Talk @ Annual Conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung

The Book, the Board, and the Lantern in the Dark
Violence, Vulnerability, and Intermedial Player Immersion in Kingdom Death: Monster

Where: Cologne University

Conference: Annual conference of the Gesellschaft für Fantastikforschung, September 17-19

 

Immersion is often understood as an enthralling concept, reserved for complex virtual worlds that veil reality behind an integral mediated experience. I challenge this assumption and argue that analogue games can cultivate immersive experiences, even when they are played with clearly separable material components. Using the narrative boutique board game Kingdom Death: Monster (Poots 2015) as a case study, I demonstrate how the game fosters immersion across different analogue media components by the perpetual evocation of violence against a frail player community.

Relying on the theoretical observations of Paul Wake, who highlights the importance of a board game’s play-performance that fills all indeterminacy with player-created meaning (cf. 2023, 49) and by focusing on the game’s intermedial connotations (via Wolf 1999, Rajewski 2010, and Ellenström 2021), I portray how Kingdom Death: Monster creates immersion between different media artefacts in a reliance on violence. The game at first fosters intimacy through a shared reading moment that leads to a co-op bonding survival gameplay segment, then it effectively exploits both sensations by forcing players into violent discomfort to evoke vulnerability. Both rulebook and play-sequence interact with one another under this shared leitmotif, upheld across two different media artefacts and the metaphoric-aesthetic driving factors of Eros and Thanatos in the sense of a discomfort between deadly threats and uncomfortable intimacy (following Freud [1920] 1955). Ultimately, I thereby demonstrate how the game evokes immersive qualities typically not connected with the abstract, engaging-rather-than-affective, physical medium.

A concluding discussion of the presented findings questions the adequacy of common observations on immersive traits in specifically analogue game studies. By discussing opportunities for methodological finetuning, my presentation’s outlook, in turn, resonates with the idea of a ‘painful playthrough,’ as worked with by Blackburn and Timmell (cf. 2024, 113) and shows how self-experienced stress in a discomforting game moment must be endured for the sake of analysing violent play.