Digitizing Early Modern Board Games

FAIN: FEL-273874-21

Kelli Wood
University of Tennessee, Knoxville (Knoxville, TN 37916-3801)

Preparation of a playable digital critical edition and translation of seven early modern Italian board games.

Booming print production in the sixteenth century led to the development of new styles of board games in Rome that spread across Europe, including direct progenitors of recognizable contemporary favorites including The Game of Life. These novel games represented microcosms of governmental, social, military, and celestial systems for educated aristocrats and average tavern-goers alike. This project proposes that virtual interfaces employed in video game world building can enable an innovative analysis of the complexity and depth of these games. Playable, digital versions of these non-linear forms of intermedial artistic production, formed out of diagrams, texts, images, and game mechanics, allow for an engagement which greatly exceeds the capacity of traditional publication. Playing—rather than simply viewing—these games will provide a new vantage point on the poetics, artistry, and imagery of the entwined visual, material, and literary culture of the Counter Reformation in Italy.