Henry Jenkins explores the relationship between media fans and content creators in his influential work Textual Poachers, describing how particular media texts are reworked and remediated by fans to create new meanings, often resulting in derivative works that are then re- circulated back into fan
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culture (1992). Media theorist John Fiske describes this process as “textual productivity,” pointing to motivation and circulation as key differentiators between these products and “legitimate” texts:
Fans produce and circulate among themselves texts which are often created with production values as high as any in the official culture. The key differ-ences between the two are economic rather than ones of competence, for fans do not write or produce their texts for money; indeed, their productivity typi-cally costs them money.
There is also a difference in circulation; because fan texts are not produced for profit, they do not need to be mass- marketed, so unlike official culture, fan culture makes no attempt to circulate its texts outside its own community [1992, p. 39].26
In discussing the ways in which some leisure subcultures can be perceived as “copyrighted,” Fine pays particular attention to games as a consumer good that are manufactured and purchased by members of a specific culture, with the entrepreneur providing the rules by which games are played (1989). How-ever, as Fine notes, the communal nature of gaming subcultures often com-plicates understandings of authority, such that players perceive themselves as having ownership of the game, and thus the freedom to manipulate the rules and engage creatively with texts. Reflecting this, the history of hobby gaming culture is replete with examples of creative textual productivity that date back to long before the rise of the Internet. Early wargame magazines are filled with suggested rule variants — a tradition that is continued in fanzines such as Sumo and Counter— while many hobby games have inspired enthusiasts to develop alternative rules, maps, and scenarios that modify the base game.
Role- playing games in particular encourage creativity through the provision of a rules system that is adaptable to a wide variety of scenarios and created narratives.
While the existence of an active participatory culture is not predicated upon the presence of digital communication technologies ( Jenkins, 2002b;
Merrick, 2004), the avenues of communication provided by the Internet have helped to foster a community of gamers who are able to circulate fan products to a large and geographically dispersed audience. The wide availability of dig-ital design tools and the simplicity of downloading and printing graphic files have resulted in a wide variety of supplementary documents being available via the files section of boardgamegeek.
The most common form of downloadable fan- created content on the site arises from a perceived shortcoming of published games. Player aids, a- glance summaries of the process of play, are available for a large number of games. While some are simple text documents intended merely as a handy reference tool, others elaborately incorporate graphics from the original game
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in order to provide a document that not only assists in play but also augments the published game. In some cases, where the rulebook published with the game is considered inadequate, enthusiasts have entirely rewritten the rules in order to make the game more accessible for others.27Given the European origins of many games, rules translations too are common.
While these forms of content creation are undertaken out of perceived necessity, more elaborate examples of textual productivity can be seen in the many fan- produced expansions for games. Examples include numerous expan-sions for Carcassonne,28 fan- created maps for rail games such as Age of Steam and Railroad Tycoon (Drover and Wallace, 2005), and the development of new cards for games such as Dominion and Race for the Galaxy (Lehmann, 2007).
Interestingly, perhaps due to the often- tenuous relationship between theme and mechanics in many eurogames, another common form of created content involves re- theming games with other icons of geek culture.
Days of Wonder’s popular cooperative game Shadows over Camelot (Cathala and Laget, 2005), has been re- imagined in the realm of Monty Python’s Holy Grail, while Reiner Knizia’s Egyptian- themed auction game Ra is transposed to a world of surreal horror inspired by H. P. Lovecraft in Rathulhu. The ancient war- themed card game Battle Line (Knizia, 2000c)— itself a theming of the original Schotten Totten (Knizia, 1999e)29— can be downloaded from the site in a file that replaces all of the cards with characters from the television series The Simpsons. In cases where games have long been out of print, some fans have taken it upon themselves to produce freely available downloads of entire games, with graphical components either rendered specifi-cally for this purpose or appropriated from copyright- free sources.30
The fact that this type of fan activity occurs largely unhindered speaks to the relationship between game hobbyists and the small industry that caters to them. As Richard Busch observes, a consequence of the 20th century shift towards the domestic sphere in the practice of leisure was that pastimes became less subject to the hegemonic values of society (1990). Hobby businesses par-ticularly tend to grow out of small entrepreneurial foundations that are com-monly the work of hobbyists themselves. Thus, the micro- industries that sprang from this shift are not entirely “impositions of monolithic capital” (p.
19) but have come to embody a negotiated relationship between the consumer and the producer. Due to the fact that the majority of individuals working within the hobby gaming industry are themselves members of the culture, the industry operates, for the most part, in a manner quite dissimilar to that of the prototypical capitalist business (Winkler, 2006).
Since hobby board gaming occupies such a niche in English- speaking countries, significant value is placed on word- of- mouth marketing. A game
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that becomes successful will rarely, if ever, do so due to intense advertising campaigns or carefully considered corporate marketing techniques. Thus, business owners are aware that gamers can have a significant role in the success of individual titles. Consequently, companies have a particularly strong need to communicate effectively with those hobbyists who tend to make purchasing decisions and act as “tastemakers” for the hobby. To this end, many designers and publishers utilize boardgamegeek as a point of intersection with the broader gaming community, and a large number maintain active accounts on the web-site.31 In the case of designers, many have posted to the site to clarify rule queries and answer specific questions concerning games they have designed, with some contributing essays and anecdotes explaining the origin of games and the nature of the design process. On occasion designers have been known to incorporate feedback from the website into re- issues of a game.32
One especially useful aspect of the relationship between gamers and the individuals and companies who make games is the ability to gauge the poten-tial demand for a product before committing to publication. The ability of publishers to effectively measure consumer interest is useful in deciding to translate successful European titles into English, as with Z- Man Games’
reprint of the 2008 Spiel des Jahres special prize winner Agricola. A number of game companies have reprinted games specifically due to their venerated status among hobby gamers. A good example of this model is found in the small publisher Valley Games who have successfully reprinted Karl Heinz Schmiel’s Die Macher and the long- out- of- print Avalon Hill titles Hannibal:
Rome vs. Carthage (Simonitch, 1996) and Titan.
The close ties between the hobby gaming industry and its customers can often result in hobbyists having a more formal relationship with publishers. Play -testing, the process of development and refinement through iterative play ses-sions, is often outsourced to gaming groups where in- house resources are limited.
Translation is another area where enthusiasts can, and do, contribute. While amateur translations are common on boardgamegeek, on occasion these texts are used in the published versions of the game.33 At conventions it is often hobbyists who are enrolled to demonstrate games to prospective customers.
Given the insights into game design and the industry generally that hob-byists typically acquire, it is not surprising to find that many decide to take their interest further by designing and/or publishing their own games. At the simplest level this typically involves the development of “print and play games”
that can be downloaded from boardgamegeek at no cost. Some designers have had games picked up by existing publishers, while others have self- published their games. Although the most popular site for the discussion of game design on the Internet is the Boardgame Designers Forum (2009), an active game design community does exist on boardgamegeek. The most important role that
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the site plays for prospective designers and publishers lies in the ability to dis-seminate information to hobbyists. Jeremiah Lee, the designer of Zombies in my Pocket (2009a), highlights the importance of the community in raising awareness of what was originally a free print and play game:
The Geek was a big influence on my process, as I hadn’t heard of PnP games until I came here, and without all the people that printed, played, loved, and rated ZimP, it wouldn’t have found a publisher [Lee, 2009b].
Jackson Pope of Reiver Games is an example of an independent publisher for whom the boardgamegeek community has been significant in raising aware-ness of his games:
I designed Border Reivers34a couple of years before I found the Geek, but coming here definitely gave me the impetus to self- publish. I made 100 copies by hand and they sold out within 11 months, largely due to the Geek. So then I published 300 copies of Yehuda’s It’s Alive!35... again by hand, and again it sold out within a year. Since then I’ve gone into it full- time and got a re- print of It’s Alive! manufactured for me and a third game, Carpe Astra,36by Ted Cheatham and I [2009].
A wonderful example of the relationship between the hobbyist commu-nity and the industry can be found in Steve Zamborsky’s game Cleopatra’s Caboose (Zamborsky, 2010). In 2005, boardgamegeek user Chuck Uherske cre-ated a tongue- in- cheek geeklist entitled Things I’m Sick Of!, which lampooned particularly overused tropes within the gaming hobby (2005).37Listed among these were Egyptian- themed games, auction games and train games. In a response to the list, amateur designer Zamborsky commented that he was currently working on “a game that auctions off trains. In Ancient Egypt.”
Another user chimed in with the (again, tongue- in- cheek) suggestion that the game should be titled “Cleopatra’s Caboose.” Zamborsky describes how the game came to be:
When I read that Geeklist, I thought it would be pretty funny to comment that I was working on a game that combined several of those elements, even though I wasn’t. Apparently, my subconscious thought otherwise and my mind had been processing some things that I wasn’t aware of, because next thing I know I’m writing down notes for Caboose after waking up one day.
Some more notes later, I realized I had to create the prototype to test the ideas and make sure that what I came up with worked. The rest, as they say, is his-tory [2009].
History, in this case, saw the game picked up for development by Z- Man Games, with characters whose names are derived partly from historic railroad barons and partly from Egyptian gods.38 Released in late 2010, Cleopatra’s Caboose is an elaborate in- joke, an inspired parody of modern strategy games that reflects the close relationship between hobbyists and game publishers.
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As is common within niche hobbies, the line between consumer and cre-ator within the board gaming hobby is frequently blurred by the activities of enthusiasts, whether this is in the form of developing supplementary materials for existing products or through more formal participation in the industry.
Board game hobbyists are not passive consumers, detached from the industry that supports their interests; they share a “sense of identity and feeling of inclusiveness” engendered by a mutual enthusiasm for the activity of gaming (Winkler, 2006, p. 148). Not surprisingly, then, there is a tendency to share this enthusiasm with those outside of the hobby.