Trammell, Aaron. The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture. New York: NYU Press (2023). Publisher’s site.
Dusting this old blog off as I head into a summer reading challenge for myself: 1 week, 1 book! Between now and August, I’m trying to read 1 book a week, just like the good ol’ days (read: very bad days) of my qualifying exams. Dumping out my thoughts on this blog really helped me as I tried to wade through all the scholarship I was reading back then, and it’s a habit I’d like to preserve as I continue in my career as a researcher. I’m trying to start up my second research project this summer, which involves a study of Japanese analog games; that means that most of the books I’m trying to cover this summer come from the field of game studies as I try to bootstrap myself into that scholarly conversation and see where my project might fit in. Basically, I’m hoping to take a similar approach to questions of genre as I did in my dissertation, only this time I’m thinking through the western high fantasy genre as it developed in Japan alongside and through analog games in the 1980s.
I’m kicking this challenge off with Aaron Trammell’s hot-off-the-presses monograph The Privilege of Play! Trammell is one of a number of voices I’ve been following on Twitter around the game studies field, and his approach in this book – which blends gender and ethnic studies, media history, and network studies – immediately caught my interest. As I read, I felt like I could see myself using a similar method in my own project, and Trammell’s clear authorial voice made his argument not only easy to follow, but a joy to unpack. Follow me below the cut for more!
One thing that I really appreciated about The Privilege of Play is the frankness with which Trammell puts himself into his argument – his own positionality as a geek who grew up in a lot of the networks that he studies here. It’s something I’ve grappled with a bit as I consider whether and how I want to pursue writing about Japanese game cultures: am I just turning all my hobbies into work? Will there still be any space for enjoyment in these things once I put them through the academic grinder? This book provided some reassurance on that score right from the introduction, in which Trammell (who turns out to be a fellow New Jerseyan!) reminisces about his childhood spent in hobby stores. There is an evident sense of care here and throughout the rest of the book, and this means not only care for the communities under discussion, but also caring about whether those communities can reckon with their racist roots and become better.
My own concerns for my enjoyment also give me a handy segue into one of Trammell’s key arguments: the quarantining of “fun” behind isolationist barricades meant to keep the cares of the “real world” at bay was precisely an effect of the hobbyist scene’s origins in the age of white flight. Articulated most clearly in his chapters on Avalon Hill’s wargaming scene of the 1960s and on the play-by-mail Diplomacy communities of the ’70s and ’80s, this argument powerfully captures the ways that white hobbyists constructed a model of apolitical fun in response to what they saw as the “chaos” of the civil rights protests happening concurrently. As we so often say today, the ability to think of oneself as apolitical is nothing more than normalizing white privilege as the default assumption, and this was the case for the communities Trammell takes up, as well.
The two chapters mentioned above bridge the first two sections of The Privilege of Play (“Beginnings” and “Networks”), though I see far more commonality between them than such a division suggests. Indeed, these two chapters, as well as the subsequent one that takes up D&D fanzine publication, feel to me like the crux of the book. (Maybe it’s cheating to say that fully half of a book is its “crux,” but this is my blog, and I can do what I want!) Looking at the solidification of hobby gaming in the mid-20th century, these chapters show the ways that early happenstances in the scene concretized into a variety of “networks of privilege” (a useful term Trammell deploys throughout the book) that entrenched whiteness as the norm for these communities. Each chapter looks at the ways these hobbyist communities, though sometimes diverging on issues of politics or gender and sexuality, nevertheless cohered around an identification with whiteness and upper-middle class white privilege.
The book’s first chapter, on model railroading, is a fascinating look at the ways that infrastructural disparities – namely access to electricity in one’s home in the early 20th century – created the conditions for an overwhelmingly white hobbyist community. Given that it was precisely upper-middle class whites who had early access to electrification, the niche hobby of model railroads naturally catered to these markets. Individual hobbyists would in turn come together as a networked community through my favorite object of study: fanzines! Trammell shows how it was the social space created by these magazines that turned a market trend into a network of privilege that was produced by (and itself reproduced) whiteness. Trammell uses this evidence to push back on a narrative within game studies with which I’m admittedly unfamiliar: that the oft-repeated history of the early “pioneers” of the tech industry – a great number of whom were members of MIT’s Tech Model Railroad Club – incorrectly positions them as individual mavericks. Trammell’s work in this chapter is to show how they would be better understood as products of and participants in the network of privilege surrounding model railroading.
The final chapters of the book, then, ask how those networks of privilege have changed (or not) with the proliferation of geekdom on the internet. If the networks of the first four chapters were largely based in the small-scale, analog world of fanzines and handshake networks that served to gatekeep their respective hobbies, the advent of forum sites like Board Game Geek and crowdfunding platforms like Kickstarter blew those gates off their hinges. In this regard, Trammell is optimistic about the future of the hobby scene. He spends a good deal of time detailing some of the recent social justice work that has been brewing in the community as more diverse voices come to be a part of it, and he seems confident that hobby gaming in the future won’t be defined in the same way by the white networks of privilege of its past.
This is not an unalloyed optimism, however, and here is another of The Privilege of Play‘s touches that I really appreciated. Trammell notes rightly that, as the hobby community expands beyond the cloisters of its old networks of privilege, it is simultaneously increasingly captured by the logics of neoliberalism. He presents a wonderfully clear accounting of the ways neoliberal exhortations toward “personal branding” and high-profile crowdfunding success stories serve to make hobby gaming seem appealing as a career while also making it an incredibly precarious way to earn a living. The growing marketization and corporatization of hobby games shines a light on the uncomfortable fit between the aims of companies like Asmodee and Hasbro and the kinds of labor that have defined the hobby scene for a century or more. Hobbyists’ fan labor is less strictly tied to economic considerations of remuneration and wages, precisely because it arose out of upper-middle class white communities for whom money wasn’t as immediate a concern. Rather, it is defined through affective attachment to the hobby itself, and in this way, this argument felt very close to what I was trying to articulate in my dissertation around the Japanese SF community.
There’s a lot more I could say about The Privilege of Play, like the ways it brings understudied historical actors to the fore while still keeping the focus on their privilege networks or the ways Trammell’s explicit ethico-political calls throughout the book made me realize what an “apolitical” posture Japanese media studies in English tends to adopt. I have to end this post SOMETIME, though, or I won’t be able to get to the next book in my challenge! Overall, The Privilege of Play was a privilege to read (I’m sorry, I’m sorry, I’m trying to delete it), and I’m looking forward to continuing on in my forays into game studies. See you next week!
Academic Androids 