Episode 4

Haeny Yoon:

Welcome to Pop and Play, the podcast all about play in its many silly, serious, and powerful forms. I'm Haeny Yoon.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm Nathan Holbert. In this season, we're talking all about young people's media: how to make it, why it matters, what participation looks like, and its many challenges and limitations.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Today, we're talking with Aaron Trammell, associate Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. Aaron has recently published two books on play, titled Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology, and the Privilege of Play. Both books challenge the prevailing narrative of play as a shiny and happy space.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, it's a great conversation where we really get into what it means to play in various communities and spaces, and the ways in which the games, and the narratives, and the world building really contribute to who participates, how they participate, what kinds of conversations emerge around play. It's a lot of fun.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, and looks at the dangers and risks and complexity of engaging in such play. Let's get into it.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Let's talk about it. I'm curious, in your own experiences, you and I have talked a lot about the different ways in which we played when we were younger. Are there any things you can recall from your childhood where you engaged in play in a certain way, or you wanted to engage in play in a certain way, and there was a tension there or a difficulty there?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. I think growing up, I feel like the thing that I was really, really trying to do is have people forget that I'm a little Asian girl. I figured there had to be ways to hide that or make that less visible. I really tried hard to fit in. One of my first examples is when I was a kid and little, my parents actually bought me this dress-up set, which is actually very... I don't remember getting a lot of things when I was little, but I definitely wanted that.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It had fake plastic high heels, whatever, earrings, whatever, all that stuff. I really wanted to get it. I think the reason why I wanted to get it was I wanted to bring it to school, instantly show everyone that I had it, and that I wanted to give it to them.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wait, what?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes. I just distributed all of these things that I just got.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Oh, my God.

 

Haeny Yoon:

One, I wanted the visibility of having something that I think everybody else has, and then I wanted to have the power to distribute that to other people.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Wow.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I feel like that was actually sad when I think about it.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's a little sad.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I also feel like my Asian-ness and my smallness is never going to be invisible. I'm never going to be able to hide that. I actually did a lot of things where I tried to do that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Totally. It's kind of amazing when I think back about the ways in which the games, or the toys, or the things that we played with or that I played with are so much about how I needed to fit in.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I certainly didn't have the same experience as you in that I wasn't a small Asian girl in a predominantly white community. I did grow up in a predominantly white community, and I do recall in my very small neighborhood, my very small school, I think there was 30, 40 people in each class, it's small in each grade, you had to play sports. Sports were the only way you could be kind of in the in community.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I really played sports a lot and I wanted to play sports a lot, but I distinctly remember that things that weren't jock-adjacent, really wanting to get involved in, but knowing I couldn't get involved with them or couldn't let anyone know that I was involved with them, because it would just be a social... Crush my social life. Not that I had a social life, but that was the sense.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I may have talked about this on the pod before, but I was very secretive about playing video games. My closest friends and I played video games together certainly, but I didn't ever talk about it at school, because I didn't want anyone to know that I was a nerd who played video games..

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. I think those issues of belonging and how it's so adjacent and related to play. There is something that happens in play, and community, and a sense of wanting to be a part of something. That happens with play. I just think about even the objects that I shared, it's not a community.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It kind of is though, right? There's a meta community around it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yes, there's a meta community, but there isn't official, like, "All the people that love dress up, come here."

 

Nathan Holbert:

Come here. We'll have a party together.

 

Haeny Yoon:

We'll have a dress up party. Although that is cosplay.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That probably did happen too. We just weren't invited.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. There isn't an official community to it, but there is this circulating set of things that these artifacts kind of convey, and these communities and groups that have access to that. I think a lot of times, now that I'm thinking about why we want to talk to Aaron about this, it's this idea that those things are not necessarily innocuous.

 

Haeny Yoon:

There is issues of access, there is identity politics in it. There's ways that certain children are made to feel because they don't have something or they don't have access to something. It really is kind of a privilege to sort of be able to mediate and be part of these communities.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We got a lot to talk to.

 

Haeny Yoon:

We got a lot to talk about, let's get into it.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Let's get to it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

We have with us, Aaron Trammell, who I have an equally long introduction for, because fandom, fan communities, that's how you know I'm a fan is long introductions.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Long intros.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Basically.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. Perfect.

 

Aaron Trammell:

You're making me blush.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Aaron Trammell is an Associate Professor of Informatics at UC Irvine. He's interested in how tabletop games furthers the values of white privilege and hegemonic masculinity in geek cultures. We often think about play as joy and happiness, but it can be many things all at once, both joyful but also intense, violent, traumatic, and a lot of times, exclusionary.

 

Haeny Yoon:

He attends to these ideas in a very, very excellent book called Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology, which Nathan just finished reading, where he centers the playing communities of black indigenous people of color. Alongside this book, he also has another one called The Privilege of Play, which looks at the history of games and race in the 20th century. He has a third book coming out, which Nathan is very, very excited about, which is Designing Dragons, Quantifying Fantasy, and Dungeons and Dragons, will be available late 2025.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You had me at Dragons.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Look, I'm not opposed to dragons, either. I like them. Welcome, Aaron.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Hey, it's great to be here.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We're super excited to have you here today. We are going to dig into your work, talk about play, talk about communities around play, but we always like to start with a bit of a game to just loosen us up and get us into the conversation. For you, I've designed a game as an expert on-

 

Aaron Trammell:

You designed a game?

 

Nathan Holbert:

... Tabletop games. I did. I'm a game designer. No big deal.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I feel like I'm getting the white glove experience here. Nice.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, I came up with a game. You're an expert at tabletop games, and we've heard you talk, we've read your work, and you're an expert at really the expansive world of games that are out there. I thought what I would do is ask you about the really boring old classic games, and...

 

Haeny Yoon:

Boring? That's debatable.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Some of them are not so great.What I'm going to do is I'm going to give you a scenario where you've invited people to your home or to some place of fellowship, and you need to figure out which classic board game is the right game for this particular group of people.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Okay, I can do that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I will give you multiple choice, but you should feel free to go off script and choose whatever you think is the perfect game for this group of people.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Okay.

 

Nathan Holbert:

All right.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I'm down.

 

Nathan Holbert:

All right. We're going to start with this. The University of California Irvine administration is coming over to your house for a party. Which game do you invite them all to play? Monopoly, Risk, Taboo, or Twister, or if there's something else you'd prefer?

 

Aaron Trammell:

No, definitely not Twister. That's going to get dicey fast. Yeah, I think I'm going to go with Taboo. The Chancellor of UC Irvine is a big free speech advocate. I think of the games listed, going with Taboo and these taboo words that you're not supposed to say.

 

Nathan Holbert:

You're not supposed to say. Yeah.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I kind of feel like that'd be kind of trolling him on the next level. Yeah, I think I'd go with Taboo on that list.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I also like the idea of just buzzing your university president with this buzzer, and putting it in his ear and being like, "Eh."

 

Nathan Holbert:

Haeny's coming over to your place. You need to choose a two-player board game that you can crush her in. Here's the options I have for you, but of course, feel free to go rogue here. You can beat her in Battleship, Guess Who, Chess, or Scrabble.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Oh, wow.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Choose carefully.

 

Aaron Trammell:

This is a hard one.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Maybe she can beat you in these games. That's always a possibility too.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I'm just kidding. Be honest.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Okay. Yeah, of that list of games, oof. I want to play Scrabble, because I think that's the game there that I enjoy the most, but I will definitely not crush somebody at Scrabble. Yeah, I think I'd do Guess Who. I think that would be the challenge game that I would choose if I had to face off against you. I've got a really good memory, so I think I'd be able to pull the rabbit out of the hat.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah,

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, very true.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's good. That's good. All right, one more, one more. You have all your college friends over, and they've had a bit too much to drink before this part of the evening, but they demand from you as the game expert that you entertain them with a new board game. Which game do you get out for your slightly inebriated friends? You get out Candy Land, Sorry, Yahtzee, or Boggle?

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yahtzee. Boggle.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I'd get out Yahtzee.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yahtzee.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Really?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Love it.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah, I think of that list of games, that's the best one, actually. The first two again?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Candy Land or Sorry.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. Candy Land, all of these games are pretty random, so you don't really make choices in Candy Land. You don't really make choices in Sorry, but you do make a choice in Yahtzee about the dice that you re-roll, and that's an interesting choice with some depth to it.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Boggle is, I've met people who are just so good at Boggle and they'll just win every game. It's actually a very low randomness game, so there's a place where I think it stops being fun. Yeah, I think we'd play Yahtzee. I feel like this is not a fun answer. I should be like, "We're drunk, we're playing Sorry, and yelling at each other."

 

Haeny Yoon:

I love that you read statistics.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Talking about randomness.

 

Haeny Yoon:

... Chance and choice into this.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, thank you for playing that game with us, Aaron. I really appreciate your answers, and I am looking forward to a vicious battle of Guess Who down the road here.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I'll do it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Bring it on.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, Aaron, we wanted to talk with you about your work. You've been doing some really excellent research around games, and gaming communities, and specifically the ways in which the way we organize these communities, can create and invite people in, and also can sometimes explicitly communicate who's not as welcome in these spaces.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I wonder if you could talk a little bit though about your own experiences as somebody who's been involved in games, and when you were a kid, were there particular gaming communities that you were drawn to? How did you participate? How did you choose to engage in these communities?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah, that's a great question, and I think you all might know the answer a little bit, but when I was a kid, the coolest person, I think the singular coolest person in my world, was my cousin. He'd always come over to the house with these cool games that he had been playing with his friends.

 

Aaron Trammell:

He introduced me to all this really, really kind of cool, nerdy stuff, like Dungeons and Dragons and then Magic: the Gathering. Then I would introduce these games to my friends who were like, "Oh, you're kind of a-"

 

Haeny Yoon:

Who were like, "Aaron's the coolest person I've ever."

 

Aaron Trammell:

This is all relative. We're talking about Dungeons and Dragons here. When I'm like, "Hey, guys, want to play some Dungeons and Dragons with me?" We're all kind of nerdy in that space. Yeah, my cousin would often introduce these games to me, and then I would read the rules, and obsess over them, and convince my friends to play them with me. It was a lot of fun. That kind of got them into games also.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. Yeah, they'd introduced me to these other gaming spaces. My friend Paul in particular would seek out Magic tournaments and stuff, so I think he was the person I knew who kind of introduced me to the social worlds of gaming, whereas my cousin was kind of the person who introduced me to the interesting world of gaming and things. That's with tabletop games. I'll say, I also love video games. I just don't really write about them so much as tabletop games.

 

Aaron Trammell:

With video games, I had eye surgery when I was a little kid, like four years old. My grandparents took pity on me, because it's a lot for a kid to go through eye surgery. As I was coming back to, getting my eyesight back, and it's really painful. They do surgery, you can't really see for a few days because you're learning to adjust your eyes again. They first, they bought me a Nintendo entertainment system, which I thought was the coolest thing in the world.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Glorious.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Even more important than that, they gave me, it was almost like a magazine that had all of the games that were for sale, almost the sort of thing that a toy store would buy to figure out how they were going to stock the shelves with screenshots of all the games. There was hundreds of games in it, each with a quarter page kind of spread on it.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I was flipping through this magazine as I was learning to play again, I was just imagining these games, and honestly, games I never ever to play, most of them, but it just seemed so exciting. I think from that early age, coming out of that surgery, I was just hooked. I was just like, "I can't wait to play games."

 

Nathan Holbert:

This is who I am now.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. I am a boy who plays games.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. Just to clarify, so when you're talking about Magic communities, you're not talking about magic shows or magic tricks, right?

 

Aaron Trammell:

No, no, no. I'm talking about even worse, Magic: the Gathering.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. I want one of you to, I challenge you to give me a three-sentence summary on what Magic: the Gathering is.

 

Nathan Holbert:

We have the expert here. Aaron, this is all you.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Well, okay. In Magic: the Gathering, you are a planeswalker, which is a person who is able to travel between universes, and you draw magic out from the world of five colors. White is the white magic, black is the dark magic, green is the nature magic, red is fire, magic, and blue is a sort of water magic, or this sort of tricky magic that exists.

 

Aaron Trammell:

All of this is kind of symbolized in a bunch of cards in this game, and you summon creatures basically to kill your opponent. I would say in reality, it's numbers, and cards on a table, and you're doing some math, and...

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's like Yahtzee.

 

Aaron Trammell:

In a way. Yes.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Exactly like Yahtzee.

 

Haeny Yoon:

You are somebody that plays it or that continues to do it in adulthood.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah, I go to tournaments, I play it sometimes.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I think that's great. I think that leads us to our next question about, so I do not go to these tournaments, but I actually do see them, and I think my image or visual sometimes at these conventions are that it ends up being very intergenerational. You see a lot of different people doing that. A lot of gamers that I talk to talk about their childhood experience with that, but then can also talk about how it goes beyond this range that they were supposed to play games with.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I think that's actually a little different than toys. I'm not playing with Barbies right now. There was a point where it feels like it's more temporal, and something like this seems to kind of move across generations. Can you talk about why you think that is the case, or what affordances does something like that in gender and doing in creating multi-generational connections?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Oh, boy. I think you asked a bigger question than you were ready for, because there's a lot of stuff to unpack here.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Strap in.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. Yeah, I definitely think that that is the case. I think that observation you're making is absolutely true, and especially, I really started going back to Magic events again two or three years ago. I was actually really surprised. I expected bunch of people were probably 10, 15 years younger than me, and I actually met a lot of people who were my age, plus another generation and another generation beyond that.

 

Aaron Trammell:

That was kind of interesting to see, and a real eye-opener about how hobbies are these sort of intergenerational affairs. Of course, I do some work with Gen Con, which is a tabletop convention in Indianapolis every year. It's a really big one. There, it's very much a family situation, where often groups of friends will come, but you'll also see families bringing themselves and sharing the sort of joy of gaming with other people in an intergenerational way.

 

Aaron Trammell:

In that way, it's all very wholesome, it's exciting. It's seemingly cool. I do think there's some sketch things that happen though because of the intergenerational side of things, kind of dovetailing with my research on how play isn't always a positive thing, but I've definitely been to some live action role play communities. These tend to be very intimate communities, where everybody kind of knows each other.

 

Aaron Trammell:

That's kind of one of the prerequisites for playing a lot of live action role play is that you're pretty familiar with the other people at the table or in the room, that you have a sense of trust, at least in a lot of communities. There's these sort of weird bleed-throughs in these communities, to where it also becomes kind of like a social scene and a dating scene.

 

Aaron Trammell:

When you have something like a social and intergenerational dating scene, things can get a little weird sometimes. I do think that that's where you start seeing things. I feel weird might be the wrong word, as long as things are legal and consensual, but I definitely do feel like that's an unusual sort of way to socialize and meet people you might be interested in is through games. Also, that's a good thing that games are facilitating that. It's an interesting kind of space in that regard.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, that reminds me of last season when we had Alexis and Josh on, remember when they were talking about cosplay conventions? They kind of brought up the same thing. They're going to these spaces, working really hard on their costumes to come, and they're very excited about the community and the building of it.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I think on the flip side, there's also real issues of being in those spaces, like issues of harassment, right? Issues of gender, and sexuality, and things like that that also play into it. I think for them, they have to kind of balance the pros of being in belonging with this community, and then the cons and that danger and that risk that comes with it.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. I think that the issue that happens in these spaces is that sometimes there's a person or several people who kind of engage in predatory behavior, and take advantage of people who might be a little more naive about the world and stuff like that.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah, I think you see some of the more concerning aspects of play coming out of those spaces as well as the sort of community building, which is a really positive aspect, and I think a great thing that games really do.

 

Nathan Holbert:

That's a nice segue to another thing I really wanted to get into with you is about this notion of community. This is something we talk a lot about, Haeny and I, on this podcast. We talk about play, and we often are explicitly trying to engage in and understand new communities of people organized around play or pop culture. As you've noted, there's this really kind of wonderful, beautiful thing about community, where you can have a group of people that you trust, that you feel safe in, that you feel like you can be yourself around.

 

Nathan Holbert:

There's this other aspect to community that I think you've written so beautifully about, where it is about defining who's in and who's out. There's this, "We're the gamers, we're the cosplayers, we're the anime players, we're the Magic: the Gathering crew." That sense of defining that we're in and others are out is, I think like you've noted, a problematic, potentially toxic part of this way in which we build and create communities.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm wondering, games and hobbies feel like they're really, really rich spaces for this. I'm wondering, is there something specific about the games? Are there ways in which we can think about new models of community building or community proliferation that can break us out of those mistakes?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. Again, this is a thing where I think a lot of things are happening. The group, often self-admittedly so, just is a little socially awkward. Like, "Oh, welcome, have a chair. Do you need a drink of water?" Those things aren't the first thing that jumped to everybody's mind as much as like, "Oh, you're one of us. Come sit down. We're playing the game, and we might not even explain what we're doing. We'll leave it you to ask those questions."

 

Aaron Trammell:

That can be very alienating from people, I think, from outside of these sort of niche geek communities, but I also think that that's one of the reasons that a lot of the folks in these communities are finding themselves and finding that to be a sort of constructive space. It's finding people who are like me and might be a little socially awkward, but then at the same time, when you want to geek out really deep on this one topic, you've got some friends to really geek out really deep.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I think that's one of the kind of aspects that's happening there. Then because you asked it, are games unique in this way? I'll give you a different example from some of my very early research that wasn't on games. This was a story that happened when I began grad school. The very first project I worked on was this theory that we had about sort of "information underground." A professor, I think he's at CUNY right now, Joe Sanchez, came up with this idea.

 

Aaron Trammell:

We looked into the punk scene in New Brunswick, New Jersey, to see how basically the kids were setting up shows, and hiding their shows from the cops, and stuff like that. This was really cool. I was a friend with a lot of people in the area. I was part of the scene, so I was helping get informants to have these conversations. It was just really exciting. It was research, it was going to shows, it was a very cool project from the inside.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Eventually we got, this one guy gave me a fanzine he had written that was getting distributed through the scene, and it was called What We Do is Secret For a Reason. It was basically a sort of pamphlet to help people who are new to the scene understand that telling everybody you meet about what's happening was actually not good for the community's health, because then the police would know, "Oh, there's always a party here on Friday night. We'll just bust it up at eight o'clock."

 

Nathan Holbert:

Just show up and bust it, yeah.

 

Aaron Trammell:

That was kind of eye-opening to me about what the sort of world of gatekeeping and secrecy does on a level of community. I think on the one hand, there are toxic elements that happen with gatekeeping for sure. There's that element of keeping people out of networks, wealthy networks, networks that might share, you want to call it networks of privilege in my book that help people gain social advantages.

 

Aaron Trammell:

At the same time, I think that for art to flourish and for our communities to flourish, there do have to be secrets. There do have to be ways that the community identifies, and knows itself, and helps itself get along.

 

Haeny Yoon:

I definitely agree with that, because I was thinking even if you zoom out beyond a gaming community, that there's communities where having a shared affinity to one another, whether it's racial, or whether it's gendered, whether it's an experience that you've had, whether it's around a trauma or violence, that's a very important space to have for people.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That having, not all communities are for everyone. Not all communities have to be open to everybody, because there are a set of conditions that make that space a special space for somebody. I'm just thinking about that beyond just gaming. I think about that with ethnicity and race especially.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Absolutely. Yeah. I think that's the trick to this, and this is a theme I think that runs through my work a little, is that often, we get locked into a conversation around purity and danger for ideas. I actually think that recognizing how complex, messy, and complicated the world is, and the lived experiences of people, is [inaudible 00:26:40]. For ethnographers listening, I know this is what you've been doing for decades.

 

Nathan Holbert:

No, no, no, no. This is the first time this has ever been suggested. I guess the part I would like to surface, though, I 100% agree with all of this, and I think one thing that is important to recognize is that different people need different things at different times. That's my philosophy. I'm thinking about there are, for certain communities, for certain groups of people, there is a need, we were talking about this earlier, about a space for healing, a space for protection and safety.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Then there's others, and I'll put my particular demographic on the line here, more white men need to experience things that are not just for white men, and they need to experience ideas, people's lives, people's values in a way that can let them recognize that there's other ways to live in the world. There's other encounters that might be possible out there.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Kind of wrestling with this tension of community as the value of its potentially closed nature, and the importance of, in some cases, really trying to expand community to be less about me versus them, and more about maybe it's us, maybe more of us that I didn't recognize this person that lives in the neighborhood down the way or the city next door can also be inclusive. Games and other communities can be really powerful for that, right?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. Well, I think for the white guys listening out there, first, I don't think that any community of colors is ever going to say, "We don't want white folks in it." I do think it's more of a scaffolding situation. I don't know, if you're maybe a white person who's only grown up in white communities, you've met very few BIPOC folks in your life, make a friend and learn to trust that friend.

 

Aaron Trammell:

When you have that significant level of trust, I think that friend will probably introduce you to deeper kinds of community that might not have been accessible. I do think that's kind of part of a natural sort of gatekeeping process there that keeps those communities safe, but also allows people to acculturate in a way that's not assimilationist in how they're entering a community.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, but what happens if people don't do that work and then come to the community because they like the thing? I guess my larger question is what happens when a community breaks down, and what do you do to set up the conditions for a real sense of community that attends to some of these racial, gendered dynamics?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Just to be clear, when you say when a community breaks down, you mean because the community is no longer-

 

Haeny Yoon:

"We all came here because we like Magic: the Gathering, we don't care that people might say racist things to each other," or, "Yeah, we came here, because we like this shared artifact," which I think can be a real thing. People can connect over this shared artifact, but maybe we're not thinking about how it's gendered and non-inclusive of these other identities, I guess.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. Well, I think that's, you know this, but I think that's a dilemma that people of color faced for a very long time going into communities where unfortunate things are being said in front of other people. I actually think sticking it out can be its own kind of political and important statement in that regard to not let it get to you.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I feel like this is probably the most machismo I'm going to lean into with any perspective. I know that's not the stance for everyone, but I do think that it can be important to let those people who are doing their own kind of gatekeeping know that maybe they have to be a little more accepting of someone new at the table and stuff like that, and to be willing to put yourself into that position, but not challenging, I would never ask for somebody to do that.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah, I do think that for people of color, that is its own challenge. For those folks in the community that might be entering one of those spaces and trying to use hate speech or something like that, I'd say good luck. That seems like a poor decision, if I'm understanding that correctly. I think communities of color are fairly resilient in how they would manage that problem within themselves.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Maybe related to that, and maybe this question for both of you, what would you like to see in gaming communities that would maybe interrupt or expand who gets to participate and who contributes?

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, and I think that's a super good question, and I think it's one that developers are certainly starting to think about in a way that is relatively new for the game development community. It's always been happening on the fringes, but it's happening in the mainstream. Personally, I am fully enjoying the fact that there are a lot more mainstream games that are allowing for representation, and experiences, and different kinds of people that are part of the stories and a part of the storytelling.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I'm really enjoying that, that I'm being exposed to more kinds of games, more kinds of experiences, more kinds of people's lives. The gaming community has not been super supportive of that. Pretty much, anytime a game comes out with a woman protagonist or a BIPOC protagonist, that there's an immediate negative reaction by many gamers. That sucks, because I really enjoy that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I really enjoy the fact that I can play a game like, "Oh, here's a new kind of character. Here's a new kind of person with a different kind of experiences."

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, like reset the norms.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah. I feel like my wish is meta textual. When you started talking about review bombing and stuff like that with games, and for listeners, if you don't know what review bombing is, that's often this sort of troll-ish communities online. If a game comes out with a sort of representation they don't like, maybe there's a queer main character or something like that, they'll just, everybody in these communities will just put a zero review score up so that the Metacritic site reads the game as worse than it actually is.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's like Yelp.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Exactly. Exactly. It's coordinated by nefarious and troll-ish groups online. That is just, that's the sort of thing that I just wish would stop. It's not helping anybody. It's not making better games. It's not pushing whatever weird political idea there is out there better. It's just making everybody's experience a lot rougher and kind of muddying the waters.

 

Aaron Trammell:

What it's inviting, and I think this is really the core of a lot of the problems of representation in games today, is a conversation about representation that essentializes, because it's setting that as the argumentative stakes. It's saying, "Well, this is a woke queer game," or whatever, because there's a woke protagonist, as if the games are woke or non-woke, and that's the binary, instead of a whole variety of stories that are being told in games.

 

Aaron Trammell:

That's just not really a constructive sense of dialogue from my perspective. It's kind of soul-crushing to think about in some ways. I get really bummed out when I think about it, not because I'm angry that the game has been review bombed. I actually probably couldn't care less if a game was review bombed or not, but because I feel like the stakes of that conversation are so disingenuous, and not motivated by anything that's actually being represented in a game.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Right.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Reviews are so, they're so subjective and so socially constructed, and then it's also like oddly raced, and gendered, and has an ideological viewpoint, and all of that.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Well, then you get into this thing, especially when you talk about the coordinated efforts here, then you get into this situation where a game comes out, and let's say it's got a gay protagonist or something, and you have this whole host of people organizing to review bomb and to talk about how this game must be terrible.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Then you play it and you're like, "It's actually a super mediocre game," but I can't really talk about it as being a mediocre game because that falls into this whole meta debate that's not really about the game at all. It does, not that I think games are the end all, and that we should always be talking seriously about the games, but the meta conversations, like you said, Aaron, it's not about the thing.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It takes away the stakes. It takes away the actual core of the thing that we really want to be engaging with each other around. Instead, it becomes these ideological battles. That's a really frustrating thing.

 

Haeny Yoon:

It's like the perennial struggle for dominance and power exists in even reviews.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I actually think with games, reviews have long been kind of ground zero for said struggle. Yeah. There's a lot of control there, because you are the taste maker when you're the reviewer, you're the critic.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah. I want to switch gears just a tiny bit here and talk a little bit about world building. Whether that's video games, or tabletop games, or role playing narrative type games, or even just fiction, there's all this kind of world building that we do to try to create the context. We create the people that might exist in these contexts.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Historically, in mainstream fantasy and mainstream sci-fi, this has been kind of a fraught space, because there's times where the particulars of how the people who had the power, who were able to publish their stories and publish their books, got to project a certain set of expectations on the way the world should be organized.

 

Nathan Holbert:

A classic example of this that I know you've written about is the way in D&D, there are these racial modifiers. If you're of this race, you have these extra points. If you're of this race, you have these points.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Not anymore.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Right.

 

Aaron Trammell:

It's totally gone now.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Right. Yeah. I wanted to invite you to talk a little bit about that. On the one hand, what are some of the ways in which that's played out perhaps in history, but also how are we thinking about that now, or how are you thinking about the ways in which world building can become part of who participates and how it feels to participate in those spaces?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Yeah, that's a great question. Let me just talk about the D&D thing first, because you got me excited and you're like, "Talk about Dungeons and Dragons." I'm like, "Ooh, shiny objects." Yeah, with Dungeons and Dragons, with the racial modifiers, I think they did two things. One was a little silly and one was pretty smart.

 

Aaron Trammell:

The silly thing was they've changed the conversation from race to a conversation about species. No longer are characters in Dungeons and Dragons of different races, they're now of different species. I'll get into that in a second. I think this will maybe eventually join into some thoughts about world building at the end of things. Yeah, they talk about species instead of race in the rules now, but they had those modifier scores, which were a really fun game mechanic to play with, to be like, "Oh, my elf gets plus two intelligence," or whatever.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Completely racist and completely problematic, but it lent this sense of theme to the characters that players were building. Now, they've replaced that part with background. I actually think that was a kind of brilliant thing. For example, if your character was a dock worker and that's your character's back story, you'll probably be strong. I thought that was a really smart way to substitute out the racist part and substitute in, I think, something that's cultural and understandable, which is that we have these stories, these histories that we live with our lives, and those actually inform our physiology probably more than something like genetics does in most cases.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I really liked that change in the new books. Back to species, I thought this was fascinating and really weird that they decided to use species instead of race. I think trying to put my words to it has been kind of challenging. I think the thing that I would say about that is it felt like kind of a sidestep, it just felt like using a different word for the same thing. At its worst, I also think that it sort of cools a conversation about race that's happening.

 

Aaron Trammell:

This is a sort of classic conservative maneuver, which is like, "Oh, people are getting upset. We're talking about race. Let's find a way not to talk about race, but still do the discrimination." I think that that is definitely something that I'm not so cool with with the species thing, I actually think that having conversations about race in Dungeons and Dragons, even if they make people unhappy, are good, because the racism that's in the game is actually the racism that players bring into the game from their own lives.

 

Aaron Trammell:

In some ways, there's a forcing function there that some of these conversations do happen. I actually think those are productive and useful conversations for people to have that allow people to understand each other better and to grow. I know that's a hot take. I feel like I'm saying that sacred, safe space of gameplay shouldn't be so safe, but I don't always believe that it should. I actually think that we need to get our hands dirty sometimes to understand the world around us, and understand the depth of affect and emotion that's happening there.

 

Aaron Trammell:

To take, I think, this all back to world building where we started, which is I think that there is a corporate incentive for sure to do world building that is very inclusive. I think that one of the affordances of that kind of world building, this sort of inclusive world building, which is important, bringing different people in, saying, "This is a safe franchise," you're not going to see swastikas everywhere when you're playing this game, you won't feel unsafe.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I also think, I do think that enabling some conversations around serious real-world topics through the game is actually the mark that makes it art. When a game can do that and do it with skill in a way that players can play and say like, "Hey, I see the beauty of the world, or the diversity of the world actually reflected in this game, and that's beautiful," I think that's actually a really special thing.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah, as I hear you talking, I'm thinking about how there is something to working through some of the difficulties, or tensions, or issues, or questions that you might have with other people. I am an early childhood person, so I often think about this with little kids too. We want to solve all their problems by telling them exactly what to do or reprimanding them for something.

 

Haeny Yoon:

We don't sometimes let them work through some of the things that might be issues are problematic, because then they don't really know how to think through those things, because some adult took care of it for them instead. I really appreciate the idea of working through something. I think sometimes we're uncomfortable with difference. I think as soon as we see something different, we either want to ignore it, or go this way, or just fix it, or deal with it, but that there is a space to kind of grapple with some of these ideas of difference.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Totally, totally. I think that's, working through is a perfect way to describe what I was trying to explain is that games can be a space where that facilitates. It can be a relatively safe space, and that's really amazing that games can do that. I think, again, we have to get away from these polemics and design that expect sort of perfection and expect these smooth, pleasurable experiences that frankly, really just serve corporations.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Yeah. Yeah. Well, thank you, Aaron. This was a very deep conversation.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Yeah, love it.

 

Aaron Trammell:

I'll take it there. That's my favorite place to take it.

 

Nathan Holbert:

I love it. Yeah, yeah.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Into the deep. Thank you for this. We'd like to end with just a very simple question of what's poppin', which means what out in the pop culture landscape, books, media, video games, a new board game, anything that is out there that you're really excited about that you want other people to know about?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Oh, man. What's poppin'? Yeah. For me, Slay the Spire. It's a video game and also now a board game. I would say that's the game that's poppin' the most for me right now. I've been trying to play it a ton, but I don't know.

 

Nathan Holbert:

It's good.

 

Aaron Trammell:

Just in general, I guess on the pop culture level, I'm just really deeply into video essays on YouTube. I've learned so much from them, and I definitely enjoy watching and chilling with them. I think that's the sort of quirky thing that's poppin' in my life.

 

Haeny Yoon:

That's great. Long form video essayist.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Long form videos.

 

Haeny Yoon:

All right.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Thank you very much, Aaron, for spending time with us today, talking about your work, talking about games, talking about world building. It's been a real pleasure. We've already mentioned that you have these two excellent books that people should absolutely check out, right? Repairing Play, and The Privilege of Play, and your new book?

 

Aaron Trammell:

Designing Dragons, which might get a different title eventually. Yeah, the new one will be Designing Dragons, and hopefully will be out late next year.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Great.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Great.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Check that out.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Thank you. Pop and Play is produced by Haeny Yoon, Nathan Holbert, Lalitha M Vasudevana, Billy Collins, and Joe Riina-Ferrie at Teachers College Columbia University with the Digital Features Institute. This episode was edited by Billy Collins and Adrienne Vitullo.

 

Nathan Holbert:

For a transcript and to learn more, visit tc.edu/popandplay. Our music is selections from Leafeaters by Podington Bear, used here under a Creative Commons Attribution non-commercial license. Blake Danzig and Meyer Clark provided our social media and outreach support. Follow @PopandPlayPod on Instagram. Thank you to Abu Abdelbagi for support with our website and additional materials.

 

Haeny Yoon:

Do you teach about play and pop culture? Check out our topics collection, organized for the classroom. Of course, don't forget to share Pop and Play with a friend or colleague.

 

Nathan Holbert:

Thanks for listening.