It was the beginning of March, I was sitting precariously on the edge of a softly padded folding chair, rolling dice. I was a newcomer to the Sunday Pathfinder 2e group, making my first forays into Pathfinder Society play, an organization that arranges national playthroughs of analog tabletop roleplaying games in the Lord of the Rings and Dungeons and Dragons-esk high fantasy Pathfinder world, allowing communities from across the US (and in fact the world) to converge as they play through the same imagined adventures around a multitude of tables. Six white men of varying ages sat around me, dice in hand and character sheets on the table, the battle maps laid out and character minis in a neat little row “walking” through the dungeon. These physical manifestations of the imagined world described to us by the Dungeon Master helping us to visualize ourselves and ourcharacters in space. Several of these men had just come home from a game conference and were speaking lightly about their concern of Covid-19 which was beginning to shut down universities on the East and West Coasts as Washington and New York states were seeing their first deaths.

There was a clipped nature to the play. The actions went as follows: walk in, kill monster, get treasure, walk out;, a phenomenon I was told was normal to this table. However, there was also a heightened anxiety amongst the players and out-of-character discussion turned again and again to Covid-19 news. None of them expected it to reach the Midwest, but to be curtailed at our borders. There was a melancholic apathy around the table, which manifested in a consistent verbal reassurance that no one believed it would impact them deeply at all.

This was the last time I was involved with in-person participant observation.

In Children at Play in the Holocaust (1988), George Eisen writes on how children played in Germany in the Ghettos and the concentration camps, as well as the ways in which the Nazi institution created and destroyed spaces of play. Although a historian looking at historical accounts and data and not an anthropologist there on the ground, Eisen allows for a deep understanding of context, action, and process within his work. I was in awe of his work and the deep emotional toll it must have taken to exist within that research. In its horror it gave us a new understanding of play  as a processing tool. He found, first and foremost, that children use their environment to create their games. One of the most poignant examples is the game in which children dug “mass graves,” some children played the Jews in the shooting line, and others played the Nazis, the Jewish children falling into the graves as they were “shot,” (Eisen 76-80). Although our current predicament cannot and should not be compared to the Holocaust and the experience of the Jewish people , we are now in a space of mass trauma and as scientists we can study what happens to play during times of isolation, how play can lift us up and how it is bastardized by that very trauma  it help us to process.

It quickly became apparent, as my university and the game shop shuttered their doors, that my research needed to pivot. The community’s second home, the game shop, vanished. The brick and mortar shop which was meant to stand eternally as the built architected play space, its tables laid out just so, evaporated. Many members of the community were left in the wind. However, within days of the initial Stay-at-Home orders the gaming community sprang to action, building digital space that could never replace the co-local, physical space, but may temporarily bridge the gap and answer the call of its members stuck at home.

As social restrictions took hold, there was a rapid increase in calls for digital games on social media and a surge of instructional YouTube videos teaching the use of digital platforms like Zoom, Discord, and Twitch. Gaming conferences rapidly adapted from co-present practices to digital platforms for panels, game sessions, and communication. This is an astounding amount of human effort and ingenuity adapting to digital space to sustain community cohesion and gaming practice. It also demonstrates the deep, game-related social ties that Milwaukee has always had both across and beyond its region.

I thus found myself with a unique opportunity to examine important questions about playful experience: How do people innovate in their use of existing technologies and other affordances? How are digital, physical, and imagined spaces and places architected and utilized as people transition from the co-local table to digital mediums? How does collective trauma impact the way we play?

It is difficult to say what my observations are here in these first days and weeks outside of the above preliminary paragraph and questions. And yet these are questions waiting impatiently for answers. In this scenario it is not only examining how play changes in immediate response to trauma, but also how it continues to change and what the new normal sure to be built will look like. My own experience has been one of exhaustion just in the posing let alone in the gathering or in the analysis. Time seems to both speed by and run like cold molasses deeply impacting my experience of being a researcher. In the wake of Covid-19 it is difficult to process what is happening and difficult to analyze these first responses without the context of the secondary responses sure to come.

References

Eisen, George. 1988. Children at Play in the Holocaust: Games among the Shadows. Massachusetts: The University of Massachusetts Press.

“One of the great pitfalls of any endeavor is the temptation to think that no one has ever formulated similar concepts or advocated related approaches… it must be admitted that many new things are different arrangements of old or known facts. In other words, most novel and creative work is based on appropriate rearrangement.”

— Dr. Nancy Lieberman.