Book review

The privilege of play, by Aaron Trammell

Brandon Blackburn

University of California, Irvine, Irvine, California, United States

[0.1] Keywords—American history; Analog; Game studies; Geek; Hobby; Play studies; Race

Blackburn, Brandon. 2024. "The Privilege of Play, by Aaron Trammel [book review]." In "Centering Blackness in Fan Studies," guest edited by Alfred L. Martin Jr. and Matt Griffin, special issue, Transformative Works and Cultures, no. 44. https://doi.org/10.3983/twc.2024.2617.

Aaron Trammell, The privilege of play. New York: New York University Press, 2023, paperback $30.00 (240p), ISBN 978-1479818402.

[1] In The Privilege of Play, Aaron Trammell interrogates how heteronormative white masculinity shaped the cultural history of hobby and geek culture in the United States. Trammell discusses the complex, insular, and often self-contradictory world of what he calls "the hobby," the network of war games, role-playing games (RPGs), and board game enthusiasts whose "collective sensibilities...gatekeep minoritized people from participation" (2). Integral to Trammell's analysis is reading the hobby first and foremost as a network—and a disproportionately distributed one at that—to show not just the links, not just the social frameworks, but the privileged potential for specific kinds of social connections determined by a history of white supremacy. The abstract sociocultural networks concretized by movements such as white flight allowed white male participants in the hobby to benefit from racism even though they largely saw themselves as apolitical outsiders. Therefore, explaining hobby culture as an enactment of what Trammell calls a "network of privilege" also explains the ubiquity, persistence, and resiliency of racist, masculinist, cis-heteronormative spaces despite dedicated efforts by minoritized peoples to diversify them (11–15).

[2] The book is organized into three sections, each of which is composed of two chapters. In part 1, "Beginnings," Trammell challenges the dominant narrative of how the hobby came to be. This intervention operates at two levels: historical revisionism and imminent cultural critique. Contesting the dominant narrative of a group of underdogs creating all of modern geek culture from scratch in the 1970s, Trammell explains how affluent model train hobbyists in the late 1800s and early 1900s created infrastructures that would eventually become inherited by enthusiasts of war games, role-playing games, and board games in the 1970s and 1980s. As Trammell argues, the popularity of model trains from as early as 1891 depended on the affluence of people. Enthusiasts purchased model trains because electricity was something to which only wealthy white elites had access, and the availability of leisure time to enjoy the trains within the domestic sphere was strictly masculinized. The entire culture that followed model trains therefore presumed affluent whiteness. This culture included periodicals, advertisements, and eventually, even the Tech Model Railroad Club, often considered the birthplace of hacker and geek culture, which was founded in 1946 at MIT.

[3] Yet, even though advertisements and other media from the early 1900s prove that white supremacy was commonplace, this presumed white affluence was both invisible to its beneficiaries and a taboo subject of discussion within the hobby. As a result, both racism and the refusal to talk about racism persisted, even as it led hobbyists to solicit interest from white supremacists. In chapter 2, "Avalon Hill's Race Problem," Trammell examines The General, a magazine distributed by popular war game and periodical publisher Avalon Hill. Using The General as a case study, he shows how hobbyists enmeshed within these networks used overtly white supremacist rhetoric to garner a dedicated and homogenous fan base. Most concretely, Avalon Hill lionized Nazi and Confederate leaders in their supplementary periodicals and courted contributors with explicit white supremacist ties. Yet, as Trammell demonstrates, there was also a subtler manipulation of networked privilege going on simultaneously beneath the overt racist imagery. As he explains, much of the draw of historical war games comes from simulating actual conflicts, meaning that prominent wars like the American Civil War and World War II are the subject of many of Avalon Hill's games. However, the ability to play at abstracting the military tactics of someone like Confederate general Robert E. Lee away from the white supremacy for which he fought was a privilege neither available to nor desirable for the marginalized people who had to deal with the effects of racism every day. Yet, protests against the games were refuted by hobbyists through claims of both historical accuracy and freedom of imagination, a paradox Trammell calls "simulationism": when the protest was about a harmful historical detail, the argument was that it was there because of dedication to historical record; when the protest was about a distressing imagined scenario like the Nazis winning WWII, the argument was that it was there because of freedom of thought (58). The ability to naturalize racism by using war games both to claim historical realism and role-play racist futures allowed for a culture in the war-gaming hobby to develop in which white supremacy could not merely persist but thrive.

[4] The history of white affluence in the hobby led to the eventual formation of a distributed network of privilege in which self-identified outsiders both benefited from and perpetuated the racist principles of its origins. In part 2, "Networks," Trammell examines how privileged elitism and white supremacy, now fully embedded into the hobby, coalesced into a culture that took pride in its societal exteriority, as evidenced in the central principle that politics do not belong in games. This stance extended even into the communities surrounding Diplomacy, an explicitly political game about the start of World War I.

[5] As Trammell explains, in response to desegregation of cities in the 1940s and 1950s, affluent white people relocated from rapidly diversifying urban centers to racially homogenous suburbs in a mass exodus known as white flight. As a result, people entering the hobby in the 1960s and 1970s would have done so within white suburbia (86). Yet, white masculinity in the suburbs was by no means hermetically sealed from the rest of society—the stable white masculine power promised by the suburbs was undercut by both the high-profile civil rights protests of the 1950s and 1960s and the integration of masculinity into the feminine-coded domestic sphere. As a result, hobbyists at the time sought to reassert their white masculinity by eradicating any indication of its fragility. Therefore, while on the surface, the hobby's apolitical stance seemed to guarantee players a neutral space to focus on their passions, in actuality it was an overt rejection of topical political issues of the day. Anything that happened in the space surrounding Diplomacy was justified by conservative rhetorics of free speech and all in good fun, even if it directly affected vulnerable people both outside and inside the hobby. Over time, Trammell explains, the deliberate rejection of political discussion obscured the racist history of its creation, allowing white male members of the hobby to benefit from systems of oppression without having to attend to the ways they excluded marginalized voices and directly undermined the efforts of actors in the community to make meaningful change.

[6] In chapter 4, "The Alarums & Excursions Community and Belonging," Trammell discusses two class supplements, written, produced, and distributed by fans, to the popular tabletop RPG Dungeons & Dragons (D&D): the Courtesan and the Damsel. The vocal apolitical stance of the hobby and the quiet complicity of many of its members sent a clear message to minoritized groups that the status quo, which existed within the hobby space just as it existed outside it, was not to be contested. While the taboo did not silence every voice in the community, even voices speaking out against issues in the hobby were not immune to inadvertently recreating them. Both of the supplements Trammell covers sought to trouble sexism in the hobby and give female characters more agency within the limited scope of D&D RPG mechanics, yet ultimately were severely limited by the very mechanics they were designed to operate within. The Courtesan class supplement seeks to bring sexuality into the game by making sex work a viable and practical avenue for play. However, while weaponizing sexuality is an attempt at a critical inversion of the power dynamics that reduce sexually active women to sex objects for male pleasure, the class still runs on a numerical algorithm that allows players to avoid reckoning with the intimate dangers of actual sex work specifically and female sexuality more generally. Regardless of the intentions of these supplements' creators, their commitment to the play-first, apolitical values of the hobby ultimately led them to create classes that reinforced sexism in D&D, however much they may have tried to trouble it.

[7] In the current moment, we find ourselves in a turbulent time in which many of these old values are being contested. In part 3, "Mainstream," Trammell looks at the hobby culture of today, following what he reads as two key shifts into what he calls a "full-time hobby game infrastructure" (172). The first of these shifts is toward digitization; the second is toward neoliberal identitarian branding. Digitization describes the shift in the late 1990s and early 2000s away from paper periodicals to online forums. The website Board Game Geek, for instance, is a veritable database of information about every game people have taken the time to upload onto it. Trammell notes that the presence of all that information in one place obscures the labor required to produce and maintain it, and structural racism is still evidenced in the type and complexity of games that enjoy popularity, but the existence of Board Game Geek still means that a more diverse group than ever before has access to the hobby. Yet, at stake in this cultural moment is not simply a two-sided conflict between the hobbyists of the old guard and politically minded, media-focused young enthusiasts. Complicating the matter is the neoliberal turn, which gained visibility at the turn of the century and began to equate identity to a kind of branding. Whereas the old guard might have avoided buying games from a vocally political designer, nowadays, it is often one of the key factors in making a purchase. As Trammell argues, "a designer's moral and ethical outlook is also part of the package that new guard geeks market when they sell games": someone like Wingspan creator Elizabeth Hargrave is popular not only because of the strength of her game design but also because of her critical writing on diversity and equity in board games (172). All of this volatility maps onto the already complex hobby space: now, there are many new game designers, but the work those designers must do to produce their games is becoming increasingly less legible as labor.

[8] The Privilege of Play is a critical retelling of American hobby culture that seeks to demonstrate how the hobby gained power and authority through a complex network of white privilege that directly conversed with—and systematically disavowed—historical efforts to create a more equitable society. Trammell shows that understanding this difficult history is integral to better addressing the current moment, in which many forms of media, which seem on the surface to be rapidly and visibly diversifying, are still wholly reliant on the same underlying hegemonic infrastructures that brought them to prominence. The book is the most comprehensive history of race in contemporary American hobby culture I am aware of in critical game studies. It continues the work of using critical race and imminent historical interventions to fill in gaps left by the apoliticism of hobby culture that still persist in many areas of the field of game studies today. I expect that as more work is done to flesh out the role of American hobby culture in the fields of game studies, fan and audience studies, and American studies, The Privilege of Play will become both a key introductory text, springboarding junior scholars into new areas of study, and an important referential text, quickly keying more senior scholars in on specific discourses. Yet, many of the book's strengths also leave room for supplemental scholarship—while Trammell's case studies are rich and specific, the book is, at its core, a concise overview of a deeply complex culture. One area in particular that needs further examination is chapter 4, "The Alarums & Excursions Community and Belonging." Trammell's discussion of the Courtesan and the Damsel supplements is generous to the context of their creation but ultimately condemnatory of the harm they might cause players. However, contemporary queer and Black feminist lenses might still provide generative perspectives for engaging with the uneasy entanglements of gender, sexuality, violence, race, identity, and role-play explored through those classes. In summary, through his discussion of networks of privilege in the hobby, Trammell offers a poignant and functional explanation for why an individual might feel like—and might even genuinely be—an outcast in certain sociocultural circles and still benefit from societal infrastructures that maintain racism, sexism, and other forms of oppression. His approach allows his reader the tools to read narratives of the past critically and strive, optimistically but critically, toward a more diverse future.