Modern board game as a McLuhanian communicational cultural artifact

A look at the practice of social co-creation: play, under the laws of the media

Abstract

This proposal focuses on the intersection of conceptions of play developed in recent years based on our own line of research and the proposals of Marshall McLuhan in Understanding Media (1964) and of Marshall and Eric McLuhan, revealed in The Laws of Media (1990).
Understanding media as extensions of human faculties, expanding human capabilities, games result in McLuhanian artifacts, extensions of humanity that improve something, render something obsolete, recover something, and enable transformation (McLuhan, 1990: 344), and which, fundamentally, affect—in their materiality—the environments surrounding these media.
This exploration centers on the shift from traditional board games to modern board games (MBGs). In this transition, certain aspects define what will be understood as Modern Board Games, establishing a distance from previous social co-creation proposals in play. While also considering which aspects of this medium remain the same.
The analysis is based on four pillars: theme, complexity, mastery, and authorship, which allow for a differentiation between these two generations of games.