Tanya Pobuda Analyzes Modern Board Gaming on Popular YouTube Channel
Dr. Tanya Pobuda, a FHASS instructor teaching courses on innovation, science and social media at Sheridan College, has been researching the board game hobby for the past 6 years. Her PhD research on board games has been featured in The Conversation, New York Times, the Analog Games Studies Journal and YouTube channel Our Family Plays Games (OFPG).
Tanya is a regular contributor to a popular U.S. board game YouTube channel that is focussed on promoting the board game hobby to a diversity of players. OFPG is run by Starla, Miklos and Grant Fitch out of Omaha, Nebraska.
A recurring segment called OFPG Voices showcases diverse content creators sharing game recommendations and analyses of the hobby with the world every week. Tanya is a regularly contributor, sharing her board game research about how gaming spaces and the wider games industry needs to do more to expand the hobby to include new participants.
Her board game research examines the lack of diversity in the labour of board game design, and a lack of representation of women and non-binary, Black, Indigenous, Persons of Colour (BIPOC) in artwork of popular games acts as a potential barrier for board gaming cultures’ potential growth, wider mainstream cultural adoption, and creates the conditions for exclusion and marginalization for those who identify as women, LGBTQiIA+, and BIPOC.
The research conducted in support of this dissertation found that 92.6 percent of the labour of board game design was that of white-identified, male-identified creators in a sample of the top-ranked 400 board games on the global game repository, BoardGameGeek (BGG). A research study further found that of the human representation found on the cover art of the boxes of the top 200 BGG games, images of men and/or boys represented 76.8 percent of the sample or 647 figures. Women and/or girls were represented 23.2 percent of the time or 195 figures in total compared to men. Only 17.5% of the human representation was that of Black, Indigenous, Persons of Colour (BIPOC) on the cover art of board games or 112 total figures, versus 528 images of white figures which represented 82.5 percent of the sample. You can read Tanya’s published research here, in her book ‘I DIDN’T SEE ANYONE WHO LOOKED LIKE ME’: GENDER AND RACIAL REPRESENTATION IN BOARD GAMING.
Today, Tanya is not only a board game academic, she is a game designer, licensed drone pilot, artificial intelligence chatbot creator, and virtual and augmented reality practitioner. She has been a featured speaker at the Manchester Metropolitan University’s Manchester Game Studies Network and Carnegie Mellon’s OLab. Tanya has been interviewed on various podcasts including The Board Game Community Show, Stuff Your Mom Never Told You About, The Spiel, Who What Why Podcast and Beyond Solitaire.
You can check out Tanya’s YouTube channel!
And her podcast appearances here to learn more about the state of modern board games.
