Logbook

(scroll down)

Why is war such a populair topic in video games? And can this depiction as war be seen as violence or does something need a violent intention in order to be called violent?
We speculated on this topic, which can be read in the following transcription.

Violence in video games

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

How about the tabletop games?

We found it hard to name video games in which there was no violence involved. However, in tabletop games it seemed to be much less of a common topic. Although there are some classic examples such as Risk and Stratego, there seemed to be a lot more games in which there was no violence involved or games that might have been about war in the past, but have become much more abstract over time, like Chess.

We researched the history of three different types of games: Chess, card games and race to the finish games, also known as the game of goose. The research can be found at the links below.

Different takes on the topic

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Now we had a basic knowledge on the topic, we continued our search for an interesting angle on the subject. We found two:

The use of (less literal) violence in tabletop games, which can be read about here:

And the violence in playing a game in itself, that we'll talk about later on.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

Game types

How you play a game also depends on who you play it with, and what type of game it is. We made a list of all games that we know good enough/played often enough to be able to say something about their tactics and strategies and divided them into categories.

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------

The playing of a game

We concluded that there are multiple ways of playing games, or, multiple motivations for playing. We went out to ask people how they play games. Most people would answer that they either play for "gezelligheid" (for the joy of doing something together) or that they really want to win. One person answered that he found the roleplay/communication aspect of games the most fun part.

As a next step we thought of making a scale where people can say how competative they are, or thinking of multiple "player archetypes" where people can say what kind of player they are.

In the logbook, our process during the project is recorded.