Big Bad Academy: This Has Happened Before: Historical Lessons on Community

As new communication technologies have been introduced and improved, TTRPG and geek communities have eagerly adopted them as their methods of circulation and connection: from newsletters and zines to BBSes newsgroups and IRC to web forums, blogs, and LiveJournals, to social media and crowdfunding platforms that have become integral parts of the industry and our lives. These technologies become infrastructures of communication for our communities, used to play games at a distance, find game groups and players, to socialize and discuss rules and play, to learn how to play, run, and create games, to theorize and discuss the creation of games, to find collaborators, to promote newly created games, and more,

In this talk, Alex Chalk (University of Toronto Scarborough) and Nicole Toivonen Winchester (York University) provide a (super-short) historical overview of communication infrastructure in TTRPG community discussion and design. How do these communication infrastructures engender relationships between players, producers, and community/culture? And how do these relationships impact what games are made and who gets to make them? We'll talk about how these spaces can influence relationships within the community, particularly those between players and designers/creators, and how the community practices and discourses of the present can be "haunted" by those of the past.