@phdthesis{nokey,

title = {Hybrid Play Experience and Design in Tabletop Gaming},

author = {Ville Kankainen},

url = {https://urn.fi/URN:ISBN:978-952-03-3765-0},

year  = {2025},

date = {2025-02-21},

urldate = {2025-02-21},

journal = {Tampere University Dissertations},

publisher = {Tampere University},

abstract = {In times of ubiquitous digitality and pervasive media networks, a materially grounded

leisure culture of contemporary tabletop gaming is flourishing. This includes the play

and culture of modern board games, tabletop role-playing games, and miniature

games. While tabletop gamers often herald tangible aesthetics and co-located face to

face sociality among the key pleasures of this form of leisure, the tabletop gaming

hobby is in many ways shaped by recent techno–cultural developments.



Especially, the past decade has been a period of blurring boundaries between

physical and digital experiences in games and leisure, but also more broadly in the

contempary West. Everyday practices and social interaction are engaged increasingly

through online platforms, shaping the ways in which people experience leisure and

life in general. The blending of physical and digital elements in contemporary

tabletop gaming practices results in patterns of hybrid play which collate together a

variety of tangible and intangible experiences on the physical–digital continuum,

characterizing everyday life in the networked society.



This dissertation is an exploratory study, situated in the interdisciplinary field of

game studies, with a diverse array of methods and theoretical perspectives. The

multi-method approach used in the work is a flexible combination of social–

scientific and design research methods. It is supported by a collection of synergistic

theories drawn from several related fields, including game studies, media studies,

consumer culture studies, and leisure studies. A combination of diverse theoretical

perspectives throughout the four articles of the dissertation allows for a

comprehensive, multi-angle exploration of hybrid play experiences and design in

contemporary tabletop gaming.



The work largely relies on fundamental research on (tabletop game) player

experiences. The intention of this was to create understanding on the roles of digital

technology and online media practices in contemporary tabletop gaming leisure.

Understanding the changing environment of (tabletop game) play in this critical

period is among the central goals of this work. However, the study was conducted

with a future-oriented design ethnographical ethos, wherein the exploration was

carried out to inform and inspire the design of future hybrid play solutions. As a

result, I have contextualized hybrid play to a wider aesthetic and cultural “postix

digital” paradigm, referring to the way that content has taken the central stage in

culture after digital technology has become an inseparable part of everyday life.

I see hybrid play as a temporal phenomenon describing this critical period of

converging media and the fusing of analog and digital technologies, and the resulting

affective and aesthetic experiences. I investigate the matter from both theoretical

and practical perspectives, proposing a set of core principles for hybrid boardgame

design, while promoting an understanding of hybrid games and hybrid play as

experiential, rather than technological categories.



The results illustrate how experiential assemblages of physical and digital

elements in tabletop gaming open an environment for meaningful tabletop gaming

experiences beyond the act of playing the game, and how both the material and

immaterial cultures of tabletop gaming spread on a global scale through sociocultural

hybrid play engagements in networked media. By promoting this approach, I

challenge a common approach in games research which emphasizes the gameplay

situation over contextual game experiences.



In this, the work highlights sociomaterial interactions in the hybrid media

ecosystem of tabletop gaming as a source for hybrid play experiences, and further

earmarks key opportunities in the resulting hybrid play design space of tabletop

games. Finally, the focus on tabletop gaming in the dissertation is merely an example

of postdigital developments in contemporary culture, and the observations made in

the work hopefully have wider implications for understanding the entanglements of

physical and digital in gaming and leisure experiences, but also more broadly in

contemporary networked media cultures.},

keywords = {Experience, Game design, Hybridity, Tabletop game},

pubstate = {published},

tppubtype = {phdthesis}

}