Board games and postdigital consumer culture

Over the past decade, the world’s media have been celebrating the resurgence of board games, calling them ‘the next real thing, after books and vinyl’, that has become ‘cool again’ (Boycott-Owen 2018). Once considered a niche activity for children and geeks, board gaming is now finding its way into mainstream culture, attracting new, more diverse demographics of consumers (Booth 2021). Following a period of steady growth in the mid- and late 2010s (Bloomberg 2019), global board game sales soared during the COVID-19 pandemic (Matalucci 2021) and are predicted to rise further with no end in sight (Statista 2023).

In popular discourse, the cultural revival of board games is attributed to their nostalgic promise of a physically grounded social experience, seen as a rare and precious commodity in a digital age. In article after article, book after book, journalists and self-help writers discuss board games as a ‘revenge of analog’ (Sax 2016) and a digital detox solution (Newport 2019). And yet, the robust materiality of board gaming is underpinned by a ‘digital hinterland’ (Rogerson et al. 2017) of online practices such as researching, collecting, cataloguing, discussing and tracking. Moreover, analogue elements in board game design are increasingly integrated with digital apps, platforms and devices (Rogerson et al. 2021). Digital technology does not just support and frame the consumption of board games – it also facilitates their production, advertisement, testing and distribution (Trammell 2019), ultimately making them ‘more accessible, more socially acceptable, and more available than ever before’ (Booth 2021: 161). As Trammell (2019: n.pag.) put it, ‘Analogue games are emerging as a cultural phenomenon in our present moment because of their explicit relationality to the digital. They can only be understood and defined by and through an oppositional-yet-contingent relationship to digital media’.

The paper examines this ‘oppositional-yet-contingent’ relationship between board games and digital technology as one of the many manifestations of postdigital consumer culture. The term ‘postdigital’, coined in arts and humanities and increasingly widely applied in other contexts from pedagogy to urbanism, describes the ‘messy and paradoxical condition’ of culture after its digitalisation (Andersen et al. 2014: 5). The prefix ‘post’ in this word does not indicate a linear progression but reflects subtle cultural shifts and ongoing mutations between old and new (Cramer 2014). Drawing on findings from a multi-method qualitative study of UK board gamers, the paper argues that postdigital consumer culture is characterised by two features. First, it strives to find an antidote, even if a temporary one, to a culture of radical digital dependency (Hoang et al. 2022; Lambert et al. 2023). For board game consumers, the dominant ‘structure of feeling’ (Williams 1997) underpinning their leisure pursuits is exhaustion and disenchantment with digital technology. Although this affective complex is widely used in marketing narratives, we should not dismiss it as a form of ‘commodification of authenticity and nostalgia’ (cf. Syvertsen and Enli 2020) – instead, it should be used as a critical lens into lived experiences of postdigital consumption. Second, in a postdigital consumer culture, technological development does not merely produce new technosocial affordances, relationships, infrastructures and imaginaries (Ritzer and Miles 2019; Kviat 2022; El-Shamandi Ahmed et al. 2023) – it also transforms the meaning and value of already existing commodities and consumption practices (Luckman 2013; Cramer 2014; Thorén et al. 2019). By looking into these transformations, we can shift the focus from consumption of and through digital technology (Denegri-Knott and Molesworth 2010) to the cultural context formed by the increasing digitalisation of everyday life (Cochoy et al. 2020; Belk et al. 2021; Hoang et al. 2022) and explore new forms of inclusion and exclusion, new social and cultural divisions, new pressures and expectations, new strategies of resistance and adaptation, and new identities and ideals embedded and represented in postdigital consumption.