Between disconnection and connectivity: analogue gaming in the post-digital age

This talk presents a work in progress on an ethnographic study of public board gaming in the post-pandemic UK (2021-2023). Over the past decade, the media have been celebrating the resurgence of board games, calling them the next ‘real’ thing, after books and vinyl, that has become ‘cool again’ (The Guardian, 2018). Although this boom is often attributed to the nostalgic promise of multisensory, face-to-face experience in an age of digital exhaustion, my ongoing ethnographic observations and in-depth qualitative interviews with gamers, designers, meetup organisers and board game cafe owners suggest that the relationship between disconnection and connectivity in contemporary board game culture is less straightforward. Even though board gaming is widely perceived and constructed as the opposite of being online, there is no rigid boundary between the analogue and the digital in lived gaming experiences.