This Thursday, the indispensable Jason Begy rolls into our little frontier town with his well-travelled talk entitled “Memories and Metaphors of the Railroad: An Investigation of Cultural Memory in Board Games.”
Jason describes his presentation as such: “In this talk I bring together memory studies, material culture, metaphor theory, and game studies to explore how board games can shape cultural memory. I begin with an overview of cultural memory studies, which examines how the media of the present actively construct our understanding of the past. Drawing on the work of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, I next describe the structural metaphors used by contemporary observers to understand the societal changes wrought by the railroad. I then analyze three board games that represent the advent of the railroad age in North America, 1830: Railways and Robber Barons, Age of Steam, and Empire Builder, as material culture. I conclude by arguing that games have the capacity to reify historically-situated structural metaphors, thus keeping them active in cultural memory.”
I hope to see you all there!
What: Trying to Figure Out What the Deal is with Train Games
When: Thursday, November 27th, from 5-7pm
Where: Centre for Technoculture, Art, and Games – EV 11.655, 1515 St. Catherine W.
Who: Everyone is Welcome!