You Say “Games,” I Hear “Board Games”

Can't Hear You: Gestures, Ster- eotypes, and Brushings Against the Player in Dota 2" focuses on a 2019 Dota 2 tournament to discuss gestures in esports.1 Emily Louisa Smith's "Fallout of Shakespeare: Playing and Video Game Theater," also published in 2024, is concerned with performances and adaptations of Shakespeare within the game world of Fallout.2Eric Hayot's 2021 "Video Games and the Novel" explores the hermeneutics of games stories, some of their cultural history within games studies, and ways in which player choice might bend stories toward player-pleasing happy endings, and then outlines examples of games that disrupted this curve.3Three distinct areas of focus hint at the vastness of what now falls within game studies and how far it has come as a field since the late 1990s.There is some direct reference to this history in Hayot's article, which discusses the field's initial need to differentiate its understanding of narrative away from literary studies to make the case for its uniqueness, but in the process perhaps overzealously dismissing the not inconsiderable overlap in narratological concerns.Yes, game stories are different, but as stories there are some foundational elements shared with literary studies (and for that matter cinema and screen culture) that have direct bearing on the craft and reception of games stories.Stories in all mediums usually trade in characters, motivations, reversals, revelations, plot structure, theme, pacing, and so on.However, from my perspective, as a games scholar-practitioner now mostly concerned with the area of board games, these articles have a particular focalizing resonance.They all, in their different ways, speak to recent developments or ongoing discussions within board-game design.Hayot's article discusses the tension between choice and constraint inherent in narrative, which speaks to the design concern within historical board games to simulate choices for historical actors that permit sufficient choice to engage players, while also applying sufficient constraints to both make games playable and reflect the constraints these historical actors endured.The article also discusses how the need for players to be able to win engenders a "predilection for happy endings" and "diegetic omnipotence," limiting video-game stories in their capacity for "tragedy, en gl ish lan g u a ge n o t es