s most prominent European conventions.25 Hobbyists view themselves as more adult than gamers. They are craft beer instead of Mountain Dew, dinner conversation as opposed to chatrooms and livestreaming. Doubling down on trending products, such as role-­playing games, also captures the attention of younger audiences. Yet these advertising efforts are distinct from the toys in a child’s McDonald’s Happy Meal because they are aimed specifically at older consumers who are already aware of the hobby. The construction of brand identity, as Banet-­Weiser argues, is a fundamental part of the neoliberal economy. As such, it’s important to recognize how hobby games are themselves the products of invisible creative work. Fan studies’ concern with active audiences is foundational to an economic understanding of hobby games. For fan studies scholars, the structural interdependence between grassroots fan production and top-­ down corporate control differentiates a “fan” from a “consumer.” As Henry Jenkins argues, this interdependence has only accelerated since

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the popularization of digital tools online.26 Websites like Board Game Geek, The Forge, Reddit, and Nordiclarpwiki allow fans and media producers to communicate with ease—­a close-­knit digital circuit of communication that has accelerated the growth of the hobby. Considering hobbyists through a lens of fan studies, as Paul Booth recommends in Board Games as Media, elicits several crucial questions.27 In an industry that is primarily driven by cottage publishing endeavors, how should the roles of media consumer and media producer be defined? As I have argued previously, the print history of Dungeons & Dragons reveals that its original publishing company, TSR Hobbies, considered the game to be only a “semi-­commercial” endeavor.28 The history of hobby game development is rife with unexpected success stories of fan labor that escalated to profitable enterprise. Almost every successful hobby game publishing house has risen from humble origins of fan community, labor, and practice. It is easier to single out the top-­down exceptions—­like Hasbro’s rapid acquisition of grassroots board game design ventures—­from the bottom-­up norms of hobby game design. Hobbyists clearly challenge the traditional fan studies lenses of top-­ down and bottom-­up analysis through the middle ground of their practices, thus it makes good sense to attribute the success of the hobby to the networking power of hub websites like Board Game Geek and The Forge. For hobbyists to effectively assemble, platforms that facilitate communication are necessary. These websites are part of the long historical arc of hobbyist publishing that I have identified; as such, they are a necessary part of the hobby’s transition from paper publishing circuits to online community. Within these platforms, distinctions are blurry. The hobbyists who form the backbone of the hobby game publishing industry and those who consume and play hobby games are frequently one and the same. It would be a mistake to generalize their interests as equivalent to those of major game publishers such as Hasbro. Today, the semicommercial goals of hobby publishing are served by platforms that take advantage of the community’s well-­established network. Crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter and Patreon capitalize on the infrastructure established by sites like Board Game Geek and The Forge by allowing hobbyists to sell to an already well-­established market. The shift toward crowdfunding in hobby games has forced hobbyists to reimagine their own relationship to the hobby. Kickstarter and other

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crowdfunding platforms encourage players to reimagine themselves and their productivity as social media “brands.” Branding differs from the self-­sustaining practices of the old guard, whose autonomous and self-­ sustaining model of community development put few economic pressures on community members. So why opt in to precarity? The short answer is that the industry has grown so quickly that it has opened space for more people to make a living by using their passions than ever before. For many hobbyists, the benefits of working in an exciting growth industry far outweigh the economic risks that they might incur. Players today who “brand” themselves on social media do so because it is essential for “making it” in the gig economy. If a gaming entrepreneur wishes to succeed on Kickstarter, cultivating a strong and consistent social media presence is essential. Branding is an explicit part of the work that today’s successful hobbyists see themselves doing. They are under no illusions that maintaining one’s own brand presence is a form of emotional labor—­hence the frequency of discussions addressing that topic between members of the community. Hobbyists today are victims of their own success—­the shift toward precarious labor practices in the industry has produced an economic context rife with its own pitfalls.

The Hobby Meets the Gig Economy The for-­profit model of the hobby game industry transformed between 2010 and 2020. It used to be sufficient to print games, fanzines, and other community essentials only to make ends meet. Then, the more profitable but precarious gig employment moved the goalpost. One important moment was when the immensely popular livestreaming group Critical Role kickstarted a cartoon based on their Dungeons & Dragons livestream. Their project “The Legend of Vox Machina” was the most profitable “Movie or TV” category Kickstarter ever. It raised over $11.4 million and inspired similar groups to seek precarious employment by livestreaming their own role-­playing games.29 Hobbyists have moved into a digital economy that is rapidly shifting from a more traditional small business model to crowdsourcing tactics through sites like Kickstarter, Patreon, and GoFundMe. Zooming out for a moment will help us compare the hobby game industry with the much larger video game industry. For the most part,

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computer games remain driven by a corporate funding model in which studios are funded by investors.30 Digital game studios scrutinize quarterly earnings and set timelines and benchmarks for the designers and programmers working at the game company. Hobby game companies, on the other hand, are far smaller. Wizards of the Coast is a successful subsidiary of Hasbro by hobby game standards. Even though they employ only six hundred people and follow a for-­profit model similar to most AAA studios, Wizards of the Coast is about as big as companies in the industry of hobby games get. It is just an eighth the size of Blizzard Entertainment (with over 4,700 employees), the digital publisher that designed Diablo (1996), Starcraft (1998), World of Warcraft (2004), and Overwatch (2016). The old model of publishing in the hobby game industry is smallbusiness boutique operations. For example, Days of Wonder, which published the best-­selling Ticket to Ride (my entry point to hobby gaming), employs only about twenty-­five employees.31 In the cottage publishing industry of hobby games, small businesses like Days of Wonder are the rule. Typically, these companies employ a handful of people who wear many hats. They rely on a skeleton crew of skilled developers who can tap into their target audience’s consumer needs. These small companies develop games for their audiences, determine a print run total that will be profitable, manage risk, and ship their games to a specialized network of hobby game distributors. This model is risky insofar as a mismanaged print run can spoil their reputation with distributors worldwide, who rely on the brand’s reputation to help sell new products. Crowdfunding platforms have changed the old model of hobby game publishing. They help hobby game publishers manage the riskiness of print runs by determining the size and characteristics of their audience before production. As researchers Andrew Schrock and Samantha Close point out, “Kickstarter projects complicate a simple dichotomy of commercial goods vs. creative endeavors, which were previously compartmentalized and personalized by such terms as ‘fans’ and ‘producers.’”32 The crowdfunding paradigm mitigates much of the risk of the small business platform, while relying on the public relations and publicity of crowdfunding events to hit milestones. The work of public relations required to successfully crowdfund hobby games is intimate, constant, and contingent upon advocacy skills. The centrality of an authentic per-

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sona to successful crowdfunding initiatives reflects Sarah Banet-­Weiser’s arguments regarding the performance of authenticity online. Where a brand’s reputation used to be built on a history of quality products, the focus in the digital economy has shifted to the self instead. Jamey Stegmaier, cofounder of Stonemaier games, wrote A Crowdfunder’s Strategy Guide: Build a Better Business by Building Community. In it, he echoes Banet-­Weiser’s sentiment when describing his carefully crafted social media presence: “Becoming a crowdfunder on social media is now part of your brand. When expressing your opinions, praise publicly and criticize privately.”33 Phrased in another way, when crowdfunding, companies must treat themselves the way a public relations specialist would treat a corporate brand. Disciplining oneself—­and by extension one’s brand—­leads to success in the paradigm of creative and precarious labor within which hobby games are now embedded. The new digital economy provides a creative opportunity for voices who didn’t have purchase in the close-­knit cottage game publishing industry. These new participants disturb the status quo of a cottage publishing industry that may have become too attached to the demographic of white male players aged eighteen to thirty-­five. However, they also usher in a generation of designers into a paradigm of precarious labor practices. Cynthia Wang, in her study of musicians who use Kickstarter, points out that the goal of many crowdfunders is not to build a new business but simply to meet an audience’s needs.34 For others like Jamey Stegmaier, building a business and a brand is the goal. As we consider the ways hobby games benefit from a digital apparatus of work, it is important to be mindful of the additional affective and creative labor necessary to run crowdfunding campaigns in an industry that is in the middle of a sea change in structure and representation. Members of the new guard in gaming have sacrificed their time, attention, and energy because they want to participate in the brand, however fraught, of the hobby. Every hobby game professional I interviewed reported working ten to twelve hours a day on average. Most reported being anxious about producing work to meet the needs of both fans and funders. As the neoliberal economy encourages us to ask hard questions about the ever-­changing dynamics of digital labor and fan production, it becomes clear how powerful the affective draw of hobby games is for the communities that enjoy them. For most, the pleasure of participating in

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the creative labor of the hobby games scene far outweighs the precarity of the jobs in a small industry that rarely pays even the most successful participants more than forty thousand dollars a year.35 Today, inclusivity is the picket line on which progressive hobbyists stand, but I am convinced that in the future battles will be fought over fair wages and working conditions. The conditions are right for the problems that have long plagued the video games industry to impact the quickly expanding hobby game industry. As the hobby expands to allow large corporate interests a greater stake in a community that used to be sustained mostly by the collective intelligence and labor of the old guard, the community’s ability to sustain itself is lost.

A More Inclusive Hobby I have suggested throughout this chapter that the old guard’s conservative politics yielded an autonomous space of participation that was long detached from the volatile whims of the economy. This space has been a boon for hobbyists because it has produced a space for the community to thrive and redouble its efforts to support itself. Websites like Board Game Geek and The Forge are a continuation of the established paper networks that defined the hobby in an earlier era. I have tried to weigh my optimism for how these efforts yielded a genuinely unique, creative, and supportive space with the ways that the community’s conservative politics insulated hobbyists from more diverse and representative participation from the greater gaming community. So while the old guard might be commended for incubating the hobby of tabletop gaming, its xenophobic posture also caused it to double down on its more eccentric proclivities. The insularity that had once been maintained largely through a network of mostly white men who knew each other changed with crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter. Crowdfunding piggybacked on the infrastructure of digital networking hubs like Board Game Geek to allow people from outside the hobbyist network the opportunity to independently publish and distribute games. Its success led to the present explosion of interest and industry growth around hobby gaming. Yet all spotlights cast shadows, and the drawback has been the normalization of precarious employment in the hobby game industry.

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To better understand the economic politics of inclusion, it is essential to return to the role of white privilege in the hobby. This book has shown that the history of hobbyists is related to the history of white privilege in the United States. As such, while the new industry’s advancement toward precarious labor might be disappointing in the context of communal well-­being, it is important to understand that the labor of the old guard has always been precarious and barely compensated. White people have historically enjoyed the security of employment, which allowed the hobby to thrive as a hobby in its earliest days. Because the industry has expanded exponentially, those who work in hobby games today see it as their main job. They often come seeking employment—­ not approaching it as an outlet for their eccentric interests and desires. The precarious state of the hobby might seem easy to celebrate from a standpoint of inclusivity. After all, it fits a meritocratic narrative in which BIPOC people find gainful employment in a historically exclusionary space. But I remain skeptical about the progress being made. From the standpoint of materialist feminism, I am elated to see such progress and glad to see radically new forms of representation in games. From a labor studies standpoint, I’m unsure that participation in precarious economies should be celebrated. Research on autonomous spaces, like that in Stephen Duncombe’s anthology of eighties and nineties punk zines Notes from the Underground, tells a different story. In zines, autonomy from capital led to networks of care, radical forms of expression, and even a healthy sense of experimentation with identity.36 What if the autonomy that long sheltered hobbyists from the pressures of neoliberal capital could be used to shelter “outsider” geeks from the bullying, harassment, and toxic masculinity that they encounter at school, the office, and home? We might imagine a hobby game scene that doubles down on kinship and community, as opposed to development and design in the service of neoliberalism. The carrot at the end of the hobby games stick today is gainful employment, a marked shift from the promise of belonging that was so essential for the old guard. The ingredients for such a scene all still exist in today’s hobby game community, yet a radical break is yet to manifest due to the meritocratic and economic promise of “making it” in the scene.

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Generation Shift This chapter looked to Board Game Geek to tell a story about how hobbyists adopted digital technologies to modernize their community infrastructure and networks. This process of modernization has been widespread and involved online forums like The Forge that represented an updated digital infrastructure. These digital forums have mostly been a quality-­of-­life upgrade for hobbyists, allowing them to communicate more efficiently. They can now sidestep the cumbersome requirements of fanzine construction: paper post, hand assembly, printing costs, and subscription fees. Overall, this shift toward digital technological platforms has been a constructive one for hobbyists and has been responsible for the increased contemporary interest in the hobby. However, the shift toward digital platforms hasn’t been all positive; it brought with it a neoliberal reorientation. A community that had once valued its autonomy and distance from industry has come to embrace its own success. People who would have been content long ago to simply contribute anonymous user reviews of their favorite games to sites like Board Game Geek now see a potential path to gainful employment doing what they love. The gainfulness of this employment may be a mirage, as it is predicated on a precarious crowdfunded base. Hobbyists who made their livelihood riding this new wave of interest in hobby games now contend with the same pressures that every livestreamer, Uber driver, and freelancer contend with. Pressures to perform, manage one’s audience, and comport one’s affect are all part of the greater process of branding the self. Game design professionals must engage with dynamics of branding as self-­starters in creative industries today. These pressures have not just been difficult for individual members of the community to manage; they have themselves reshaped the hobby game community into something new. Hobby gaming is more entrepreneurial and refined than it has ever been. Yet for all that has been lost as the old guard’s cottage infrastructure made way for the tiny houses of crowdfunding, the embrace of digital platforms has opened the door for more diverse voices in a hobby that had previously been absent from its predominantly white male infrastructure. Where the old guard maintained the status quo through quiet handshake agreements between trusted friends on a predominantly

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white convention circuit, the massive crowd engagement made possible by digital platforms has allowed for the crowd to choose who and what is represented, funded, and appreciated in the hobby. Because of these economic changes, the old guard has been forced to accommodate a shifting demographic that has challenged traditions, beliefs, and norms. In the next chapter I analyze the clash between the old guard of hobbyists and a new and rapidly diversifying generation of geeks in greater detail.

6

Hobby Games Today

To protest the 2020 murder of George Floyd, hundreds of thousands of people across North America took to the streets. The revitalized Black Lives Matter (BLM) movement demanded that police departments across the country be defunded, pushing America’s lingering racist ideology back to the center of political discourse. For the hobby, these protests struck like clap of thunder. Events like the decades-­old grassroots Origins Game Fair were canceled for lack of an antiracist agenda. The organizers naïvely stuck to the old hobbyist adage that politics don’t belong in games, echoing the logic hobbyists used in the 1960s and 1970s to remain cloistered in their white suburban bubbles. In this way, BLM opened generational schisms between an old guard of white male hobbyists and a new and more diverse class of technologically savvy geeks. The old guard of hobbyists, who came of age in the eighties and nineties, had cultivated a homogeneously white consumer base for the hobby game industry. By contrast, the new class of geeks tapped into new and more diverse hobby game markets by using crowdfunding platforms. This chapter shows how today’s geek identity grew from the homogeneously white hobby culture of decades past. I argue that younger cadres of geeks have formed an uneasy alliance with neoliberalism in order to set diversity as the agenda for the future of hobby games. However, an old guard still clings to white male standards of taste that have been cultivated for decades through the design of hobby games. A conversation between Tom Vasel and Eric Lang demonstrates the tensions that emerge when the old guard of white hobbyists encounters a diverse new guard of hobby game geeks. Tom is one of the most powerful men in the hobby. His YouTube channel the Dice Tower has over a quarter million subscribers. Even before online platforms, Tom had been interviewing designers and writing reviews online for decades. He found success not only because of his diligent work ethic but also because he followed board game trends closely enough to understand 155

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what hobbyists liked to play. The Dice Tower Network is the most popular place on the internet to find board game reviews. Games that Tom likes are awarded either the Dice Tower’s seal of excellence or its seal of approval, while games that he dislikes have literally been set on fire in his garbage can. In other words, Tom is the definition of a tastemaker and gatekeeper. In his public statements about his hobbyist positionality, he has consistently stated that his review website is apolitical. “The Dice Tower doesn’t ever dabble in political statements, and that our goal is simply to bring board game entertainment to those who watch the show,” he writes, describing games as “a respite from the chaos around us.”1 Tom’s example shows us how game hobbyists still perceive civil protest as dangerous, even while adapting to the changes in the culture and industry around them. This quote is part of the Dice Tower’s larger statement in support of BLM. Importantly, Tom frames the diversity and inclusion as a decision that has nothing to do with “politics.” The statement continues, “Recently, however, dear friends have brought to my attention that this is not merely a political situation and not saying anything is having the opposite effect. By not speaking out, we are perceived as either not caring, or worse—­agreeing that the status quo is fine. . . . Let me be plain and clear: We believe in diversity and inclusion for everyone.”2 Tom’s decision here to position diversity and inclusion as apolitical shows him finding a compromise to understanding his own identity as both hobbyist and geek. As a hobbyist, Tom recognizes that the hobby community desires to be an apolitical space, yet as a geek who relies on the diverse audiences hailed through Kickstarter to pay his bills, he also recognizes that the future of hobby gaming must incorporate diversity and inclusion. Eric Lang, Tom’s interviewee, is one of the most influential Black men in the hobby game industry. He is the game director of CMON Games, a hugely successful board game company that relies almost exclusively on crowdfunding to publish, market, and distribute its games. Eric’s most famous designs are Blood Rage (2015), Arcadia Quest (2014), and Star Wars: The Card Game (2012)—­each an offshoot of “wargames” that reached a broad audience by combining accessible gameplay with engaging themes. Eric is also a Black activist, outspoken on social media about the impacts of racism on the hobby. He was one of the designers

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Figure 6.1. Tom (left) and Eric (right) discuss racism on the Dice Tower. Screenshot taken by the author for purposes of critique from a video posted by the Dice Tower on YouTube.

who canceled their appearances at Origins Game Fair because the organization remained silent about BLM. He terms his approach “white activism” because in his advocacy work he primarily raises awareness around racism among white hobbyists, like Tom, whom he works with. The conversation, titled “Gaming in a Social and Political World,” was catalyzed by Eric petitioning Tom to explain the importance of BLM on the Dice Tower. The interview begins awkwardly. Tom sweats nervously while asking Eric to explain why he should do more for BLM. He says, “My reaction is that which many people watching might have. I’ve always stayed out of everything. Why should I be involved with this when I’m not involved with the upcoming presidential election?” Positioning himself as a hobbyist addressing hobbyist viewers, Tom expresses a belief that politics simply don’t belong in the hobby. Eric agrees to some extent and acknowledges that gaming is importantly a “respite.” Then he calmly explains how the BLM protests require us to ask what it is like to be a person of color in society, which includes the gaming table. Eric explains how alienating the hobby game scene can feel to gamers from diverse backgrounds: “We’ve been to game conventions . . . generally speaking, they’re predominantly white.”3 Eric expresses a belief that the hobby game industry has not done enough to include Black people. In response, Tom is vexed by the lack of diversity in the hobby gaming community. While he was true to the Dice Tower’s stated mission to promote diversity and inclusivity in gaming, it is clear from his body language that it was hard for him to accept Eric’s discussion of how the hobby game scene and white privilege have conspired to exclude people of color from the gaming table.

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Tom’s restlessness stems from his hybrid identity as both hobbyist and geek. He exemplifies the geek’s desire to make space for broader and more diverse participation in the hobby as well as the hobbyist’s anxiety about engaging in politics. Tom occupies this position because his celebrity is predicated upon his relatability as a hobbyist. Yet celebrity is a relatively new phenomenon in the world of hobby gaming, which is predicated upon a horizontal, modest, and collegial ethic where the distinctions between designer and player, producer and consumer, military strategist and armchair diplomat have always been unclear. Because the Dice Tower is crowdfunded, Tom’s salary depends on being relatable to both an aging crowd of hobbyists and a diverse wave of geeks hungry to explore the hobby. In short, Tom shows us how the apolitical white male hobbyist is trying to adapt to the times and embrace a more diverse generation of hobby game geeks. Through the stories of people like Tom, we can see how geek identity has been informed by a white hobbyist mindset that, as I explain in chapter 3, internalizes and reproduces the segregationist politics of white flight. Within the geek identity there exists an invisible, uncomfortable, and mostly unacknowledged dynamic of white privilege that sets politics aside to focus on play and games. Geeks rarely confront the hobbyist history of racism because they see themselves as outsiders in their communities. But perhaps this outsider myth has been more of a boon than a curse because the network that resulted from the relative isolation of geek outsiders has been notoriously influential. For example, Bill Gates has famously identified both as a geek and as a hobbyist.4 As hobbyists like Gates shared skills through mail networks, they also developed a sophisticated culture that many leveraged into careers driven by their passions.5 The conversation around inclusivity in geek gaming today explicitly acknowledges social difference in a way that it once did not. While the hobbyists who developed the creative infrastructure of the hobby games scene were typically older white men, the new generation of creative talent is far more diverse. Game geeks today were educated within institutions that understand structural inequality and raised on a desegregated media infrastructure typified by shows like The Cosby Show that highlighted how the everyday lived experiences of Black people were no different from those of white people inhabiting a similar social class. Hobby games set the stage for an emerging industry that the new gen-

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eration could build on for meaningful structural impact. However, the old generation remained attached to many of the traditions and conventions that came before. This book has focused on the ways that race, class, gender, and sexuality are discussed by hobbyists as they are the foundations upon which the identity is built. As I described in the introduction to this book, intersectionality helps us frame how power operates in the hobby. Intersectionality theory recognizes the ways that identity structures uneven sets of power relationships between people. It recognizes that different people are oppressed in different ways and how one group’s righteous cause may feel counterproductive to another’s.6 For this reason, understanding and identifying histories of privilege and relative social advantage are important to any intersectional analysis. Tom’s evident discomfort with discussing white privilege is an example of him negotiating two audiences: a rapidly diversifying audience of new game geeks and an older white male contingent of hobbyists. Thus, examining the positionality of this new generation of geeks enables a more sustained discussion about relative privilege when comparing them to the older and more influential set of hobbyists who make up the rest of the scene. This chapter starts by analyzing the cultural shift from hobbyists to geeks to show how a hobby identity informed a geekiness that foregrounded whiteness, as opposed to masculinity. After establishing these generational stakes, I then explain how this up-­and-­coming generation of geeks was able to define a new space for itself in the rapidly commercializing hobby game scene. Yet these new opportunities for more diverse participation came with a price; the rapid expansion of hobby games led to a precarious set of labor practices for geeks involved in the scene, while legacy hobbyists could conduct business as usual. Finally, the chapter concludes by returning to older generation of hobbyists to ask if the hobby game scene can grow beyond its xenophobic white roots.

Hobbyists and Geeks as Overlapping Generations The central friction that emerged in the evolution of the hobby pitted an older generation of apolitical game hobbyists against a newer generation of geeks interested in shifting the unjust power dynamics of the past. This

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new guard, who came from outside hobbyist networks, desired greater representation in the video game industry and the games themselves. The fact that people like Tom Vasel identify as both hobbyists and geeks speaks to a greater cultural shift taking place. An interest in hobbies has always been an important part of geek identity, but there are good reasons that hobbyists have not always identified as geeks. Historically, “geek” was a pejorative used to describe hobbyists, so being called one was uncomfortable. For example, the late nineties television show Freaks and Geeks portrayed the likeable cast as nerdy outcasts and outsiders. In the past decade countless op-­eds have been published describing the ascendant popularity of geek culture and its connections to celebrity in Silicon Valley.7 But to read geek culture only through the lens of technology does it a disservice. Sure, the rapid growth of geek media in the consumer sector is correlated with a number of affluent technologists who identified as geeks while growing up, but the geeks producing geek media have their own histories. In the stories they tell about themselves, more often than not, they think of themselves as hobbyists. Today’s geeks can find their predecessors in the hobby. This simple fact helps to reconcile the well-­documented contradictions documented in scholarship about geek culture. For instance, as T. L. Taylor has explained, geeks often perform “geek masculinity.”8 For Taylor, players reinforce and embrace an outsider status by mastering nerdy, arcane topics. Consider the endless parade of rules necessary for learning almost any board game. The investment of time learning rules, in this sense, is a form of masculinity; geeks come to associate their masculine identity with time spent playing and investing in a game’s rules. The geek can also be contrasted with the stereotypical, mainstream “jock” whose hypermasculine identity performance is often depicted within the context of a locker room or shower where grooming habits and dating tips are shared in the same breath. Among both geeks and hobbyists, the stereotype of a feminized and unkempt nerd playing games in the basement is reinforced by the geek’s deliberate attentiveness toward developing a niche and specialized community, language, and culture around the game itself—­one that is both daunting and alien to the mainstream. These distinctions, as Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett remind us in Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media, are stereotypes that emerge as a result of engaged and active boundary policing among those who self-­identify as geeks.9

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Much scholarship has considered how geek identity excludes rather than includes. Salter and Blodgett, Christina Dunbar-­Hester, and Suzanne Scott have shown how the masculinity of geek culture has kept women and other minoritized people out of geek community spaces.10 The outsider mythology that many geeks hold as central to their identity, in contrast, has been less explored so far—­perhaps because most geeks today are insiders rather than outsiders. In this sense, hobbyists are interesting because, as this book has explained, their network has united a mix of powerful insiders like Jerry Pournelle (whom I described in detail in chapter 2) and others who remain almost completely unknown. The social positioning that hobbyists maintained through their networks of privilege is the exact same power that geeks today enjoy. The difference is that the new guard of geeks is composed of individuals who have had to struggle against discrimination and adversity to achieve their successes. For this reason, they feel compelled to make a more equitable space for those who might follow. Understanding the dynamics of digital work in hobby games helps us comprehend how geeks have gained social capital within the gaming community. Where hobbyists developed a paper network of skill sharing, geeks seized upon the opportunities presented by digital technology to redefine how games were produced in this space. For this reason, there is more diverse community participation within digital skill sharing—­like art, layout, promotion, and advertising—­than there was within the core game design realm of the hobby, which remains predominantly white. Consider Scott Alden, another figure in the hobby game industry who straddles the generational divide between geek and hobbyist. In fact, Scott is so geek that he jammed the word into the title of his website. Board Game Geek, as the prior chapter detailed, has become the nexus for modern board games in hobby game culture today. But Scott is also a hobbyist who deliberately designed the site to appeal to an audience of hobby gamers. The site is funded through an annual pledge drive, in which users donate funding to pay for the site’s operational fees. This drive, in addition to the money the site raises through advertising fees, supports the site’s small staff of programmers and streaming media personalities. As the previous chapter noted in detail, Board Game Geek reflects geek culture in its branding and financial model and assumes a horizontalness between all users that is very much derived from hob-

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byist culture, where distinctions between producer and consumer are somewhat superficial. Much like a wiki, if a user wants a game that they invented to appear on Board Game Geek, they follow a set of submission guidelines and upload an entry for the game. Game publishing companies operate similarly. If a game publishing company wants one of their products to appear on the site, they must design and populate an entry for it. Users can use the site’s currency “geekgold” to buy badges and banners to distinguish themselves as game designers or publishers. The screening process is minimal and recursive; if a user wants a banner that identifies them as a game designer, they must simply point to the page in Board Game Geek that they designed. The site’s flattening of designer, player, publisher, and company into a single user layer shows a deep appreciation for the ideals of the hobbyist ethic. In 2019 the site updated its logo (figure 6.2), which peeved many within the community who had a strong affinity for the old logo—­a bespectacled white blond man running with a checkerboard. In a note that revealed both Scott’s desire to appeal to an up-­and-­coming demographic of geek gamers as well as his sympathies to the politics of the hobby community, he explained, “BGG welcomes all gamers, whatever your level of experience or particular tastes, and updating the logo reflects our belief that gaming is for everyone, not just geeky guys with glasses. Whatever our differences individually, gaming brings us together. Our new symbol is a nod to BGG’s past, while also inviting you to see yourself in that silhouette—­or to find your passion for play represented in that ‘game flame.’”11 Scott tried to welcome a rapidly diversifying group of geeks to the metaphorical table, while also noting the homogeneously male makeup of the old guard of hobbyists. What went unsaid—­perhaps because it was too uncomfortable to discuss—­was that the old crew of men was as white as their old logo. Yet discussing “differences” means discussing politics. Although the new geek logo certainly hails from a more diverse audience than the old one, it is interesting that Scott returned to the old hobbyist adage that politics has no place at the gaming table—­as if the decision to update the logo had nothing to do with the politics of inclusivity. Scott’s bona fides as founder and designer of Board Game Geek illustrate just one of the many areas of industry growth encouraged by the hobby game boom. To understand the landscape of the industry today,

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Figure 6.2. Old Board Game Geek logo (left) compared to the new Board Game Geek logo (right). Screenshots taken by the author for purposes of critique from https:// boardgamegeek.com.

let’s break down the production cycle of a hobby game. A tabletop board game begins development as a germ of an idea seeded through various channels: playing other hobby and digital games, online reviews of other board games, and community design discussions hosted in web forums. During the prototyping stage, the game’s components are listed and balanced on a set of digital spreadsheets that afford designers a bird’s-­eye view of the design. After this paper prototyping stage, the game’s prototype is remastered through digital tools and sent to a print shop, which uses these digital proofs to print the game. The rules undergo similar stages of revisions in word processors before moving text into layout software. Finally, after many stages of playtesting and graphic design, the game goes to press. Production may occur through an established company. More likely, however, the game is crowdfunded and advertised through a complex network of board game reviewers, promoters, and advertisers. Game press is almost exclusively digital, meaning the board game’s success is contingent on social media exposure on platforms like Twitter, Facebook, and Instagram. Hobby games are the commodity that is produced by these many steps of digital labor. To design a game that appeals to hobbyists, it is easiest to be trained by another hobbyist. In this sense, design is the last frontier of gatekeeping in the hobby. Parallel to hobby games, Christina Dunbar-­Hester has written about the wave of diversity advocacy that is now taking place in open technology cultures, seeded by the activism of the #MeToo movement.12 Although there have been many small interventions, hobby games have yet to experience a comparable reckoning. This isn’t for lack of interest, as the conversation above between Tom and Eric shows. In an essay for the science fiction fan site Tor, Ajit George wrote about his

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experience attending Gen Con, North America’s largest hobby game convention: “For all that Gen Con offers, it lacks in minority gamers. Last year was my first Gen Con, and as I explored the convention, I saw almost no one who looked like me. By far, the most visible minorities at Gen Con were the hired convention hall facilities staff who were setting up, serving, and cleaning up garbage for the predominantly white convention-­goers. It was a surreal experience and it felt like I had stepped into an ugly part of a bygone era, one in which whites were waited upon by minority servants.”13 Ajit’s advocacy was read and considered by the Gen Con leadership, and he was given a space on their Industry Advisory panel. However, broader cultural change has been slow to come, meaning hobby games remain predominantly white. I argue that hegemonic masculinity and whiteness endure in hobby games, despite the advocacy work of people like Ajit and Eric, because it has inherited a stubbornly apolitical stance from hobby gaming culture. Although the hobby game scene’s present success was predicated upon fifty years of creative incubation in isolated hobby networks of privilege, it is not clear if their dominance will endure. Ajit and Eric demonstrate that their noble goals are not simply achieved when they rise to be leaders. Individual successes do not necessarily change the networks, industry, and culture that helped whiteness endure among game hobbyists. Still, I believe that the energy and enthusiasm of geeks asking for different and diverse games in the hobby demand we consider what it might take to more fully diversify gaming. The new generation of game geeks has experienced meaningful successes. Wizards of the Coast—­the company that owns both Magic: The Gathering and Dungeons & Dragons—­recently took huge steps to make their games less racist, in solidarity with 2020’s BLM protests. They eliminated racist cards and card art from Magic: The Gathering (like the card “Invoke Prejudice,” which featured wizards wearing Klan hoods in the illustration),14 fired illustrators with transphobic and white supremacist values like Terese Neilson,15 and rewrote the lore of Dungeons & Dragons to be less racist. The Drow, traditionally evil matriarchal underground elves with jet-­black skin, can now be good as well as evil.16 This is just a short list of changes implemented by Wizards of the Coast. Game designers like Avery Alder have had great indie success with story games like Monster Hearts that used statistics like hot, cold, volatile,

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and dark to queer the formula of character design established by Dungeons & Dragons. Wingspan—­Elizabeth Hargrave’s board game about birdwatching—­received enormous critical success, won awards, and even brought mainstream attention to the hobby game scene through stories in major publications like the New York Times.17 The enthusiasm that these new hobby game geeks espouse for their work speaks to their desire to develop, change, and embrace new ways of designing games. Despite mounting pressure to change, a generation of hobbyists remains defiant. I suggest that their obstinance has little to do with singular individuals, which is typically how we think of shifting the “culture” of a particular group. As Sheryl Sandberg famously put it, women are asked to “lean in.”18 People of color shoulder the burden of embodying diversity, doing the work that others should. An individualistic perspective naïvely neglects the power of networks, ideas, and labor involved in producing hobby games. An additional complication is that the hobby game industry is rapidly expanding, complicating an important principle: that capitalism fortifies the historically xenophobic tendencies of hobby gamers. More than money, most hobbyists participate for love of the game and the community itself.

The Commercialization of Hobby Games The hobby game industry is being rapidly commercialized by corporate interests who are sympathetic to the needs of the geeks diversifying the hobby simply because they see an opportunity to cultivate new markets. At Gen Con 2019, Asmodee Games distributed a cartoon map to visitors of their booth (figure 6.3). The map oriented shoppers to the subsidiaries of Asmodee in the exhibit hall—­a convention space dedicated to publishers eager to sell their wares. Asmodee games is second only to Hasbro as the largest and most profitable hobby game manufacturer in the world and represents the culmination of hobby games’ marketization and another step away from the hobby’s grassroots origins. A discerning eye could see that a majority of board gaming’s most influential and well-­distributed publishers fell under Asmodee’s umbrella. These games were commonly sold at Barnes & Noble, Target, and Walmart, as well as small hobby shops and comic shops worldwide. Companies under Asmodee’s umbrella at Gen Con 2019 included Fantasy Flight Games,

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Catan Studio, Plaid Hat Games, Z-­Man Games, CMON, Days of Wonder, Libellud, Repos Productions, Space Cowboys US, Lookout Games, and at least eighteen others. As the map in figure 6.3 shows, Asmodee Games’ properties accounted for between one-­sixth and one-­eighth of the space in the Gen Con exhibit hall. This percentage is even more impressive when you consider that not all of the businesses set up in the hall were games distributors. Media outlets like Board Game Geek and the Dice Tower sat alongside online malls like Cool Stuff Inc. and other businesses that don’t even publish boardgames. Plus, Asmodee maintained a low-­key pop-­up office on site to hold meetings and manage talent. Their dominance was a world away from Gen Con’s humble start of fifty people in Gary Gygax’s basement. It also exemplifies the influence of external markets that distinguishes the hobby games of today from hobby games in the sixties, seventies, and even eighties. Commercialism adds a wrinkle to the simple argument that this group of more diverse geeks is always the underdog. Corporate interests in the hobby game scene have embraced diversity, while hobbyists have remained apolitical. The grassroots infrastructure established by hobbyists has been hesitant to adapt to the rapidly expanding demographic of hobby game geeks. Sensing business opportunity, companies like Asmodee often support inclusive efforts merely because they recognize that breaking down the xenophobic barriers that once defined the hobby broadens their consumer base. Unlike the hobby game scene of the seventies and eighties—­when games were often designed, manufactured, and distributed by a small team publishing out of a garage—­today’s hobby games are produced by a global neoliberal creative economy shared primarily between “developed” nations. Labor theory in the twenty-­first century shifted away from a Fordist labor model to a post-­Fordist one. “From automobiles to Apple” is another way of understanding this shift in work, moving from the practices of the assembly line toward the plight of the graphic designer. Maurizio Lazzarato coined the term “immaterial labor” to describe this rise of creative industries: “Immaterial labor involves a series of activities that are not normally recognized as ‘work’—­in other words, the kinds of activities involved in defining and fixing cultural and artistic standards, fashions, tastes, consumer norms, and, more strategically, public opin-

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Figure 6.3. Map depicting Asmodee’s corporate holdings at Gen Con 2019. In addition to the many smaller hobby companies they own, here they also boast their rights to publish the Disney-­owned Marvel and Star Wars franchises. Photo taken by the author.

ion.”19 Understanding the economic context of hobby games helps us recognize the various forms of invisible labor that support them as a brand. The branding of hobby games has evolved from a compromise between the labor practices of the present digital economy and the interests of hobbyists. As Adam Arviddson explains, brands in our contemporary moment focus on the “context of consumption,” as opposed to the “maker’s mark” from which the term “brand” originates.20 In this sense, it is notable that Asmodee’s name is absent from the various companies it owns on their flyer. But in another sense, the maker’s mark persists and the branding of hobby games keeps to its hobbyist roots. Quite unlike the video game industry, which notoriously kept the names of designers and developers off the final product, hobby games feature the designer’s name prominently on the box. The designer of the game generally circulates and socializes with the community at Gen Con. In these ways, the reputation of a designer is cultivated over time.

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This burden of branding and reputation makes it difficult for minoritized people to participate in creating hobby games using the old hobbyist playbook. As Paul Booth notes in Board Games as Media, there has been good deal of skepticism around efforts to diversify representation within games by the developers, designers, and entrepreneurs who represent the hobby game industry. This pushback ranged from skeptical takes that claimed that things were already diverse enough to a more libertarian perspective that suggested that the market would decide when the community was ready for more diverse representation.21 These conversations all add up to the same problem: the whiteness of hobby games is an objective hurdle for BIPOC people looking to get involved in the scene. A wariness of games and politics denotes the hobby games scene as still suffused with whiteness. The Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), which owns and sponsors the Origins Game Fair, opted against a public statement of antiracism in support of BLM because they argued that politics didn’t belong in games.22 The interview between Tom Vasel and Eric Lang was notable because Tom often related that he wants to keep politics off of the Dice Tower. It was only through private coaxing behind the scenes that he decided to let Eric discuss hobby games and BLM.23 The desire to keep politics separate from the hobby echoes the stated goals of supporters of Gamergate—­a toxic movement that argued it was against the politicization of games journalism in order to send harassing messages and death threats to women working in the games industry. Despite the potential for the hobby to re-­create the most toxic elements of digital games culture, there are some encouraging signs that institutions and individuals are eager to embrace structural change. Zak Sabbath, the producer of the influential blog Playing D&D with Porn Stars and an influential role-­playing game writer, was banned from attending Gen Con 2019 because of his history of abusive relationships with women in the scene. Signs that read “harassing or offensive behavior will not be tolerated” were prominently displayed on all entrances of the convention center. The voices of a younger generation of hobby game geeks were being heard and the industry was adapting to make space. In the center of this struggle lay a handful of successful old guard hobbyist personalities. These men remembered the salad days of hobby

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games from when the scene was still small, yet they no longer resembled the isolated and lonely hobbyists of yesterday. Many of these figures are sympathetic to the cultural sensitivities of the new generation of geeks, viewing the up-­and-­coming generation’s ideals as the future of the hobby. Peter Atkinson, owner of Gen Con and founder of Wizards of the Coast, is one such personality. Atkinson became a transformative figure in the hobby game scene by leading his upstart company to success when he published Magic: The Gathering. In 1997, Wizards used these earnings to acquire TSR Inc., which owned the struggling Dungeons & Dragons intellectual property. By revitalizing the brand and publishing the highly successful and critically praised third edition of the game, Wizards of the Coast ascended within the hobby game circuit. Atkinson resigned from the company in 2001 and purchased the rights to Gen Con from them in 2002. Although this book has endeavored to position hobbyists as lonely or isolated, Atkinson doesn’t fit the mold; he is an organizer, leader, and networker. Much like Bill Gates’s journey from computing hobbyist to industry leader, Atkinson’s rise shows how the white-­collar managerial skills that were traded in hobby communities have become valued by the industry. Additionally, both Atkinson and Gates demonstrate how white hobby communities coalesced around their own successes, making space for industry innovation in a community that sees itself as working in a semicommercial paradigm. Atkinson embodies the hobbyist perspective by living the dream: being able to make ends meet while working in the hobby games industry. When describing why he purchased Gen Con, Atkinson said, “This is a chance to get back to work in the industry I love, doing something that’s a lot of fun, in a small company environment, yet profitable enough to feel I’m not wasting my time. I’ve always loved Gen Con and this is a chance to focus my creative energies on it to make it even bigger and better than before.”24 That he is in it for not just money but also love speaks to the stakes of the hobbyists who control the hobby today. Love of the hobby games scene means a love of their fans as well. This might mean “tough love”—­like when Gen Con decided to ban Zak Sabbath—­ but it also means continuing to embrace the hierarchical and militaristic dynamics of masculinity that circulate within the scene.

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The hobby games scene reproduces a masculine dynamic as well. For critical cultural studies scholars Nick Taylor and Gerald Vorhees, masculinity is a subject position that promotes a patriarchal, imperialistic, and capitalist society. Whether the valence is “toxic” or “hegemonic,” the needs, desires, wants, and whims of the masculine player reinforce what bell hooks terms “imperialist white-­supremacist capitalist patriarchy.”25 In games, the twofold problem of masculinity is both a crisis of representation and a subject position.26 It is a crisis of representation because depictions of hegemonic masculinity reinforce unhealthy patterns within our society. It is a subject position because, as this book has argued, those who inhabit white masculinity possess a worldview ignorant of their own privilege. In the hobby, like the hobbyist culture that produced it, participants are largely ignorant to their own privilege and likely to position themselves as outsiders because of it. This aspect of hobbyist identity is directly related to what T. L. Taylor describes as “geek masculinity.”27 Even though the hobbyists in the scene come from around the world, they all share an imagined geek identity that they use to positions themselves above and outside what they see as dull and uninspired workaday culture.

The Future of Hobby Games The work of the hobby game geeks who compose the new generation of hobbyists differs from the white-­collar managerial labor that I described above. Their new practices revolve around social media savvy that empowers these geeks with the skills needed to challenge and circumvent the cultural practices of game hobbyists. Crowdfunding—­accepting small amounts of money for a product from a “crowd” of supporters before it has been produced—­is the primary way they maneuver around the old guard. For this reason, the hobby continues to be a contested space. The distribution and publishing networks established through an invisible infrastructure of hobbyists are being challenged by a new class of game developers with different needs, skills, and—­most importantly—­audiences. While hobby games relied on an invisible network of white men to promote and publish their games, the new guard today crowdfund their games. This practice isn’t limited to just games either. Critical

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Role’s success in pitching “The Legend of Vox Machina,” a cartoon based on their actual play series, testifies to this fact.28 Then there are the many successful crowdfunding campaigns that support board game reviewers at sites like the Dice Tower, Shut Up & Sit Down, and No Pun Included. The geeks who run these sites know the demographic makeup of those who are watching. Reviewers like Quintin Smith and Matt Lees of Shut Up & Sit Down, and Elaine Bladukiené and Efka Bladuka of No Pun Included, go to great lengths to describe how board games often insidiously intersect with histories of colonialism and slavery. My favorite example of how hobby game geeks cater toward a more socially aware, politically active audience is a review of the historical train game 1830. In it, Efka described how the game erased the history of slave labor within the US railroad industry, in favor of a light, fun narrative around robber barons striking it rich.29 Such commentary by crowdfunding-­savvy entrepreneurs is just one way that reviewers overtly discuss racist, sexist, and heteronormative stereotypes. Older companies in the hobby game scene, by comparison, remain attached to a familiar model of small print runs and trusted distribution networks that cater to a known audience with specific needs. For example, Days of Wonder, the board game company that published the best-­selling Ticket to Ride, employs only about twenty-­five people.30 For old guard game hobbyists, small businesses like Days of Wonder are the premiere publishing model. Much like Avalon Hill, which I examined in chapter 2, these companies employ a handful of people who wear many hats. Their business models rely on a skeleton crew of skilled developers who are able to tap into their target audience’s consumer needs. These companies develop games for known audiences, determine a print run total that will be profitable, and ship their games to specialized networks of hobby distributors across the globe. This model is risky since a mismanaged print run can spoil their reputation with distributors who rely on the brand’s reputation to help sell new products. The new scene of hobby game geeks circumvents the riskiness of print runs by determining the size and shape of their audience prior to print. Yet the crowdsourcing model that demands these practices is very much driven by a celebrity class of game designers who are outspoken

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on social media. A designer’s moral and ethical outlook is also part of the package that new guard geeks market when they sell games. In this sense, fans of Eric Lang and Elizabeth Hargrave aren’t just fans of their games—­they are also fans of their politics.31 Thus today’s hobby game geeks position intersectional advocacy at the forefront of progressive politics. Yet the neoliberal brand economy also enforces a fraught alliance between progressive politics and the self. The ways that tastemakers in the hobby game community are encouraged to brand themselves speak to the uneasy alliance between geek identity and neoliberal subjectivity. Today, hobbyists record videos as frequently as they write articles, meaning their “managerial” work more resembles that of a reality television producer than an assembly line. I asked Tom Vasel about the emotional work of livestreaming, and he explained that he and other streamers often “forget the cameras are there” as they become engrossed in their projects. He constantly must remind his fellow streamers that “we’re on camera” and sidelines them if they are in a foul mood, which can foreshadow a poor or lukewarm performance. Because Vasel and the team at the Dice Tower have to reliably produce content for their many fans on Kickstarter, the stakes of video streams being successful are quite high. Even Tom has to constantly convince himself that he is “offering something that people should give money for.” Of course, Tom’s job as hobbyist media personality is only one of the many careers possible in the world of hobby games. This emergent new digital economy provides a creative opportunity for the new geeks who grew up as outsiders to the hobby game networks of privilege. Crowdfunding disturbs the status quo of a cottage publishing industry that had become too attached to a sole demographic of white male players aged eighteen to thirty-­five. The resulting industry landscape is exciting and more inclusive than ever before. Yet careers in this rapidly expanding space remain fragile and subject to the needs of the audiences that support them. Unlike the hobbyists of the past, who saw participation as a “side gig,” the new generation of geeks has created a full-­time hobby game infrastructure.

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The Enduring White Masculinity of Hobby Games My goal in this chapter has been to show how a generation of hobbyists who believe games and politics should be kept separate are compromising their ideals to make space for a more diverse cadre of geeks who use social media to navigate the white hobby networks of privilege that previously defined hobby game industry. It is still predominantly led by a contingent of white men who are sympathetic to the changes taking place, yet still largely complicit in structurally reinforcing the white status quo. Yet although the old hobby network has been resistant, the new generation of geeks are steadily changing the hearts and minds of hobbyists in seats of power. The hobby game geeks rely on social media and crowdfunding platforms to sell their games. They are hyperattentive to how their ethical and moral reputations are major selling points for their games. Just as the old guard insisted that a designer’s name on a box spoke to the quality of their product, the new geeks recognize that the people, communities, and ideas represented in the artwork on a game box are as important as the game’s designer. Such images carry symbolic weight for the communities that circulate them. There was once a dark joke that circulated in board game community about how you were more likely to find a sheep than a woman on the cover of most board games.32 Statistics clearly show that it was no joke—­hobby games have long struggled to include women and people of color. In an analysis of people represented in the cover art of the top one hundred board games, Tanya Pobuda showed that 85 percent of the people were white and 69 percent were men. As it turns out, you are slightly more likely to find the likeness of an alien or animal on the cover of a board game than a woman.33 Gender dynamics have been slow to change because the old guard of hobbyists—­who have produced an industry around making games for players similar to themselves—­have been hesitant to label this a “problem” due to their desire to avoid politics. Their attendant hobbyist identity has also produced an astoundingly homogeneous core of white male participation within the board game industry. In Pobuda’s 2017 quantitative research on the board game industry, 96 percent of the designers of the top two hundred board games

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were white and 98 percent were men. Her findings demonstrate how a white male aesthetic lingers within the representational space of games as well. Activists in the scene have known about the lack of representation in hobby games for a long time. For example, folks like Eric Lang and Elizabeth Hargrave have been challenging the status quo of the hobby game scene from the inside. Lang is presently vetting a small, elite cohort of Black game designers for design jobs in the industry, and Hargrave has been actively cataloging and amplifying the voices of women and people of color working professionally in hobby games. Both use social media to cultivate a new generation of “woke gamers” who challenge the social and infrastructural norms that the old guard of hobbyists have put in place. The very soul of hobby games is in flux, as their future is debated by the geeks and hobbyists of today’s community. The whiteness of the hobby game scene is further complicated by its position as a global phenomenon. Given that the history of Blackness is intimately connected to the American project through the slave trade,34 it is tempting to read whiteness as related and oppositional—­and thus implicated with the construction of Blackness. After all, this book has detailed how the white networks of hobbyists that established the creative infrastructure of the hobby game scene were also publishing within the cultural climate of the United States. However, to equate the subjectivity of white Americans with that of white folks globally is problematic, as the two have different histories.35 White American hobbyist gamers share a particular history of colonial violence toward Black and Brown people and a set of derivative cultural privileges that provide status, education, and wealth. The civil rights movement of 1960s America is, in this sense, a specific instance of how the damage of colonialism is still felt by Black folks in North America. While nations have differing histories of Black, Brown, and Indigenous people, many share a history of imperialism that relates to the global construction of a privileged white subjectivity.36 As this book has argued, geeks today have inherited a dubious legacy from hobbyist gamers. Even though the hobby is international in scope, it still reflects a privileged white subjectivity with historical roots in imperialism. By focusing on the labor practices that substantiate the production of hobby games, we can begin to understand how the old gatekeeping

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practices that positioned hobby games as the domain of white men have been outmaneuvered by a new generation of social-­media-­savvy geeks. By shining a light on the hobby, we can also see how the genealogical development of the hobbyist identity has informed today’s geek identity. The hobby identity made space for lonely white men to find comradery by nerding out with other men with similar interests in their network and was defined by its hands-­off approach to politics. The geek identity is, in many ways, defined by its precarious and imperfect relationship to neoliberal markets. Will the xenophobic white history of the hobby endure in the future? Only time will tell. But the inspirational work of activists like Hargrave and Lang is encouraging at the least.

Conclusion

The year 2021 was difficult for board game developers. The Ever Given, a ship transporting eighteen thousand containers, made global news by blocking the Suez Canal for six days. It was just one of many high-­profile supply chain issues that plagued retailers, sending global markets haywire. After having spent a year in isolation due to COVID-­19, I returned to my favorite game and comic book stores to get back to my usual routine—­browse the shelves, make small talk with the staff, and check in on the newest releases. It just wasn’t the same. The new releases didn’t arrive like they used to. They would sporadically trickle in, rarely the flood of games that I had been accustomed to before the pandemic hit. The hobby had suffered greatly. Producing a board game is hard work. Although companies like LudoPact have found a niche in it by centralizing most of the production involved in stewarding a board game to press. Even these companies outsource to other companies in the supply chain. Game boards, cardboard tokens, cards, dice, wooden pieces, the game box itself, and organizational inserts—­all of which might be unique shapes, requiring a custom order—­are each produced by different manufacturers.1 Pulling together these bits on a massive scale affects a board game’s print run. So understanding the ins and outs of supply chains is a necessary part of selling hobby games today. Those who chose to crowdfund their games found themselves in even more precarious positions, as the people running Kickstarters are not always familiar with industry norms. They may be learning for the first time that wooden components are frequently sourced from Europe, while plastic miniatures are generally produced in China. Or they could be surprised to learn that global shipping costs are contingent on a stable shipping market (one that didn’t exist in 2021). Succinctly put, the supply chain issues that made global headlines in 2021 hit the new generation of geeks who were in the process of fulfilling their first Kickstarters incredibly hard. 177

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Conflicts within the community around race, gender, and equity continued to roil. Frosthaven, the sequel to the hit board game Gloomhaven, became the third most profitable product ever on Kickstarter in 2020, raising almost thirteen million dollars.2 As part of this expansive campaign, consumers could opt in to purchasing a bespoke custom wooden insert to hold the game’s many pieces. These inserts were produced by a company called the Broken Token, which made similar custom “game bling.” After the founder of the Broken Token was accused of sexual assault and abuse by his employees, many board game publishers, including Cephalofair Games (which published Frosthaven), chose to terminate their contracts with the company.3 Although these allegations would have been concerning even for the old guard of hobbyists, the new and more precarious funding platform of Kickstarter produced a mandate for producers to take heed of the desires of their market. It allowed consumers to hold the industry accountable in ways that were previously impossible due to the relatively low stakes and amateur nature of hobby games. For all these reasons, 2021 was a year of unprecedented churn in the board game industry. It had already seen the networks of privilege that had ushered in the success of the old guard embattled by the more ardent ethics of the new generation. That new generation had to contend with economic precarity as a global catastrophe wreaked havoc on the supply chains that the community relied on. This confluence of events, although typical of many industries that year, was startling for hobbyists. There had never been a time in the hobby games industry where the stakes were so high. Whereas independently published games used to be distributed with modest components and relatively small print runs that were reliably distributed to a small network of shops, hobby games stopped following this model. Hobby games, for better or worse, had become big business. Even amateur Kickstarter productions were outsourced to a number of specialized vendors who managed the bespoke components needed to ultimately publish a game. Avalon Hill’s early productions were games that contained a handful of thin cardboard maps, a few sheets of thin cardboard tokens, and a black-­and-­ white rulebook. By contrast, hobby games today demand a more robust infrastructure to produce and distribute. The growing production demands of hobby games is a sign of the changing times. As this book has argued, hobbyists were a homog-

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enously white male group for the better part of the twentieth century. The tight-­knit networks of privilege that they moved in benefitted hobbyists greatly, even while to outsiders it may have seemed that they were grown men playing with children’s toys. As the network of hobbyists continues to develop, it has scaled with the economic needs of the community. Games are no longer printed for a small and intimate group of hobbyists primarily located within a core network of privilege. Instead they are made for a younger, more diverse group of geeks who are often excited to be exploring hobby games for the first time. The changing demographics and expanding audience for the hobby has forced the old guard of hobbyists to either mature by adapting their games and components for a new, more competitive market, or simply find a new hobby. Just as the robust infrastructure of model train stores eventually transformed into an infrastructure of general hobby shops that allotted ever-­increasing shelf space to hobby games, so too has the old guard of hobbyists needed to adapt and make space for change within the hobby community. For women and BIPOC working in the hobby games industry, the stakes have never been higher. The rapid changes to the industry have produced jobs for BIPOC who have previously been excluded from the networks of privilege that dominated the hobby. Their inclusion, although exciting, welcomes them to unstable employment. Companies often do not have the capital or business savvy to weather a slow crisis of consumer capitalism—­like the COVID-­19 pandemic produced. So at this moment, the future of hobby games remains uncertain as the once-­steady improvements to supply and demand are complicated by a volatile market. Amid this roil lies a new and diverse generation of geeks fighting for a hobby scene that accepts and embraces its newfound diversity. Given that this book is largely a historical work and I cannot foresee what is to come next, it ends on a cliffhanger. The survival of the hobby games scene in a post-­COVID world and the new generation of geeks relies on changing the hearts and minds of a massive consumer base just now learning about hobby games. The unwritten pages of the future largely depends upon how the hobby game scene understands its own past. This book began by discussing how MIT’s infamous Tech Model Railroad Club grew from the robust hobby model train scene at its apex of

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popularity in the 1950s. At this early moment, the network of model train hobbyists was centralized in cities where wealthy consumers with access to electricity were likely to live. The widespread interest in model trains was partly the work of A. C. Kalmbach, a hobbyist who transformed his local press (Kalmbach Publishing) into a national hobby magazine syndicate that catered to model train enthusiasts. Kalmbach’s zeal for model trains was so great that he even spearheaded advertising campaigns in other major publications to raise awareness about the hobby. By the 1950s, Kalmbach’s efforts had resulted in the widespread diffusion of model train stores that catered to other enthusiasts—­where copies of his magazine Model Railroader and his competition Railroad Model Craftsman might be found. This early network of model railroad hobby stores and magazines established a template for how hobbyists would network throughout the twentieth century. Clubs, groups, stores, and individuals would list themselves in the back pages of hobby magazines, leading interested individuals to connect through the mail. Because model railroading had initially been a hobby that only wealthy people with access to electricity could afford, the early networks of model train enthusiasts were predominantly white. The trend toward whiteness would continue throughout the century, as these white networks presumed a white male consumer in the advertisements, articles, and clubs that catered to the hobby. MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club was a case in point. Given the overwhelmingly white male culture that MIT had curated throughout the 1950s, the students interested in model railroads also fit this demographic. This group, a mere node in a national model railroad network, was made famous by Steven Levy’s Hackers, where they are mythologized for bringing a particular kind of machismo to the culture of technology, which persists to this day. Levy chronicles how the hackers who incubated themselves in the Tech Model Railroad Club were the “bad boys” of MIT’s hobby scene. He argues that they established a culture where they were able to resist authority, play by their own rules, and ultimately create space where a dream of freedom accelerated by the information highway might flourish. The rebel streak that Levy identifies is the same that Salter and Blodgett critique in their writing on geek masculinity, as it presumes invisible exceptionalism and privilege within the culture.4 I relate this current of exceptionalism to the simul-

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taneous embrace of the Old West in the media at the time. The Tech Model Railroad Club, in other words, was interested in trains because they simulated the rugged masculine frontiers hobbyists found in comics, on television, and in movies. Trains were celebrated as the pinnacle of technology, commerce, and civilization. The impact of model railroads did not end with the Tech Model Railroad Club. In issues of Model Railroader appeared advertisements for Tactics, Gettysburg (produced by a new game company called Avalon Hill), and a railroad game called Dispatcher. Avalon Hill was then just a small company located in the suburbs of Baltimore and specialized in wargames. The company positioned its products for the mass market but never attained the popular success as other contemporary board game publishers such as Hasbro and Milton Bradley due to the esoteric nature of their games. Instead, Avalon Hill’s games were popular mainly among a growing contingent of hobbyists who were fascinated by the potential of simulation to reimagine history. For example, imagine if at Waterloo Napoleon was able to reposition his artillery strategically—­would the outcome of the war, or even history itself, be changed? These hypotheticals captivated the imagination of the hobbyists who subscribed to Avalon Hill’s magazine The General and led the way for the company to design simulationist games. Like the model railroad hobbyists who came before, those who wrote for or consumed the Avalon Hill General also enjoyed their status within the network of privilege that characterized hobby games. Hobbyists were predominantly younger white men, but the older participants tended to be white men with military experience. Thus while the young white men working at the Tech Model Railroad Club were able to glean technical and electrical tips from those in their network of privilege, members of the hobby game network dialogued with military elites about strategy and tactics. This two-­way discourse positioned these same elites in a conversational space alongside the hobbyists who idolized them for their accomplishments and experience. A good deal of their dialogue was troubling. Some authors at the Avalon Hill General saw the magazine as an opportunity to share historical accounts that today would be read as white supremacist. These accounts were part of a greater white supremacist strategy to question the epistemology of World War II by offering questionable historical takes on

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Adolf Hitler’s rationale for the war. These accounts, while not embraced by all members of the community, were amplified by Avalon Hill. The company published the game Origins of World War II, which offered players the opportunity to simulate the conditions that led to the war and play out alternative histories with their friends. The company also would later take advantage of their consumer base’s burgeoning interest in the Nazi general Erwin Rommel and Confederate general Robert E. Lee by prominently featuring them as heroes on covers of the Avalon Hill General. In other words, the magazine did everything it could to signal white supremacist sympathies to its readers. Given that the Avalon Hill General’s readers included military actors with a good deal of clout, the publication was somewhat successful in distributing and mainstreaming many of these troubling historical perspectives. One powerful reader was Jerry Pournelle, a science fiction writer, military strategist, and eventual advisor to president Ronald Reagan. Pournelle was particularly active in the networks of privilege that were established by the magazine and would offer readers detailed analysis of the veracity of its proposed rule sets. My work shows how he embraced a brand of libertarian politics popularized by Barry Goldwater in the 1960s and later took root in the hobby game scene as its members sought an ideology that helped them navigate the landscape of civil rights in the 1960s. When the United States passed civil rights reforms in the 1960s, most of the hobbyists in the networks of privilege who consumed the Avalon Hill General moved to the suburbs. This mass demographic shift aligned with the overall trends at the time. “White flight” is reflected within hobbyist culture by how Black people were represented in the periodicals. Hobbyists at this early moment were overwhelmingly white men, which the advertisements that the magazine published make abundantly clear. Hobby communities, to say the least, did not yet know how to even symbolically include people who were not white men in their network. Perhaps the hobby’s inability to include diverse participants is what makes an in-­depth exploration of one hobby network so crucial. The New York Conspiracy was a group of hobbyists who enjoyed play-­by-­mail Diplomacy. Unlike the other hobbyists whom this book considers, the New York Conspiracy did talk politics in the pages of fanzines they distributed in the 1970s. These zines offer insight into the subjectivities of these

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hobbyists as they navigated the status quo of the 1970s. The group was relatively progressive in comparison to the hobbyists who participated in other Diplomacy publishing rings. However, their writing shows that the group was oblivious and occasionally hostile to the greater struggle of civil rights in the United States. In other words, even though some members of the group were critical of the Vietnam War, Richard Nixon, and climate change, these were overwhelmingly white liberal causes. They remained aligned with the segregationist politics that continued to impact Americans long after segregation became illegal. The time lapse provided in figures 3.1 to 3.6, depicting fanzine growth in North America throughout the 1960s and 1970s, supports the hypothesis that hobbyists aligned themselves with the post-­segregationist politics of white suburban America. Early fanzines, like those sold in the model railroad shops of the 1950s, were clustered within urban areas. As time progressed, the geographic machinations of white flight can be seen in action. Where publishers in the network were once clustered in urban areas, over time the network crept into more suburban areas and its presence in urban areas receded. I have argued throughout this book that the politics of whiteness informed the politics of the hobby and not only impacted the network’s geographic structure but also informed the spaces where these games were played, representation within the games, and how the community isolated itself within white enclaves. In other words, if we are to contend with the history of hobby games, we must center the fact that these games were themselves the product of white privilege. In addition to the sobering revelation that geek culture is historically linked to the politics of whiteness, these same communities also practiced a popular form of libertarian politics. In politics and practice, these communities embraced an outsider ethic that celebrated what it saw as the virtues of rugged masculinity. They also entertained a form of community that imagined itself as belonging to a social sphere separate from that of big government—­which they felt aimed to control people. Libertarian politics were a widespread and fundamental part of the Diplomacy fanzine scene, and they emerged even in the role-­playing scenarios that these players used when adding color to their games. Some of these role-­playing scenarios even betrayed the biases of these players; juvenile men would often glibly use racial and sexual slurs when communicat-

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ing with other players in the network. Although some members of the community did their best to moderate these conversations in the name of inclusivity, for the most part they went unchecked in the name of free speech. Hobbyists, by the late twentieth century, had largely internalized the isolationist and xenophobic politics of libertarianism—­generally adopting an us-­versus-­the-­world mentality in their games and writing. The libertarian mindset that characterized hobbyists in the 1960s and 1970s trickled into the mechanics of the games that they produced. The Alarums & Excursions fan community, for example, designed modifications to Dungeons & Dragons, which had just been released. This book explored two optional character classes—­the Damsel and the Courtesan—­that highlighted the gender dynamics of fans in the Alarums & Excursions scene. These classes spoke to how the overwhelmingly masculine attitude of hobbyists was designed to encourage players to consider how women could be more thoroughly integrated into one’s Dungeons & Dragons campaign. The imaginary space here was limited. The same tropes that Anita Sarkeesian would later critique in her web series Tropes vs. Women in Games were engineered for the very first time as playable characters in Dungeons & Dragons. The Alarums & Excursions community also explored the mechanics that might govern sexual relationships in role-­playing games. They developed a series of intricate tables for “maneuvering” oneself in a sexual encounter. These tables would be referenced after players rolled dice to determine whether a character’s sexual advance would be reciprocated by another character. Of course, by today’s standards these mechanics are overtly problematic, as they remove agency from the individual who might be subjected to such an advance. In other words, these mechanics would allow for characters to engage in sex, whether or not the players controlling them were consenting. Although it is tempting to critique these mechanics through the lens of the present, their exposition within Alarums & Excursions speaks volumes to how much the norms of hegemonic masculinity and related macho self-­sufficiency of libertarianism impacted the hobby game community. Importantly, within the context of other Dungeons & Dragons modifications engineered by the hobby game community, these mechanics were mundane. Dungeons & Dragons players were encouraged to roll on tables to resolve almost every imaginable social encounter. The game’s main supplements foregrounded

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salacious material such as a table of random “harlots” the characters might encounter in the streets. These materials went unchallenged by the game’s masculine player base. But the Alarums & Excursions community, unlike the hobby game communities that came before, was not overwhelmingly composed of men. Lee Gold, the fanzine’s main editor, is a woman, and many Alarums & Excursions articles were written by women in the community. Early articles even admonished the leadership of TSR Hobbies—­the company that published Dungeons & Dragons—­for the sexist representation of women in some of the game’s early supplements. These early conversations about representation and equity within hobby games were rather cordial. They seem intimate in comparison to similar conversations that crop up on today’s internet message boards and game chat servers. The intimacy of the conversations in Alarums & Excursions highlighted the fact that even though the hobby community was diversifying—­ expanding its acceptance of gender to include more women—­this early push was driven by the small and intimate networks. These networks were managed by tight groups of friends as opposed to the theater that the hobby game scene would develop into as it expanded to include a more global audience. The rise of massive web databases and web forums such as Board Game Geek and The Forge shows the hobby game industry expanding. Importantly, with the popularization of the internet in the 1990s, hobbyists were able to sidestep the expensive distribution costs that had once been a necessity. No longer were subscription fees needed to afford the Xerox and print costs for the magazines and fanzines that were the infrastructure of hobby game networks in the twentieth century. Instead, anyone with access to the internet and basic HTML formatting skills could to construct a website. Users who wanted to participate in the discourse had it even easier—­sleek web interfaces made it easy to log on to a forum and share one’s perspectives with others. Online communication was a far cry from the arduous process of typing and sending your feedback to a zine’s editor, who would then copy and collate your contribution so that they could staple it into the zine itself for wide distribution. Communication between segments of the hobby at the end of the twentieth century was greatly streamlined. It had never been easier to connect with so many different people at once.

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Although the internet allowed geeks to connect in an unprecedented way, more diverse participation in the hobby remained slow to come. Even though sites like Board Game Geek attempted to brand themselves as inclusive spaces by allowing users to identify their country of origin with a flag underneath their avatars, these efforts did very little to change the culture of hobbyists themselves. After a century of hobbyists communicating through postal dispatches from one white enclave to another, the community held very little appeal to women and BIPOC people who had no way to know about its best-­kept secret—­the networks of white privilege that had been cultivated throughout the twentieth century within hobby communities. Thus, online hobby game spaces worked to accelerate the creative and consumerist aspects of hobby games while maintaining the same white male cultural tropes that had historically defined these communities. The boom in hobby game interest in the internet era ushered in a new age of precarity for the industry itself. Up to this point, the industry success stories in the hobby game sector had been scarce. Industry growth opened new avenues for full-­time employment in the scene. Certainly, any employment marked a tremendous sea change for the hobby game industry. Previously, companies had been content with running businesses as hobbies, often with the help of close loved ones. Hobby games, in other words, suddenly had the potential to be much more than a hobby. Perhaps the recent boom in hobby games has been the reason that conversations about equity have become common in the community today. I began this book with a brief description of conversations about the board game Puerto Rico and ended it with a snapshot of the earnest discussions about race and the scene’s enduring whiteness. I contrasted a socially “woke” and activist generation of geeks against the old guard—­ aged hobbyists who are invested in the white cultural dynamics that have historically pervaded the hobby game scene. The widespread global success of hobby games has now, thirty years after its massification through the internet, reached saturation with a diverse global audience that just wants to chuck dice and play games. The emergence of a new and diverse generation of hobby game geeks has been helped by corporate interests that see new audiences as essential to industry growth. They are keen to leave behind the overtly racist,

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sexist, and homophobic subtext that had previously lurked just below the surface of games in the hobby. The barriers to entry for minoritized people were substantial. Women and BIPOC people remain infrequently featured on the boxes of today’s board games,5 and rulebooks still frequently default to the use of male pronouns in their exposition.6 For a long time it was rare to find diverse representation among streamers who engaged in game reviews and live game playthroughs online. Finally, minoritized game designers remain rare, and few opportunities for professional development exist outside the white male networks of privilege that characterize hobby games. So although a new generation of hobby geeks stands at the precipice of a new and more diverse future, their arrival and the related sea change in the hobby have been difficult for many members of the old guard to accept. Perhaps change has been slow to come because the politics of the moment have been predicated on an uneasy coalition between the new guard of hobbyists and neoliberal capital. Space for diversity within hobby games has come at the cost of the hobby game scene’s autonomy. A libertarian ideology once reigned in the hobby game scene, and hobby games and their distribution networks had been assumed not to be profitable. The scene’s expansion has come at the cost of its autonomy. It is probably for the best that hobby games can no longer serve as naïve conduits of white male culture. But in the present hobby boom, the community is losing touch with its creative autonomy as well. Can the new guard of geeks, now rapidly becoming the majority presence in the hobby game scene, learn to rekindle this autonomy and strike out to produce radical and transformative games within today’s industry? The work of current visionaries gives me cause to hope. The radical Black aesthetics invoked by Omari Akil in his game Hoop Godz show that there is a BIPOC audience interested in games that foreground and celebrate Black culture in their design and aesthetics. I am also quite taken by the thriving independent itch.io scene, in which a diverse contingent of role-­playing game designers have been proactive in sharing short, spicy, and critical scripts for folks to download and use at their game night. Finally, I am encouraged by the trailblazing activist work of popular designers like Elizabeth Hargrave and Eric Lang who have tirelessly pushed for a more inclusive hobby. Like all revolutions, the changing of the guard in hobby games has been messy and fraught with many

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potential politics, but I am hopeful for the wonderful things to come on the horizon. I am glad to see that the conservative politics of hobbyists have been challenged in the hobby game scene and am hopeful that similar changes will crop up in other hobby scenes in the years to come. I only hope that our present revolution is one that allows hobbyists to maintain their autonomy. As this book has made clear, the many wonderful innovations of hobbyists—­from the early games associated with the Tech Model Railroad Club to the explosion of creativity in modern board games today—­ have been possible only because these groups have been detached from and positioned outside of mainstream culture. Whenever I have found despair in the overwhelmingly white politics of hobbyists, I have found an equal amount of comfort in the authentic, genuine, and lasting friendships made between lonely and isolated geeks. Despite the racist and sexist detritus of older hobby games, many of us found hobby games only because we were outsider geeks. We were interested in science fiction and fantasy because they were cool and non-­mainstream. The hobby scene’s autonomy has, for all of its failings, given the scene the potential to embrace an open-­ended future. More than anything else, I am excited by the possibility. In the future, I still imagine myself and my nerdy friends from childhood enjoying a game with other geeks with whom we share experience, identity, and even the history, however fraught, of hobbyists.

Acknowledgments

This book, in so many ways, has been the product of an ongoing research project that has spanned the last decade. As such, there have been many people who have supported me along the way, and these final acknowledgments represent only the tip of the iceberg. Thank you from the bottom of my heart to everyone who has supported me these past ten years. I could not have written this book without you! I begin by offering a word of thanks for the other misfit geeks I grew up playing hobby games with. Thanks Marc Blinder for introducing me to both Dungeons & Dragons and Magic: The Gathering; those games set me on a course, and I wouldn’t have been the same person without them. Thank you Paul Greenleaf for jumping into these games head-­first with me in our childhood. And thank you Colin Germain, Brian MacDonald, Chris Bernard, Matt Greenleaf, Adam Wilson, Suesan Cota, Frank Cota, Evan Seehausen, Matt Knutson, and Lizzie Stark for continuing to kindle within me a passion for hobby games. You all are the best, and this book would not have been the same without you. I could not have written this book without the support of my scholarly community either. First, a huge thank-­you is owed to Henry Jenkins and Karen Tongsen for seeing potential in this book since I first shared a sample chapter. Thank you also Eric Zinner and Furqan Sayeed for all of the excellent editorial support. I am also indebted to the Analog Game Studies publishing community for the intellectual support. Evan Torner, Shelly Jones, Megan Condis, Tanya Pobuda, and Edmond Chang—­thank you for being such amazing and supportive colleagues. The book would be only a fraction of what it is today without your support and feedback. My appreciation branches out to the larger scholarly community of game research scholars as well. Shira Chess, Paul Booth, Antero Garcia, Sean Duncan, Amanda Cote, Max Foxman, Souvik Mukherjee, Soraya Murray, Chris Paul, Nick Taylor, Adrienne Shaw, Sara Stang, Peter McDonald, Alenda Chang, Thiago Falcao, Eddo Sterne, John Sharp, Sam 189

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Tobin, James Hodges, Robby Ratan, Steven Dashiell, Mia Consalvo, William White, Tom Apperley, Sam Roberts, Kishonna Gray, and Lindsay Grace—­thank you for all of the amazing conversations, encouragement, and support along the way. As a large portion of this research was conducted in graduate school, I must express how appreciative I am for the support of my dissertation advisor Marija Dalbello, who encouraged me to dive deep into the archives and explore the publications of hobbyists. Truly, thank you. A kind word is also owed to my dissertation committee. Aram Sinnreich, thanks for encouraging me to follow my heart and write a dissertation on Dungeons & Dragons one spring day in 2012. Jack Bratich, thank you for approaching theoretical lessons with generosity and kindness, even when I clearly missed the point. Fred Turner, thank you for reminding me that the real story here was one that revolved around people and not games. And, finally, a special thanks to Jenny Stoever, who has always believed in me—­even before I believed in myself. Thank you all for your expertise and guidance; this work will forever carry you in its heart. I also owe a debt of gratitude to my community here at UC Irvine. Roderic Crooks, Bo Ruberg, Katie Salen-­Tekinbaş, and Braxton Soderman, I cannot tell you how invaluable your feedback on this project has been. Support cannot be limited to feedback, and so I also must thank my excellent colleagues Sameer Singh, Tess Tanenbaum, Karen Tanenbaum, Daniel Epstein, Elena Agapie, David Redmiles, Paul Dourish, Melissa Mazmanian, and Kylie Peppler for helping to provide a healthy community where I could thrive while completing this work. This extends also to the present and past graduate student community at UCI as well: Amanda Cullen, Forest Scully-­Blaker, Ke Jing, Ian Larson, Kat Brewster, William Dunkel, Spencer Ruelos, Justin Keever, Izzy Williams, Bryan Truitt, Brandon Blackburn, Adrianna Burton, Dan Gardner, Emory Edwards, Kate Ringland, Bono Olgado, and Nikki Crenshaw—­ your encouragement and support have meant more to me than you will ever know. Let me geek out for a second, as is necessary following a book like this. I want to take a moment to thank my intellectual cohort from Rutgers University who sat through innumerable conversations with me on the topic. Taken from the Latin cohortes, the term “cohort” denotes a class of warriors trained to support one another on the battlefield. I

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am fortunate to have been included in the ranks of the best intellectual cohort I could have imagined at the Rutgers University School of Communication and Information. And although I lack the space here to name everyone, special thanks are in order for Jonathan “Coach” Bullinger, Jessica “J-­town” Lingel, Mr. Frank Bridges, Camille “Camzo” Reyes, Nathan “The Drifter” Graham, Annie “Boss” Gilbert, James “The Kid” Hodges, Andrew “The Panopticon” Salvati, Katie “Scraps” McCollough, Jessica “J-­Crow” Crowell, Charlie “Chuck” File, Nadia “Oakland” Rodriguez, “Jersey” Sean Leavey, Zack “Attack” Lischer-­Katz, “Steady” Steph Mikitish, Heewon “The Network” Kim, Nadav “Games” Lipkin, “Spicy” Rob Spicer, Emily “The Challenger” Knox, Marianne “Magic” Martens, Iulian “Books” Vamanu, “President” Leon Laurey, “Speedy” Marie Haverfield, “Bro” ‘manda Carpenter, Jacob “Go Spurs Go” Sanchez, “Papa” Ian Dunham, and Fanny “The Business” Ramirez. We’ve fought ghosts, chimeras, dragons together—­I couldn’t have done this without you and will always keep your spirit with me. In addition to the crew above, I need to offer a mighty thanks to those who supported me with housing while I traveled to America’s archives on a shoestring budget. Kate Magsamen-­Conrad and Jordan Conrad—­ thank you for hosting me for almost a month in 2013 as I conducted my initial research at the Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. David Tochterman, thanks for letting me crash during my first week in L.A. when I visited the RAND Corporation Archive. Cynthia Wang, thank you for letting me stay in your apartment that second week. Without your help, I would never have afforded to get this project off the ground—­let alone see it to completion. Thank you all from the bottom of my heart. A special word of thanks is necessary for Andrew Schrock, who has been not only an amazing colleague but also a wonderful editor and cheerleader for this project. Thank you Andrew, I am forever grateful for your friendship and support. This book would not have been possible without the support of my family, who has always believed in me. Mom, you’ve saved everything I’ve written—­ever. You’ve always supported me, even when my teachers didn’t. Dad, thanks for showing me how wires, screens, stems, and greens hide the secrets of the universe. Sarah, Josh, Gibson, and Brody, you always remind me of the things most important in life—­love, care, cats, pizza, and subs.

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And finally, I would like to thank my wife, Emma Trammell, for bearing with me as I considered, reconsidered, and reconsidered again every point I made in this text. Through sleepless nights and cranky mornings: thank you, Emma, for offering your steady hand and able mind to editing, reading, and discussing this manuscript. You have my heart, and this project wouldn’t have been the same without your help.

Notes

Introduction

1 Patrick Riley, “Racial Overtones of PR and Black Gamers . . . ,” Board Game Geek, June 5, 2004, https://boardgamegeek.com. 2 Chad Urso McDaniel, “Slavery,” Board Game Geek, March 11, 2003, https://boardgamegeek.com. 3 Cayey, “Puerto Rico the Racist Game,” Reddit, May 16, 2019, www.reddit.com. 4 From a private conversation. 5 Robin DiAngelo, White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Race (Boston: Beacon, 2018), 20. I recognize that the work of DiAngelo, as a white woman writing about race, work has been scrutinized in recent months. For some like John McWhorter, who wrote a critical review of the book from a Black perspective, it may even make the problem of whiteness worse. Despite these critiques, I find DiAngelo’s voice valuable in this discussion insofar as it highlights how the present conversation about whiteness is being discussed by many readers who share a similar white liberal mindset. John McWhorter, “The Dehumanizing Condescension of White Fragility,” Atlantic, July 15, 2020. 6 Settlers of Catan is another hugely popular modern board game. 7 As an aside, Richard Ham prominently sports a BLM tee when he reviews games on his popular review stream Rhado Runs Through today; Richard Ham, “Racial Overtones of PR and Black Gamers . . . ,” Board Game Geek, June 5, 2004. https:// boardgamegeek.com. 8 Paul Booth, Board Games as Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 3–­4. 9 Kishonna Gray, Intersectional Tech: Black Users in Digital Gaming (Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 2020); Safiya Noble, Algorithms of Oppression: How Search Engines Reinforce Racism (New York: New York University Press, 2018); Ruha Benjamin, Race after Technology: Abolitionist Tools for a New Jim Code (Medford, MA: Polity, 2019). 10 Noel Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White (New York: Routledge, 1995), 11. 11 T. L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-­Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012). 12 Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 13 Suzanne Scott, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2019).

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14 Sara Ahmed, The Cultural Politics of Emotion (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2004), 51; Sara Ahmed, “Happy Objects,” in The Affect Theory Reader, ed. Melissa Gregg and Gregory J. Seigworth (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2010), 32. 15 Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservativism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6. 16 A typical but telling headline from the New York Times in 2004 reads, “The Consequences of the 1960’s Race Riots Come into View.” Virginia Postrel, “The Consequences of the 1960’s Race Riots Come into View,” New York Times, December 30, 2004. 17 Morton Grodzins, “Metropolitan Segregation,” Scientific American 197, no. 4 (1957): 33–­41. 18 Kruse, White Flight, 9–­10. 19 Peggy McIntosh, “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack,” in White Privilege and Male Privilege: A Personal Account of Coming to See Correspondences through Work in Women’s Studies (self-­published, 1988), www.racialequitytools. org; DiAngelo, White Fragility. 20 Richard Dyer, “Whiteness: the Power of Invisibility,” in White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, 5th ed., ed. Paula S. Rothenberg (New York: Worth, 2016), 10. 21 Ignatiev, How the Irish Became White; David R. Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2018). 22 Rukmini Pande, Squee from the Margins: Fandom and Race (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2018), 8. 23 R. W. Connell and James W. Messerschmidt, “Hegemonic Masculinity: Rethinking the Concept,” Gender & Society 19, no. 2 (2005): 832. 24 Salter and Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media, 11–­12. 25 Debbie Ging, “Alphas, Betas, and Incels: Theorizing the Masculinities of the Manosphere,” Men and Masculinities 22, no. 4 (2017): 8. 26 Amanda Cote, Gaming Sexism: Gender and Identity in the Era of Casual Video Games (New York: New York University Press, 2020). 27 Patrick Crogan, Gameplay Mode: War, Simulation, and Technoculture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2011), xiii. 28 This insight has been noted by many other historians of the early internet. Fred Turner locates the networks of 1960s counterculture as the predecessors of 1980s computing. Kevin Driscoll considers how these networks—­bulletin board systems—­were composed of hobbyists. The dream of a democratic open network built on shared values is even echoed by Jessa Lingel in her work on how Craigslist continues to model the utopic promise of the early internet. See Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2006); Kevin Driscoll, “Social Media’s Dial-­Up Rooms,” IEEE Spectrum 53, no. 1 (2016);

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29

30 31 32

33 34 35 36

37 38

39

Jessa Lingel, An Internet for the People: The Politics and Promise of Craigslist (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020). Rukmini Pande and Swati Moitra, “‘Yes, the Evil Queen Is Latina!’: Racial Dynamics of Online Femslash Fandoms,” Journal of Transformative Works and Culture 24 (2017), para. 4, https://journal.transformativeworks.org. Matt Barton, Dungeons and Desktops: The History of Computer Role-­Playing Games (Natick, MA: A. K. Peters Press, 2008). André M. Carrington, Speculative Blackness: The Future of Race in Science Fiction (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2016). Mel Stanfill, “Doing Fandom, (Mis)doing Whiteness: Heteronormativity, Racialization, and the Discursive Construction of Fandom,” in “Race and Ethnicity in Fandom,” ed. Robin Anne Reid and Sarah Gatson, special issue of Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 8 (2011), para. 12. Aaron Trammell, “Black Analog Game Designers,” in Black Game Studies, ed. Lindsay Grace (Pittsburgh: ETC Press, 2021), 34–­56. Christina Dunbar-­Hester, Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019), 36. Kevin Driscoll, “Professional Work for Nothing: Revisiting Bill Gates’ ‘An Open Letter to Hobbyists,’” Information & Culture 50, no. 2 (2015): 1–­2. The most notorious of these accounts is Espen Aarseth’s Cybertext: Perspectives on Ergodic Literature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997). Janet Murray’s Hamlet on the Holodeck: The Future of Narrative in Cyberspace (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997) is often cited as an exemplar in this tradition. Noah Wardrip-­Fruin and Pat Harrigan, First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2004). In the academy, the new opportunities proved by virtual worlds encouraged a new paradigm of social science research and games where virtual worlds became laboratories of experimentation for researchers to consider how games might inform some of the larger research questions posed by their home fields. Standout research in this era includes the economic research on game economies done by Edward Castronova, work on games and learning done by James Paul Gee, Constance Steinkuehler, and Jen Jenson. In addition to work on games and learning, Tom Boellstoerff, Celia Pearch, Bonnie Nardi, and T. L. Taylor published a book on best practices for ethnographic virtual worlds research. Finally, the early methodological conversations that dominated the first wave grew into a conversation around values and processes in games epitomized by Ian Bogost’s concept of “procedural rhetoric” and Mary Flanagan’s exhaustive work in the book Critical Play. Shira Chess and Adrienne Shaw, “A Conspiracy of Fishes, or, How We Learned to Stop Worrying about #GamerGate and Embrace Hegemonic Masculinity,” Journal of Broadcasting and Electronic Media 59, no. 1 (2015): 208–­220. DiGRA stands for Digital Games Research Association. It is a global conference that serves as the main gathering point for game studies researchers.

196 | Notes

40 See Adrienne Shaw, Gaming at the Edge: Sexuality and Culture at the Margins of Gamer Culture (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015); Bonnie Ruberg, Video Games Have Always Been Queer (New York: New York University Press, 2019); Shira Chess, Ready Player Two: Women Gamers and Designed Identity (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2017); Gray, Intersectional Tech; Carly Kocurek, Coin-­Operated Americans: Rebooting Boyhood at the Video Game Arcade (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2015). 41 Nicholas Thiel Taylor, “Now You’re Playing with Audience Power: The Work of Watching Games,” Critical Studies in Media Communication 33, no. 4 (2016): 293–­ 307. 42 Chris Paul, The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture Is the Worst (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2018). 43 Alenda Chang, Playing Nature: Ecology in Video Games (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2019). 44 McKenzie Wark, Gamer Theory (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2004); Mia Consalvo, Cheating: Gaining Advantage in Video Games (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2009). 45 Dimitri Williams, Nicole Martins, Mia Consalvo, and James Ivory, “The Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games,” New Media and Society 11, no. 5 (2009): 815–­834. 46 Evan Torner, “Just (the Institution of) Computer Game Studies,” Analog Game Studies 5, no. 2 (2018), http://analoggamestudies.org. 47 José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding, eds., Role-­Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations (New York: Routledge, 2018); Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum, eds., Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016); Evan Torner and William White, Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-­Playing (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2012). 48 These are anthologized as the Knutepunkt Books at https://nordiclarp.org. 49 See Booth, Board Games as Media and Game Play: Paratextuality in Contemporary Board Games (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021). 50 See Gerald Vorhees’s excellent “The Character of Difference: Procedurality, Rhetoric, and Role-­Playing Games,” Game Studies 9, no. 2 (2009), http://gamestudies. org. In this article, Vorhees analyzes the computational processes that lie beneath role-­playing games. Although he does engage in some pointed references to the tabletop game Dungeons & Dragons, the majority of his writing engages with Final Fantasy, a console role-­playing game, instead. 51 Jonathan Dornbush, “Update: Critical Role Kickstarter Breaks Record, Reveals Episode Plans,” IGN, March 7, 2019, www.ign.com. Here I use the definition of “actual play” taken from the Diana Jones website: “a movement within hobby-­ games in which people record and broadcast their games—­usually campaigns of roleplaying games—­on the internet.” Anonymous, “The 2018 Award,” in The Diana Jones Award: For Excellence in Gaming, www.dianajonesaward.org.

Notes | 197

52 Charlie Hall, “Tabletop Games Dominated Kickstarter in 2018, While Video Games Declined,” Polygon, January 15, 2019, www.polygon.com. 53 Axel Bruns, Blogs, Wikipedia, Second-­Life, and Beyond: From Production to Produsage (New York: Peter Lang, 2008), 21.

1. Model Trains and Networks of Privilege

1 I’m speaking here of the early histories of video games intended for a popular readership, written by Steven Kent and Tristan Donovan, that established the genre. These books present a racialized and gendered history of video games that—­with some notable exceptions—­foregrounds the leadership of successful white men. Since the publication of these books, there has been some academic work published in MIT’s Game History series and Bloomsbury’s Influential Game Designers series that has been more critical in scope about the blind spots in this history. To learn more about the popular history of video games, see Steven Kent, The Ultimate History of Video Games: From Pong to Pokémon—­The Story Behind the Craze That Touched Our Lives and Changed the World (New York: Crown, 2001), and Tristan Donovan, Replay: The History of Video Games (East Sussex, UK: Yellow Ant, 2010). 2 Take, for example, Nolan Bushnell, the founder of Atari. He made his name in business through the skullduggery that was typical of his cohort. Pong, the game that made Atari successful, was stolen from the blueprint laid out in the Magnavox Odyssey’s lesser-­known game Tennis for Two. Bushnell thrived on impish tricks, and through them he was able to sustain Atari through its halcyon days in the 1970s. When he was eventually bought out and left without a job, he repeated the same process. This time he convinced investors to put their money into his novel idea for the pizza parlor Chuck E. Cheese. The details of Bushnell’s story are fraught with exceptionalism and white privilege. Bushnell succeeded only because the networks of white businessmen that he was embedded in wanted him to succeed. Because Bushnell cultivated a network of investors encouraged by his success, he was able to thrive despite his chicanery. Bushnell’s narrative may be just one, but it typifies the other narratives that constitute video game history. 3 Although its design is mainly credited to Steve Russell—­nicknamed “Slug” by his buddies—­a number of his peers at MIT contributed to the visioning and design of the game. Up to this point, computer games were more simplistic, like a game of tic-­tac-­toe or chess, for example. Games were mostly played on a tabletop, and none asked players to maneuver their token for real-­time battle. At the time, no game like Spacewar! existed. 4 Fred Turner and Christine Larson describe “network intellectuals” as the people who are able to profit from the collective intelligence and labor of a networked scene. “Networked Celebrity: Entrepreneurship and the New Public Intellectuals,” Public Culture 27, no. 1 (2015): 55. 5 Benjamin Woo, Getting a Life: The Social Worlds of Geek Culture (Montreal: McGill-­Queen’s University Press, 2018), 13–­14.

198 | Notes

6 Woo, Getting a Life, 10. 7 “Carlisle & Finch Trains” (Train Collectors Association, Western Division, n.d.), www.tcawestern.org; “Märklin Trains” (Train Collectors Association, Western Division, n.d.), www.tcawestern.org. 8 “History of Lionel Trains” (Lionel, n.d.), www.lionel.com. 9 The quote is from a letter sent to a fan by the Lionel Corporation. The letter is object ID 116.3240 at the Strong Museum of Play in Rochester, NY. 10 A. C. Kalmbach, “Highball!,” Model Railroader 1, no. 1 (1934): 1. 11 During Reconstruction, the US government promised liberated Black slaves forty acres of tillable land and a mule. Although this land was initially given to the population, the order was quickly reversed by President Andrew Johnson, who assumed the presidency following Lincoln’s assassination. 12 White-­owned companies in the period after World War II would even print advertisements mocking Black folk who tried to participate in white leisure activities. Grace Elizabeth Hale, Making Whiteness: The Culture of Segregation in the South 1890–­1940 (New York: Vintage, 1999), 156. 13 Laine Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table, a Love Letter: Archaeologies of Gender in Videogame History,” Game Studies 13, no. 2 (2013): para. 20. 14 Nooney, “A Pedestal, a Table, a Love Letter,” para. 7. 15 Erkki Huhtamo, “Slots of Fun, Slots of Trouble: An Archaeology of Arcade Gaming,” in Handbook of Computer Game Studies, ed. Joost Raessens and Jeffrey Goldstein (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2005), 3–­21. 16 Steven Levy, Hackers: Heroes of the Computer Revolution (Cambridge, MA: O’Reilly, 2010), 7–­8. Peter Samson was a new member of the Tech Model Railroad Club and the figure whom Levy uses to show how members of the club would work together to tinker with the early computers that were also housed in the building. 17 Levy, Hackers, 8. 18 Levy, Hackers. 19 “Blacks at MIT History Project” (MIT Libraries, January 13, 1998), https://libraries.mit.edu. 20 Robert M. Gray, “Coeducation at MIT: 1950s–­60s + Epilog: The Enduring Bottleneck of Women Engineering Faculty” (Stanford, CA: Stanford University, Gender/Race Imperative Speaker Series, October 25, 2017), 10–­11, https:// ee.stanford.edu. 21 Levy, Hackers, 25. 22 Levy, Hackers. 23 Levy, Hackers, 28. 24 T. L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2012), 111–­112. 25 A statistic that was observed by Robert Fleming at the time and published in Innisfree: The MIT Journal of Free Inquiry. Robert Fleming, “The Negro and MIT,” Innisfree: The MIT Journal of Free Inquiry, February 1968.

Notes | 199

26 Craig Steven Wilder, Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (New York: Bloomsbury, 2013), 10. 27 Stefano Harney and Fred Moten, The Undercommons: Fugitive Planning and Black Study (Brooklyn, NY: Autonomedia, 2013), 28. 28 Levy, Hackers, 23.

2. Avalon Hill’s Race Problem

1 Avalon Hill, “$quander Endorsed by Millionaire: Millionaire Magazine, December, Features the $quander Story,” Avalon Hill General 2, no. 4 (1965): 1. 2 Avalon Hill, “General McAuliffe Added to Advisory Staff,” Avalon Hill General 1, no. 6 (1964): 1. 3 The same mechanic has been reused in modern board games like Last Will (2011), which is also a race to bankruptcy. 4 Mary Pilon, “Monopoly’s Inventor: The Progressive Who Didn’t Pass ‘Go,’” New York Times, February 13, 2015. 5 The Strategy of Technology is a key text in modern military strategy that suggests a method for how the advancement of military technology could be instrumental in maintaining a military advantage. 6 In Cotton’s obituary in the National Vanguard, he is quoted as saying, “You haven’t lived until you have been called an anti-­Semite.” Kevin Alfred Strom, “A Tribute to Richard Cotton,” National Vanguard, October 26, 2010, https://nationalvanguard.org. 7 As this chapter will describe in greater detail later, Avalon Hill’s games heavily emphasized squad-­level combat, dice rolling, and probabilistic resolution. The RAC was a military think tank, much like RAND, that was located in Virginia. Here, Pournelle participated in a variety of logistics simulations that were slow moving and analytical. By all accounts of his description, they seem like variants of The Cold War Game, a role-­playing game that Herbert Goldhamer designed for RAND. 8 Jerry Pournelle, “Simulating the Art of War,” Avalon Hill General 7, nos. 5–­6 (1971): 8. 9 Pournelle, “Simulating the Art of War,” 8. 10 The quantitative and statistical efforts of other fans of Diplomacy were of great interest to Pournelle. He concluded “Simulating the Art of War” by noting that one fan, Edi Birsan (whom I discuss in more detail in chapter 3), was doing great work in developing a more advanced combat matrix. Birsan’s tables were useful for Pournelle because they quickly produced results that accurately represented the complexity of the phenomenon they were representing. For Pournelle, representing the complexity of phenomena through statistics was the mark of good developmental work. Birsan’s development of statistics was an encouraging sign that simulation might eventually be playable within a reasonable time frame. 11 Peter P. Perla, “Operations Research, Systems Analysis, and Wargaming: Riding the Cycle of Research,” in Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming, ed. Pat Harrigan and Matthew G. Kirschenbaum (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2016), 173. 12 “Chit” is slang for the small cardboard tokens used in board and wargames.

200 | Notes

13 Text quoted from the back of the box of Afrika Korps (1964). 14 Avalon Hill, “Hilary Smith Appointed South Atlantic Editor,” Avalon Hill General 1, no. 1 (1964): 2. 15 Avalon Hill, “Pacific Coast Editorship to Basketballer—­Jon Perica,” Avalon Hill General 1, no. 1 (1964): 4. 16 Avalon Hill, “Southwest Editor’s Post to Air Man-­Sgt. Louis Zocchi,” Avalon Hill General 1, no. 1 (1964): 3. 17 Avalon Hill, “General McAuliffe Added to Advisory Staff,” 1. 18 “Opponents Wanted,” Avalon Hill General 1, no. 1 (1964): 11. 19 Len Lakofoka, “Avalon Hill Philosophy—­Part 26,” Avalon Hill General 7, no. 6 (1971): 2. 20 Robert S. Wistrich, “Introduction: Lying about the Holocaust,” in Holocaust Denial: The Politics of Perfidy, ed. Robert S. Wistrich (Boston: De Gruyter, 2012), 5. 21 Avalon Hill, “Cover Story: Who Really Started World War II?,” Avalon Hill General 8, no. 3 (1971): 2–­3. 22 In chapter 3 I delve more deeply into how the communities of white flight and hobby gaming dovetail with one another. Chief among my takeaways is that hobbyists found one another and retreated into basements and fanzines in an effort to insulate themselves from a perception of turbulent protest in urban spaces. 23 Avalon Hill, “Cover Story,” 2. 24 Avalon Hill, “Cover Story,” 2.

3. The Hobby Diplomacy Scene

1 Nicholas A. Ulanov, “DIPCON VI,” Pouch 17 (1973): 7–­9, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive, Bowling Green State University Libraries, Bowling Green, OH. 2 Larry Peery, “Chicago: A Month Later,” Xenogogic 5, no. 1 (1972): 7, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 3 Hobbyists in the community endeavored to make ends meet so that they could continue publishing. This was considered to be in the best interests of both their fanzines and the greater community. 4 The Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines is a fan document from 1992 that compiled a comprehensive list of all Diplomacy fanzines published in North America. It encompasses 768 entries with titles, publishers, locations, years published, last known issues, and general trivia for all the Diplomacy zines published from 1961 to 1992. Jim Meinel admits in the introduction that the increasing accessibility of online bulletin board forums led to a lack of what he refers to as “top flight” zines in the late 1980s. He uses this point about prestige to justify the Encyclopedia’s seemingly arbitrary thirty-­year scope. Nonetheless, many of the zines that were founded toward the end of this timeline continued for a good deal of time after the Encyclopedia ceased publication. It continues to be a valuable resource today. For example, much of the bibliographic data used by the Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive—­which houses the Hoosier Collection of Diplomacy Fanzines—­was pieced together by cross-­referencing their collection

Notes | 201

with the information provided in Meinel’s Encyclopedia. Jim Meinel, Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines (Alaska: Great White North Publications, 1992), http:// diplom.org. 5 Because this visualization shows only the scope and geography of fanzines as they accumulate over time but doesn’t show how fanzines enter and exit this discourse, it cannot be relied on to show how things changed geographically over time. A more accurate reflection of this dynamic would show clusters that thinned out more over time in urban areas and occasionally flickered on and off in rural areas. That being said, I prefer this cumulative visualization more than I would have preferred the alternative because I feel like it visually represents the impact and growth of ideas geographically. 6 Kevin Kruse, White Flight: Atlanta and the Making of Modern Conservativism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2005), 6. 7 Meinel, Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines, vi. 8 See figure 1.2 for an example. 9 Sara Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” Social Text 22, no. 2 (2004): 126. 10 Ahmed, “Affective Economies,” 126. 11 The clash between the old guard of hobbyists and the new guard of technologically savvy hobby game geeks is described in detail in chapter 6. 12 Penelope Naughton Dickens, “Censorship and the Press Release,” Pouch 31 (1973): 9, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 13 Although this issue would later be discussed in other zines, at first it was confined only to discussion within the Pouch, most likely due to the fact that the Pouch was one of the few zines that would publish editorial content, such as political columns, with no connection to the game itself. Eventually, however, the discussion spread to other zines, such as the Mixumaxu Gazette, in which other political perspectives were debated. 14 Pouch 19 (1973): 18, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 15 Douglas Kellner, “The Frankfurt School and British Cultural Studies: The Missed Articulation,” in Rethinking the Frankfurt School, ed. Jeffrey T. Nealon and Caren Irr (Buffalo: State University of New York Press, 2002), 32. 16 Michel Foucault, The History of Sexuality, vol. 1: An Introduction (New York: Vintage, 1990), 95. 17 Gil Neiger would eventually inherit the position of editor-­in-­chief of the Pouch from Nicholas Ulanov after Ulanov graduated from high school. 18 Shelby Steele, “White Guilt,” American Scholar 59, no. 4 (1990): 498. 19 Suzanne Scott, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2019), 74–­75. 20 Robert Lipton, “The Care and Feeding of Press Releases,” Mixumaxu Gazette 6 (1973): 8, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 21 In his description of white enclaves, or “sundown towns,” James W. Loewen describes how a reputation for violence toward Black people is used as an informal way to police the borders of white suburbs. James W. Loewen,

202 | Notes

Sundown Towns: A Hidden Dimension of American Racism (New York: Touchstone, 2005), 92. 22 This approach to politics was absent in many other Diplomacy fanzines such as Graustark, Fredonia, and Ruritania, which focused on the game only. These more conservative groups of hobbyists along with Larry Peery and Jerry Pournelle, whom this chapter treats with more detail later, would frequently publish articles on war, military technology, and history. Although these articles rarely addressed the political causes of the moment, they treated their highly conservative subject manner uncritically, thus reinforcing a white supremacist and militaristic historical narrative. 23 As of November 1973, the Pouch had subscribers in twenty-­four states, two territories of Canada, Belgium, and England. Penelope Naughton Dickens, Duncan K. Smith, and Nicholas A. Ulanov. “Introduction,” Pouch 36 (1973): 2, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 24 Nicholas A. Ulanov, “Why I’m for Impeachment,” Pouch 35 (1973): 3, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 25 Ulanov, “Why I’m for Impeachment,” 4. 26 Martin Luther King Jr., “‘Hungry Club Forum Speech,’ May 10, 1967, Butler Street YMCA, Atlanta, GA,” Atlantic, February 2018, www.theatlantic.com. 27 Malcolm X, “‘The Ballot or the Bullet,’ King Solomon Baptist Church, Detroit, MI, April 12, 1964,” American RadioWorks (2022), https://americanradioworks. publicradio.org. 28 Lipton was nineteen years old when he began publishing the Mixumaxu Gazette. 29 Robert Lipton, Mixumaxu Gazette 1 (1973): 5, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 30 Kruse, White Flight, 6. 31 Lipton refers to the nomination of Millard Fillmore in 1972 as a comedic example of this idea’s legitimacy. 32 Mixumaxu Gazette, no. 8 (1973): 5. 33 For more on the prisoners’ rights movement, see Eric Cummins, The Rise and Fall of California’s Radical Prison Movement (Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 1994). 34 Angela Y. Davis, “Speech Delivered at the Embassy Auditorium, Los Angeles, California, June 9, 1972,” American RadioWorks (2022), http://americanradioworks.publicradio.org. 35 Kruse, White Flight, 6. 36 RAND is short for research and development. The RAND Corporation is a nonprofit think tank that has been active since 1948. The US Air Force has historically contracted and consulted with RAND to gain support on questions relating to nuclear posture, nuclear deterrence, psychological warfare, and much more. Famously, RAND helped to popularize game theory as a strategy for nuclear deterrence during the Cold War. 37 Game theory describes a status quo between opposing groups that allows players to strategize small incremental gains over time. It allows parties who come to a

Notes | 203

dilemma from a position of strength to maximize their gains by minimizing their losses. In this sense, it was an ideal framework for the white hobbyist community to tinker with and adapt to their designs. Game theory is a mechanism not only for achieving and maintaining the status quo but also for excelling within it. In short, game theory became the strategy of white supremacy within the hobbyist community. 38 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 4, no. 4 (1968): 9, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 39 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 1, no. 1 (1967): 1, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 40 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 4, no. 4.5 (1971): 3, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 41 Larry Peery, Peerinalis 1, no. 2 (1971): 2–­3, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 42 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973): 16, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 43 Larry Peery, Peerinalis 1, no. 2 (1971): 1, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 44 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 6, no. 3 (1973): 46, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. Perry’s list continues in Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973). 45 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973): 24, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 46 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 5, no. 1 (1972): 7, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 47 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973): 24, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 48 Lincoln Bloomfield and Cornelius Gearin, “Games Foreign Policy Experts Play: The Political Exercise Comes of Age,” Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973): 36, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 49 Bloomfield and Gearin, “Games Foreign Policy Experts Play.” 50 Stefan T. Possony and Jerry Pournelle, The Strategy of Technology (1970; Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997). 51 Larry Peery, Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973): 88, Ray Browne Popular Culture Archive. 52 Peery, Xenogogic 6, no. 4 (1973): 88. 53 Tara McPherson, “Why Are the Digital Humanities So White? Or, Rethinking the Histories of Race and Computation,” in Debates in the Digital Humanities, ed. Matthew K. Gold (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2012), paras. 5–­6.

4. The Alarums & Excursions Community and Belonging

1 A&E citations are included in the notes to this chapter in the following format: author, A&E issue number, month and year, page number(s). 2 Paul Mason, “In Search of the Self: A Survey of the First 25 Years of Anglo-­ American Role-­Playing Game Theory,” in Beyond Role and Play: Tools, Toys and Theory for Harnessing the Imagination, ed. Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (Helsinki: Ropecon, 2004). 3 In Textual Poachers Henry Jenkins characterizes filk music as one of many modes of fan engagement. Notably filk relies on “found musical material” and “involves the skillful management of heteroglossia, the evocation and inflection of previously circulated materials.” Henry Jenkins, Textual Poachers: Television Fans and Participatory Culture (London: Routledge, 1992), 253. 4 Although Dungeons & Dragons creator Gary Gygax often chose to publish his thoughts through Dragon (the magazine published by his company TSR Hob-

204 | Notes

bies), he would occasionally publish in A&E as well. Authors publishing in A&E were keenly invested in the understanding and development of Dungeons & Dragons. They would publish exposés on the game’s mechanics, offer modifications to help adapt the game to their play style, and share their own home-­brew games with interested players. To define the fans publishing in A&E as occupying a single category such as “consumer,” “publisher,” “author,” or “designer” would be inaccurate. 5 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2005). 6 A&E 2, July 1975, 4. 7 Jon Peterson, Playing at the World: A History of Simulating Wars, People, and Fantastic Adventure from Chess to Role-­Playing Games (San Diego, CA: Unreason Press, 2012). 8 Cory Doctorow, “How Gary Gygax Lost Control of D&D and TSR,” BoingBoing, August 12, 2014, https://boingboing.net; David Kushner, “Dungeon Master: The Life and Legacy of Gary Gygax,” Wired, March 10, 2008, www.wired.com. 9 Peterson, Playing at the World. 10 William White, Tabletop RPG Design in Theory and Practice at the Forge, 2001–­ 2012: Designs and Discussions (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020). 11 Nick Mizer, “‘Fun in a Different Way’: Rhythms of Engagement and Non-­ immersive Play Agendas,” Analog Game Studies 1, no. 1 (2014). 12 Gary Fine, Shared Fantasy: Role-­Playing Games as Social Worlds (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1983). 13 Steven Dashiell has written about how the practice of rules lawyering in role-­ playing games furthers systems of hegemonic masculinity at the game table. Nick LaLone and Matt Barton have also written about the influence of Dungeons & Dragons on computer role-­playing games. This chapter connects these two arguments by reading Dungeons & Dragons as an influential and popular medium that models hegemonic masculinity with its systems. See Steven Dashiell, “Rules Lawyering as Symbolic and Linguistic Capital,” Analog Game Studies 4, no. 5 (2017); Nick LaLone, “A Tale of Dungeons & Dragons and the Origin of the Game Platform,” Analog Game Studies 6, no. 3 (2019); and Matt Barton, Dungeons & Desktops (Wellesley, MA: A. K. Peters, 2008). 14 Karen Hellekson and Kristina Busse, The Fan Fiction Studies Reader (Iowa City: University of Iowa Press, 2013), 11. 15 Michael Saler, As If: Modern Enchantment and the Literary Prehistory of Virtual Reality (New York: Oxford University Press, 2012). 16 Dick Eney, A&E 6, November–­December 1975, 25. 17 Dick Eney, A&E 6, November–­December 1975, 25–­32. 18 Dick Eney, A&E 6, November–­December 1975, 25. 19 Dick Eney, A&E 6, November–­December 1975, 25. 20 Dick Eney, A&E 6, November–­December 1975, 25.

Notes | 205

21 Michelle Nephew, “Playing with Identity: Unconscious Desire and Role-­Playing Games,” in Gaming as Culture: Chapters on Reality, Identity and Experience in Fantasy Games, ed. Sean Q. Hendricks, J. Patrick Williams, and W. Keith Winkler (Jefferson, NC: McFarland, 2006). 22 Eliot Wieslander, “Rules of Engagement,” in Montola and Stenros, Beyond Role and Play, 181. 23 John Eric Holmes, “Confessions of a Dungeon Master,” Psychology Today, November 1980, 84–­94. 24 Samuel Konkin III, A&E 7, January 1976, 39–­42. 25 Samuel Konkin III, A&E 19, February 1977, 63. 26 Samuel Konkin III, A&E 7, January 1976, 40. 27 Samuel Konkin III, A&E 7, January 1976, 41. 28 Lee Gold, A&E 8, February 1976, 9. 29 Dick Eney, A&E 8, February 1976, 42. 30 Dan Pierson, A&E 8, February 1976, 51. 31 Sherna, A&E 10, April 1976, 54. 32 Katherine van Wormer, “Restorative Justice as Social Justice for Victims of Gendered Violence: A Standpoint Feminist Perspective,” Social Work 54, no. 2 (2009): 107.

5. Geek Culture Goes Digital

1 The Dragon was TSR Hobbies’ magazine that was used to support the Dungeons & Dragons community. 2 Luke Gygax has been embraced by the new and emerging generation of hobby game geeks, while Ernie’s work has been supported mostly by a conservative fringe contingent of the old guard. 3 FLGS is short for “friendly local game store.” A common refrain in hobby publications is encouraging consumers to buy games from FLGS shops as opposed to big-­box stores, online stores, or shops that are out of network. 4 The Game Manufacturers Association publishes a monthly paper magazine titled GAMA. This magazine, however, is industry facing and thus not commonly displayed for sale at hobby shops. 5 According to an article citing Board Game Geek creator Scott Alden. Mark Morrise, “A Brief History of BGG,” Board Game Geek (2017), item 3, https://boardgamegeek.com. 6 As I describe in detail in chapter 2, these games allow for a simulationist perspective on history that encourages players to tinker with “what if ” situations where either the Confederates or Nazis win their respective wars. 7 Morrise, “Brief History of BGG,” item 2. 8 Fred Turner, From Counterculture to Cyberculture: Stewart Brand, the Whole Earth Network, and the Rise of Digital Utopianism (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2008), 33.

206 | Notes

9 Pierre Lévy, Collective Intelligence: Mankind’s Emerging World in Cyberspace (New York: Plenum Trade, 1995), 11. 10 The General, for example, ran a monthly column titled “Avalon Hill Philosophy” where they would print articles that were specific articulations of how they designed their simulationist games. 11 Emily Care Boss, “Key Concepts in Forge Theory,” in Playground Worlds, ed. Markus Montola and Jaakko Stenros (Helsinki: Ropecon, 2008). 12 Evan Torner, “RPG Theorizing by Designers and Players,” in Role-­Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations, ed. José P. Zagal and Sebastian Deterding (New York: Routledge, 2018), 198. 13 GNS Theory is an ideology in game design that Ron Edwards positioned as foundational within the Big Model. 14 William J. White, “‘Actual Play’ and the Forge Tradition,” in The Wyrd Con Companion Book, ed. Sarah Lynne Bowman (Mountain View, CA: Creative Commons, 2015), 85. 15 Vincent Baker, “The Big Model, RIP,” Storygames, 2015, www.story-games.com. 16 Torner, “RPG Theorizing by Designers and Players,” 192. 17 Tiziana Terranova, “Free Labor: Producing Culture for the Digital Economy,” Social Text 18, no. 2 (2000): 33. 18 T. L. Taylor, “The Assemblage of Play,” Games and Culture 4, no. 4 (2009): 332. 19 Lisa Nakamura, “Race In/For Cyberspace: Identity Tourism and Racial Passing on the Internet,” Work and Days, no. 13 (1995). 20 Sarah Banet-­Weiser, Authentic: The Politics of Ambivalence in a Brand Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012): 37. 21 Banet-­Weiser, Authentic, 80. 22 See Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2015). 23 Aaron Trammell, “Deodorizing the Geek Gamer,” First Person Scholar, June 20, 2018, www.firstpersonscholar.com. 24 Megan Condis, “‘We Don’t Cut Corners’: Wendy’s Feast of Legends and the Subversion of Gamified Advertising,” Analog Game Studies 8, no. 1 (2021): para. 12, https://analoggamestudies.org. 25 For the uninitiated, Knudepunkt is “a yearly gaming convention focused on arty larp that rotates its way around Denmark, Sweden (Knutpunkt), Finland (Solmukohta), and Norway (Knutepunkt), changing its name according to the local language.” Lizzie Stark, Leaving Mundania (Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2012), 195. 26 Henry Jenkins, Convergence Culture: Where Old and New Media Collide (New York: New York University Press, 2006), 210. 27 Paul Booth, Board Games as Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 101–­102. 28 Aaron Trammell, “The Ludic Imagination: A History of Role-­Playing Games, Politics, and Simulation in Cold War America, 1954–­1984” (PhD diss., Rutgers University, 2015), 63.

Notes | 207

29 Sarah Whitten, “‘Dungeons and Dragons’ Kickstarter Breaks Record with $11.3 Million Campaign,” CNBC, April 19, 2019. 30 This profit model is not consistent in all digital games. Indie game designers often work with small teams within a precarious model similar to that which supports most hobby games. 31 According to their LinkedIn profile, Days of Wonder employs around eighteen workers. 32 Andrew Schrock and Samantha Close, “Hotspot3—­Civic Kickstarters,” Confessions of an ACA-­Fan, May 24, 2013, para. 7, http://henryjenkins.org. 33 Jamey Stegmaier, A Crowdfunder’s Strategy Guide: Build a Better Business by Building Community (Oakland, CA: Berrett-­Koehler, 2015), 179. 34 Cynthia Wang, “The Promise of Kickstarter: Extents to Which Social Networks Enable Alternate Avenues of Economic Viability for Independent Musicians through Crowdsourcing,” Social Media and Society 2, no. 3 (2016): 8. 35 In interviews I conducted with folks in the hobby game industry, all related constantly working ten-­to twelve-­hour days just to make ends meet. But as T. L. Taylor noted in her ethnography of live streamers, for most the benefits of this lifestyle far outweigh the downsides of their old jobs. T. L. Taylor, Watch Me Play: Twitch and the Rise of Game Live Streaming (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2018), 91. 36 Stephen Duncombe, Notes from the Underground: Zines and the Politics of Alternative Culture (Bloomington, IN: Microcosm, 2008), 186.

6. Hobby Games Today

1 Tom Vasel, “From Tom . . . ,” Board Game Geek, June 4, 2020, http://boardgamegeek.com. 2 Vasel, “From Tom . . . .” 3 Tom Vasel and Eric Lang, “Gaming in a Social and Political World,” Dice Tower, June 6, 2019, www.dicetower.com. 4 Famously, Gates wrote “An Open Letter to Hobbyists” to others in the personal computer programming hobby to discuss the potential commercialization of hobby computing. Less famously, Gates copped to being a geek in an interview with the Telegraph. Bill Gates, “An Open Letter to Hobbyists,” Homebrew Computer Club Newsletter, January 1976; Mary Riddell, “Bill Gates: ‘If You Don’t Like Geeks, You’re in Trouble,’” Telegraph, October 20, 2010. 5 In gaming, Sid Meier is a perfect example of borrowing from the hobby to cultivate a career in the industry. Meier was able to transform hobby board games like 1830 and Civilization into best-­selling and genre-­defining computer game franchises like Railroad Tycoon and Civilization. 6 Kimberlé Crenshaw, “Demarginalizing the Intersection of Race and Sex: A Black Feminist Critique of Antidiscrimination Doctrine, Feminist Theory and Antiracist Politics,” University of Chicago Legal Forum 1989, no. 1 (1989): 140. 7 See the following articles, among many others: Patton Oswald, “Wake Up Geek Culture, Time to Die,” Wired, December 27, 2010; Andrew Harrison, “Rise of

208 | Notes

8 9 10

11 12 13 14 15 16 17 18 19

20 21 22 23 24 25 26

the New Geeks: How the Outsiders Won,” Guardian, September 2, 2013; Noam Cohen, “We’re All Geeks Now,” New York Times, September 14, 2014. T. L. Taylor, Raising the Stakes: E-­Sports and the Professionalization of Computer Gaming (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 2012), 111–­112. Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017), 11–­12. Salter and Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media; Christina Dunbar-­Hester, Hacking Diversity: The Politics of Inclusion in Open Technology Cultures (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2019); Suzanne Scott, Fake Geek Girls: Fandom, Gender, and the Convergence Culture Industry (New York: New York University Press, 2019). Scott Alden, “Welcome to a New Look for Board Game Geek!,” Board Game Geek, August 6, 2019, https://boardgamegeek.com. Dunbar-­Hester, Hacking Diversity, 13. A. A. George, “Gaming’s Race Problem: Gen Con and Beyond,” Tor, August 13, 2014, www.tor.com. Charlie Hall, “Racist Magic: The Gathering Cards Banned, Removed from the Database by the Publisher,” Polygon, June 20, 2020, www.polygon.com. David McRoy, “Wizards Ends Their Relationship with Terese Nielsen,” Hipsters of the Coast, June 19, 2020. www.hipstersofthecoast.com. Cass Marshall, “Wizards of the Coast Is Addressing Racist Stereotypes in Dungeons & Dragons,” Polygon, June 23, 2020, www.polygon.com. Siobhan Roberts, “She Invented a Board Game with Scientific Integrity: It’s Taking Off,” New York Times, March 11, 2019. Sheryl Sandberg, Lean In: Women, Work, and the Will to Lead (New York: Knopf, 2013). Maurizio Lazzarato, “Immaterial Labor,” in Radical Thought in Italy: A Potential Politics, ed. Michael Hardt and Paulo Virno, trans. Paul Colilli and Ed Emery (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 134. Adam Arviddson, “Brands: A Critical Perspective,” Journal of Consumer Culture 5, no. 2 (2005): 243–­244. Paul Booth, Board Games as Media (New York: Bloomsbury, 2021), 185. Luke Plunkett, “Board Gaming’s Industry Body Refuses to Say a Word about Black Lives Mattering,” Kotaku, June 11, 2020, www.kotaku.com.au. Tom admits this early in the video “Gaming in a Social and Political World.” Damon White, “Interview with Peter Atkinson,” Gaming Report, March 24, 2002, www.webcitation.org. bell hooks, Understanding Patriarchy (Louisville, TN: Louisville Anarchist Federation, 2010), 2, https://imaginenoborders.org. Nick Taylor and Gerald Vorhees, “Introduction: Masculinity and Gaming: Mediated Masculinities in Play,” in Masculinities in Play, ed. Nick Taylor and Gerald Vorhees (London: Palgrave Macmillan, 2018), 5.

Notes | 209

27 Taylor, Raising the Stakes, 111–­112. 28 Actual play is a genre of streaming. In an actual play video, a group of players record their game session of Dungeons & Dragons or of a similar role-­ playing game. Actual play videos differ from role-­playing games that aren’t streamed as they assume that they will be watched and thus tend to be more performative. 29 Elaine Bladukiené and Efka Bladuka, “The Wonderful and Brutal World of 18xx Games,” No Pun Included, July 17, 2020, www.youtube.com/ watch?v=QErygzM4W_Y. 30 According to their LinkedIn page, there are around eighteen employees. www. linkedin.com. 31 In “Inclusion, Diversity, and Representation in Board Games and Beyond,” Elizabeth Hargrave details how she perceives present inequities in the hobby game scene. Although there are perspectives that agree and disagree with Hargrave, the voices that agree are effusive. For example, quotes like the following are common: “Thank you so much for this article, Elizabeth. It was such a great read! As a queer person who mostly plays games with women and other queer people, I, and most of my friends, have definitely felt somewhat excluded and uncomfortable when we go into a board game shop or a board game café.”. Hargrave, “Inclusion, Diversity, and Representation in Board Games and Beyond,” Stonemaier Games, July 23, 2020, https:// stonemaiergames.com. 32 Erin Ryan, “Gender Representation in Board Game Cover Art,” Cardboard Republic, June 29, 2016, www.cardboardrepublic.com. 33 Tanya Pobuda, “Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry,” Analog Game Studies 5, no. 4 (2018): paras. 22–­23 and 29. 34 Saidiya V. Hartman, Scenes of Subjection: Terror, Slavery, and Self-­Making in Nineteenth Century America (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997), 7. 35 Specifically, whiteness in America is often the product of a racist assimilation process that David R. Roediger terms “Americanizing.” Roediger, Working toward Whiteness: How America’s Immigrants Became White (New York: Basic Books, 2018), 9–­10. 36 Paula S. Rothenberg, ed., White Privilege: Essential Readings on the Other Side of Racism, 5th ed. (New York: Worth, 2016), 3.

Conclusion

1 Stephen Conway, “Made for Play: Board Games and Modern Industry,” YouTube, July 15, 2012, www.youtube.com/watch?v=uvrmG7G7XqU. 2 Andrew Gebhart, “How Frosthaven Raised 12.9M and Became the Biggest Game in Kickstarter History,” CNET, May 13, 2020, www.cnet.com. 3 Charlie Hall, “Gloomhaven, Blades in the Dark Publishers Break Ties with Tabletop CEO Accused of Assault,” Polygon, August 20, 2021, www.polygon.com.

210 | Notes

4 Anastasia Salter and Bridget Blodgett, Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media: Sexism, Trolling, and Identity Policing (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2017). 5 Tanya Pobuda, “Assessing Gender and Racial Representation in the Board Game Industry,” Analog Game Studies 5, no. 4 (2018): para. 29, https://analoggamestudies.org. 6 Tanya Pobuda and Shelly Jones, “An Analysis of Gender Inclusive Language and Imagery in Top-­Ranked Board Game Rulebooks,” Analog Game Studies 8, no. 2 (2020), https://analoggamestudies.org.

Index

Figures are denoted by fig following page numbers Adobe design suite, 144 Afrika Korps, 55, 57, 61–­62, 140 agency, 122, 184 Ahmed, Sara, 6, 87 Akil, Omari, 187 Alarums & Excursions conflict in, 117–­118 Courtesan and, 118 Damsel and, 124–­125 decrease in women contributing to, 127 divergent politics and, 23 exclusion and, 139–­140 gender inclusion and, 184–­185 Gygax and, 111–­112 hegemonic masculinity and, 117 in historical context, 135 homogeneity and, 112–­113 inclusivity and, 131–­132 start of, 109, 110–­111 Alden, Scott, 139, 140–­141, 161–­162 Alder, Avery, 23, 164 amateur publishing associations, description of, 111. See also play-­by-­mail publishing loops. Analog Game Studies, 21 Anthropy, Anna, 23 antifeminism, 10–­11 Apocalypse World, 141, 142–­143 Arcadia Quest, 156 Arneson, Dave, 116 Arviddson, Adam, 1673 Asmodee Games, 165–­166, 167, 167fig assemblage of play, 143–­144

assemblage of work, 143–­144 Atkinson, Peter, 169 Atlas, 38, 39fig Attica Correctional Facility, 98 authenticity, 145, 149–­150 autonomy, 152, 187–­188 Avalon Hill games of, 58–­63 Gettysburg and, 51 military elite and, 54, 57 Pournelle and, 105 Smith and, 113 $quander and, 51–­54, 52fig summary of, 181 Avalon Hill General Black erasure in, 34 cover art for, 70–­7 1fig editorial staff of, 63–­66 fan culture and, 111 glorification of disgraced in, 68–­74 marketing and, 33 military elite and, 12 opinion columns in, 61 “Opponents Wanted” section of, 66–­ 68, 75, 84, 135 Pournelle and, 55, 57 privilege and, 181 $quander and, 51–­53, 52fig white supremacy and, 61, 69, 74–­76, 114, 181–­182 Baker, Meguey, 141 Baker, Vincent, 141, 142–­143 211

212 | Index

Banet-­Weiser, Sarah, 145, 146, 150 Bang! 137 Bannon, Steve, 18 Battle of the Bulge, 65 Beasley, Philip, 64 Benjamin, Ruha, 5 Big Model, 142–­143 Birsan, Edi, 57–­58, 79, 89–­90 Black erasure, 34 Black Lives Matter (BLM), 155, 156, 157, 164, 168 Black National Political Convention, 90 Bladuka, Efka, 171 Bladukiené, Elaine, 171 Blitzkrieg, 62 Blizzard Entertainment, 149 Blodgett, Bridget, 6, 10, 160–­161, 180 Blood Rage, 156 Bloomfield, Lincoln, 104–­105, 106 Board Game Geek, 1, 23, 33, 135, 136–­141, 143, 146–­147, 151, 153, 161–­162, 163fig, 166, 185–­186 Board Games as Media (Booth), 147, 168 BoingBoing, 116 Bonaparte, Napoleon, 74 Booth, Paul, 21, 147, 168 Boss, Emily Care, 142 branding, 145–­148, 150, 153, 167–­168, 172 Breitbart, 18 Broken Token, 178 Brown v. Board of Education, 7 Bruns, Axel, 22 Bulge, Battle of the, 65 Bull Run, First Battle of, 73 bulletin board systems (BBSs), 84 Carlisle & Finch, 31 Carrington, André, 13 Catan Studio, 166 censorship, 88–­89, 90–­91, 92, 93, 96 Cephalofair Games, 178 Chang, Alenda, 18 chaos, fears of, 95–­96

Cheating (Consalvo), 19 Chess, Shira, 17, 18 Churchill, Winston, 73 Civil Rights Act, 7 civil rights/civil rights movement, 87, 89, 96, 97–­98, 104, 107, 174, 182–­183 Civil War, 60–­61, 73 Close, Samantha, 149 CMON Games, 156, 166 collective intelligence, 141 colonialism, 174 communalism, 141 Condis, Megan, 146 CONEX II, 104–­105 Confederate generals, 73, 74–­75, 182 Connell, R. W., 10 Consalvo, Mia, 19 consent, 122, 129–­130, 131, 184 Convergence Culture (Jenkins), 111 Cool Stuff Inc., 166 Cosby Show, The, 158 Costikiyan, Greg, 88 Cote, Amanda, 11 Cotton, Richard, 55 Courtesan, 117–­124, 120fig, 121fig, 123fig, 126–­128, 130, 184 COVID-­19, 177 Critical Role, 22, 148, 170–­171 Crosby’s Hobby Center, 45 Crowdfunder’s Strategy Guide, A (Stegmaier), 150 crowdfunding, 144, 147–­148, 149–­150, 151, 153, 170–­171, 172 Cultural Politics of Emotion, The (Ahmed), 6 cultural tourism, 145 cyber utopianism, 140–­141 Damsel, 117–­118, 124–­128, 130, 184 Davis, Angela, 98–­99 Days of Wonder, 149, 166, 171 de Certeau, Michel, 80 de Gaulle, Charles, 73

Index | 213

deepfakes, 145 Der erzwungene Krieg (Hoggen), 72 desegregation, 7–­8, 86, 107–­108 Deterding, Sebastian, 21 Diablo, 149 DiAngelo, Robin, 1, 8–­9 Dice Tower, 139, 155–­156, 157–­158, 157fig, 166, 168, 171, 172 Dickens, Penelope Naughton, 79, 88–­91, 93, 94, 96, 107 digital economy, 172–­173 digital media/technology branding and, 145 diversity and, 161 infrastructure and, 153 integration and, 135 normalization of whiteness in, 3–­4 privilege and, 11–­12 DiGRA (Digital Games Research Association), 17, 21 DIPCON, 79–­80, 103 Diplomacy conference for, 79–­80 description of, 81–­82 geographic distribution for, 83–­85fig military literature and, 100, 106 New York Conspiracy and, 88–­90, 182–­183 “Opponents Wanted” section and, 75 politics and, 107 Pournelle and, 55 zines for, 67–­68, 82, 83–­85fig, 84, 86–­88 Dispatcher, 59–­60, 181 diversity advocacy/efforts, 156, 157, 163–­ 164, 166, 168, 173 DIY (do-­it-­yourself) ethic, 136 Dogs in the Vineyard, 142–­143 Donnelley, Elliott, 36 Dragon, The, 111, 125fig, 130, 135, 137, 138 Dragon Magazine, see Dragon, The Dunbar-­Hester, Christina, 14, 161, 163 Duncombe, Stephen, 152

Dungeons & Dragons crowdfunding and, 22 decrease in racisim in, 164–­165 intellectual property issues and, 136 libertarianism and, 184–­185 Old Spice and, 146 origin of role-­playing and, 115–­116 print history of, 147 Wizards of the Coast and, 164–­165, 169 See also Alarums & Excursions; Courtesan; Damsel. Dworkin, Andrea, 124 Dyer, Richard, 9 Ebony and Ivy: Race, Slavery, and the Troubled History of America’s Universities (Wilder), 48 Edland, Tor Kjetil, 23 Edwards, Ron, 142 1830, 171 electric model trains, 31. See also railroad hobbyists. electricity/electrification, 31–­32, 37 Electronic Mediations, 20 Encyclopedia of Postal Diplomacy Zines (Meinel), 82, 84, 87 Eney, Dick, 118–­119, 121–­122, 123, 126, 127, 128–­129 environmental activism, 89–­90 environmental impacts of game industry, 18 equal rights amendment, 91 eSports, 6, 18 Ever Given, 177 Facebook, 145 Fair Housing Act (1968), 7 Fairy Tale, 137 fan networks, 50 fan studies and fan culture, 9, 111–­112, 146–­147 Fantasy Flight Games, 165

214 | Index

fanzines, 111, 185. See also play-­by-­mail publishing loops; individual publications. Feast of Legends, 146 Fiasco, 141–­142 “filk songs,” 110 film theory, 121 Fine, Gary, 116 First Person: New Media as Story, Performance, and Game (Wardrip-­Fruin and Harrigan), 16 Floyd, George, 155 foreign policy, 104–­106 Forge, The, 116, 135, 136, 141–­143, 147, 151, 153, 185 Foucault, Michel, 42, 90, 117 Freaks and Geeks, 160 “freedom,” rhetoric of, 7, 8, 99 frontier myth/mentality, 29–­30, 40–­41, 49, 181 Frosthaven, 178 fun, white male privilege and, 91 game designers versus player communities, 116 Game Informer, 137 Game Manufacturers Association (GAMA), 168 game studies, 15–­19 Game Studies, 16, 20 game theory, 100–­101, 102–­103, 106, 107 GameFAQs, 138 gamer identity, 15 Gamer Theory (Wark), 19 Gamergate, 16, 17–­18, 168 “Games Foreign Policy Experts Play: The Political Exercise Comes of Age” (Peery), 104 GameSpot, 137, 139 “Gaming in a Social and Political World,” 157 Gary, Indiana, 89–­90 Gates, Bill, 14, 158

Gearin, Cornelius, 105 “geek girl,” 6 geek identity/culture exclusion and, 161 exclusionary tendencies of, 12 hobbies and, 160–­161 hobby communities and, 14–­15 hobbyists and, 22 neoliberal subjectivity and, 172 outsider status and, 4–­6, 170 politics of whiteness and, 183 toxic masculinity and, 10 white flight and, 7, 158 white nationalism and, 18 geek masculinity, 46, 62, 131, 160, 170, 180 Gen Con, 80, 164, 165–­166, 167fig, 168–­169 gender cover art and, 173 Dungeons & Dragons and, 184–­185 “the hobby” and, 2–­3 unequal attention and, 115–­116 General, The, 100, 135, 139 generational diversity, 12 generational shifts, 159–­165 George, Ajit, 163–­164 Gettysburg, 51, 59, 60–­61, 140, 181 gig economy, 148–­151, 153. See also precarious labor. Ging, Debbie, 10–­11 Gloomhaven, 178 GoFundMe, 148 Gold, Barry, 110, 115 Gold, Lee, 109–­111, 113, 115, 117, 118, 128–­ 129, 136, 185 Goldwater, Barry, 182 Grand Theft Auto IV, 17 grants, 20 Gray, Kishonna, 5 Green, Walter G., III, 64 Grey, Kishonna, 18 Grodzins, Morton, 7–­8 Gupta, Anada, 23 Gygax, Gary, 111–­112, 116, 124, 130, 136

Index | 215

hacker ethic, 49 Hackers (Levy), 28, 40, 42–­45, 46, 48–­49, 180 Ham, Richard, 2, 139 Hargrave, Elizabeth, 165, 172, 174–­175, 187 Harney, Stefano, 48 Harrigan, Pat, 16, 21 Hasbro, 149 hate speech, censorship of, 88–­89, 94 Hausrath, Alfred, 104 Hearts of Iron, 75 hegemonic masculinity, 5, 9–­11, 113–­114, 117, 129–­131, 170 Hess, Karl, 97 Hitler, Adolf, 61–­62, 71fig, 72, 73–­74, 75, 182 “hobby, the,” 2–­4 hobby games as absent from game studies, 20–­22 description of, 3, 19–­20 distribution of, 30 hobby shops, 30–­31, 37 hobbyist subjectivity, 8 hobbyists impact of, 22–­24 social context of, 45–­46 Hoggen, David, 72 hooks, bell, 170 Hoop Godz, 187 How the Irish Became White (Ignatiev), 9 Hughes, Daniel, 64 ideological white supremacy, 69, 74, 113–­114 IGN, 137, 139 Ignatiev, Noel, 9 immaterial labor, 141, 143, 166–­167 Immersive Gameplay: Essays on Participatory Media and Role-­Playing (Torner and White), 21 imperialism, 174 inclusivity, 151–­152, 158, 166, 179, 187 insider identity, 5, 161

insider/outsider dynamic, 29–­30, 41, 49 Institute of Diplomatic Studies, 102, 103 intellectual property issues, 136 International Diplomacy Association, 79, 103 intersectional advocacy, 172 intersectionality, 159 itch.io, 187 Jackson, George, 98 Jackson, Thomas “Stonewll,” 71fig, 73 Jenkins, Henry, 111, 146–­147 Jobs, Steve, 115 Johnson, Andrew, 95 Jones, Evan, 89, 90 Kalbach, John, 34 Kalmbach, A. C., 33–­34, 180 Kask, Tim, 124 Kellner, Douglas, 90 Kickstarter, 22, 144, 147–­148, 150, 151, 172, 177–­178 Killer Bunnies, 137 King, Martin Luther, Jr., 96, 97 Kirschenbaum, Matthew, 21 Knabe, Carl F., II, 64 Knudepunkt, 21, 146 Kocurek, Carly, 18 Konieczka, Corey, 23 Konkin, Samuel, III, 123, 124–­126, 125fig, 127–­129 Kriegspiel, The, 58, 59 Kruse, Kevin, 8, 86, 99 labor theory, 166 LaFarge, Thomas, 64 Lakofka, Len, 67, 79–­80, 124 Lance (The Undead Viking), 139 Lang, Eric, 155–­157, 157fig, 163–­164, 168, 172, 174–­175, 187 LARP (live-­action role-­playing), 21 “law and order,” 72 Lazzarato, Maurizio, 166

216 | Index

Leary, Jim, 36 Lee, Robert E., 65, 69, 182 Lees, Matt, 171 “Legend of Vox Machina, The,” 148, 171 leisure/leisure spaces, exclusion of minoritized people from, 3, 38 Leith, Martin D., 64 Lévy, Pierre, 141 Levy, Stephen, 28, 40, 42–­45, 46, 48–­49, 180 Libellud, 166 libertarian movement/libertarianism, 97–­ 98, 183–­184, 187 Lionel Engineer’s Club, 32 Lionel Manufacturing Company, 31–­32 Lipton, Robert Bryan, 88, 89, 92, 93, 96–­99 Little Wars, 58 Lookout Games, 166 LudoPact, 177 MacArthur, Douglas, 95 Madeja, Victor, 64 Magic: The Gathering, 164, 169 “manosphere,” 10 Märklin, 31 Marx, Harpo, 97 Marxist Party of America, 97 masculine dynamic, reproduction of, 170 masculinity geek, 46, 62, 131, 160, 170, 180 hegemonic, 5, 9–­11, 113–­114, 117, 129–­ 131, 170 toxic, 10–­11, 15, 23 massification, 90 massively multiplayer online games (MMOGs), 145 materiality, 21 Matthews, Jason, 23 McAlester prison, 98 McAuliffe, Anthony C., 65, 75–­76 McCarthy, John, 47 McGovern, George, 94

McIntosh, Peggy, 8–­9 McIntosh, S. C., 125fig McPherson, Tara, 107 Meinel, Jim, 82, 84, 87 Messerschmidt, James W., 10 #MeToo movement, 163 Miles, E. Walter, 103 military elite, 54–­55, 57, 65, 69, 76, 80–­81, 100, 101, 106, 181 military simulations, 56–­58 militia movements, white, 92 Milwaukee Commercial Press, 33 MIT, 46, 47–­48 MIT Center for International Studies, 104–­105, 106 Mixumaxu Gazette, 88, 92, 96–­97, 98, 135 Mizer, Nick, 116 mobile games, 18 Model Craftsman, 32 Model Railroader, 32–­38, 35fig, 36fig, 39fig, 45, 47, 49, 67, 180, 181 model railroads, 30–­40. See also Tech Model Railroad Club. Moitra, Swati, 11 Monopoly, 53–­54 Monster Hearts, 164–­165 Morningstar, Jason, 141–­142 Moten, Fred, 48 Munchkin, 137 Mussolini, Benito, 73 Mystery House, 41–­42 Nakamura, Lisa, 145 Napoleon Bonaparte, 74 nationalism, resurgence of, 16 Nazi Party, 61–­62, 73, 74–­75, 182 Neiger, Gil, 90 Neilson, Terese, 164 Nephew, Michelle, 121 networks of privilege age and, 47 Avalon Hill and, 62–­63, 66–­68, 69, 75–­76

Index | 217

description of, 31 overview of, 11–­15 universities and, 48 white homogeneity of, 80 New York Conspiracy, 80–­81, 88–­92, 96–­ 97, 99, 107, 182–­183 Nixon, Richard, 93–­95, 96 Noble, Safiya, 5 Nooney, Laine, 41–­42, 115 Nordiclarpwiki, 147 Notes from the Underground (Duncombe), 152 Old Spice, 146 “Opponents Wanted” section, 66–­68, 75, 84, 135 Origins Game Fair, 155, 157, 168 Origins of World War II, 70fig, 72–­73, 76, 182 outsider status geek culture and, 4–­6, 160–­161, 183 geek masculinity and, 46 as transformative, 9 white privilege and, 6–­7 Overwatch, 149 Pande, Rukmini, 9, 11 Panzer Blitz, 62 Panzer Leader, 113 Parker Brothers, 54 parliamentary procedure, 46 Patreon, 144, 147, 148 Paul, Chris, 18 Peerinalis, 79, 101, 102 Peery, Larry, 79, 92, 100–­104, 105–­106, 107 Penny Arcade Expo, 21–­22 Perica, Jon, 64 Peterson, Jon, 116 Pierson, Dan, 129 Plaid Hat Games, 166 play-­by-­mail publishing loops, 67–­68, 75, 79, 81–­88, 83–­85fig, 107, 182–­183. See also Diplomacy.

Playing at the World (Peterson), 116 Playing D&D with Porn Stars, 168 Pobuda, Tanya, 173–­174 political commentary, 93–­99 politics in hobby games, 80 Polygon, 116, 139 Possony, Stefan T., 55, 105 Pouch, The, 88–­91, 93–­95, 96 Pournelle, Jerry, 54–­58, 73, 75–­76, 92, 100, 105–­106, 161, 182 precarious labor, 19, 23, 148, 150, 152, 172. See also gig economy. prisoners’ rights movement, 98–­99 privilege. See networks of privilege; white privilege. production cycle/demands, 163, 177–­179 “produsers,” 22 Proujanski, Arnold, 79 public relations, 149–­150 Puerto Rico, 1–­2, 3, 13, 22, 186 race affluence and, 37 invisibility of, 113–­114 railroad hobbyists and, 37–­38, 49 “race riots,” 7, 94–­95 racism as “fun,” 90–­93 white supremacy and, 98 railroad hobbyists, 3, 12, 27–­28, 32–­33, 59–­ 60, 87, 179–­181 Railroad Model Craftsman, 32–­33, 180 Raising the Stakes (Taylor), 6 RAND Corporation, 100, 102, 103–­104, 106 Reagan, Ronald, 105, 182 Reddit, 17, 18, 147 Repos Productions, 166 Research Analysis Corporation (RAC), 55, 56 restorative justice, 129 revisionism, 72–­73, 74–­76 Rio Grande Games, 1

218 | Index

Robert’s Rules of Order, 46 Roediger, David R., 9 Role-­Playing Game Studies: Transmedia Foundations (Zagal and Deterding), 21 Rommel, Erwin, 61–­62, 65, 69, 71fig, 73, 182 Roosevelt, Franklin D., 73 Ross, Edmund G., 95 RPG theorizing, 143 Ruberg, Bo, 18 Sabbath, Zak, 168, 169 Saler, Michael, 117 Salter, Anastasia, 6, 10, 160–­161, 180 Samson, Peter, 43 San Quentin State Prison, 98 Sandberg, Sheryl, 165 Sarkeesian, Anita, 184 Scale-­Craft, 36 Schrock, Andrew, 149 Science Fiction and Fantasy Writer’s Association, 55 Scott, Suzanne, 6, 91, 161 Second Life, 16 Settlers of Catan, 2 sexuality, 17 Shared Fantasy (Fine), 116 Shaw, Adrienne, 17, 18 Sherna, 129 Shut Up & Sit Down, 139, 171 “Silver Plate Road, The” (Kalbach), 34, 35fig, 87 “Simulating the Art of War” (Pournelle), 55 simulationism, 58, 65, 69, 73, 74, 75, 181–­ 182 slavery/slave trade 1830 and, 171 history of Blackness and, 174 Puerto Rico and, 1–­2 universities and, 48 Smith, Duncan K., 79, 88–­89, 90, 92, 94 Smith, Hilary, 63–­64 Smith, Nick, 113–­114, 132 Smith, Quintin, 171

social justice, 145 social media, 141, 148, 150, 170, 173, 174 Sorcerer, 142 Space Cowboys US, 166 Spacewar! 28, 40, 47, 49 speleology, 42, 43–­44, 45 $quander, 51–­54, 52fig, 61 Stalin, Joseph, 73 Stanfill, Mel, 14 Star Wars: The Card Game, 156 Star Wars: The Role Playing Game, 88 Star Wars: Rebellion, 23 Starcraft, 149 Steele, Shelby, 91 Stegmaier, Jamey, 150, 172 Stonemaier games, 150 story games, 141–­142 Story Games, 142 Strategic Defense Initiative, 105 Strategy of Technology, The (Pournelle and Possony), 55, 105–­106 structural inequality, 158 structural privilege, 9 structural white supremacy, 68–­69 suburbia, 15, 182 Suez Canal, 177 supply chain issues, 177 Tactics, 59, 60, 181 Tarnowski, John, 142 Taylor, Nick, 18, 170 Taylor, T. L., 6, 46, 143–­144, 160, 170 tech culture/industry hobby games and, 15 normalization of whiteness in, 5 as predominantly white male, 4 Tech Model Railroad Club, 12, 27–­29, 40–­ 48, 179–­181 Terranova, Tiziana, 143 Thompson, Jack, 17 3DGameGeek, 140–­141 Ticket to Ride, 137, 149, 171 Tor, 163

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Torner, Evan, 20, 21, 142, 143 Toxic Geek Masculinity in Media (Salter and Blodgett), 160 toxic masculinity, 10–­11, 15, 23 “Trivial, Trite, Trash” (Peery), 100 Tropes vs. Women in Games, 184 Truman, Harry S., 7, 86, 95 Trump, Donald, 18 TSR Hobbies, 111, 147, 185 TSR Inc., 169 TTT Publications, 99–­104, 105, 106, 107 Turner, Fred, 141 Twain, Mark, 41 Twilight Struggle, 23 Twitter, 145 Ulanov, Nicholas A., 79, 94–­97, 98, 107 universities, as white enclaves, 48 US Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, 105 Vasel, Tom, 155–­156, 157–­158, 157fig, 159, 160, 163, 168, 172 Venture Simulation in War, Business and Politics (Hausrath), 104 victim blaming, 126 video game industry, 148–­149, 151, 167 Vietnam War, 87 violence, antifeminism and, 11 “Virtual Census: Representations of Gender, Race and Age in Video Games, The” (Williams et al.), 20 virtual worlds, 17 von Metzke, Conrad, 88–­89, 91–­92 Vorhees, Gerald, 170 Waldron, Emma Leigh, 21 Wang, Cynthia, 150, 172 “War Gaming Methodology” (Weiner), 103 Wardrip-­Fruin, Noah, 16 wargames, 55–­56, 58–­59, 60–­62, 65, 101, 114. See also individual games. Wark, McKenzie, 19

Watergate scandal, 88, 93–­95, 96 Weiner, M. G., 103 Wells, H. G., 58 Wendy’s, 146 westerns, 40–­41 White, William, 21, 116, 142 “white activism,” 157 white flight, 6–­8, 37, 47, 86, 107–­108, 158, 182–­183 White Flight (Kruse), 86 White Fragility (DiAngelo), 1, 8 white guilt, 91 white nationalism, 18 white privilege censorship and, 89 definition of, 6 geek culture and, 5–­6 hegemonic masculinity versus, 5 hobby games and, 19 ignorance of, 170 libertarian movement and, 97–­98 military elite and, 80–­81 overview of, 6–­9 Peery and, 102 precarious labor and, 152 race and activism and, 90 white masculinity and, 23–­24 writings on, 8–­9 “White Privilege: Unpacking the Invisible Knapsack” (McIntosh), 8 white supremacy Alarums & Excursions and, 113–­114 Avalon Hill and, 54, 58, 62, 66, 68 Avalon Hill General and, 61, 69, 74–­76, 181–­182 policing of, 92 Pournelle and, 55, 58 prisoners’ rights movement and, 98–­99 racism and, 98 revisionism and, 72–­73, 74–­76 structural versus ideological, 68–­69 use of symbols of, 51, 62

220 | Index

whiteness civil rights and, 87 of Diplomacy, 107 historical context of, 174 invisibility of, 9, 13–­14 normalization of, 3–­4, 5, 93 performing, 90–­93 pervasiveness of, 3 “Who Really Started World War II?” 72–­73 Wieslander, Eliot, 121 Wilder, Craig Steven, 48 Williams, Dimitri, 20 Williams, Roberta, 41–­42 Wingspan, 165 Wired, 116 Wistrich, Robert S., 72

Wizards of the Coast, 149, 164, 169 Woo, Benjamin, 29 Working toward Whiteness (Roediger), 9 World of Warcraft, 16, 149 World War I, 81 World War II, 61–­62, 72–­73, 75, 181–­182 X, Malcolm, 96 Xenogogic, 100–­104, 105, 106 Yiannopoulos, Milo, 18 Zagal, José, 21 Z-­Man Games, 166 Zocchi, Louis, 64, 65 Zones of Control: Perspectives on Wargaming (Harrigan and Kirschenbaum), 21

About the Author

A aron Trammell is Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at the University of California, Irvine. He is the Editor-­in-­Chief of the journal Analog Game Studies and the co-­editor for the Tabletop Gaming series at University of Michigan Press. His other book, Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology, presents a theory of play that centers BIPOC people. He was an honoree of the hobby game industry’s prestigious Diana Jones Award in 2020.

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