Playing Inside: Board Games, Video Games, and the Indoors
Call for Submissions
Series editor: Jesse Ritner
Submission Deadline – 30 June 2025
Conversations about play and the environment within the environmental humanities usually focus on outside activities. Many people play sports, recreate in the great outdoors, and swim in the ocean. Environmental historians and their colleagues across related disciplines have engaged in extensive conversations about the role of play in knowing the environment. Only a few, however, have begun to think about how playing indoors impacts human relationships with the environment.
In his 2021 article Deep Play? Video Games and the Historical Imaginary, Andrew Denning argued that video games were a form of “deep play.” In this autoethnography, he calls attention to how “the cultural practices and social networks surrounding gaming provide insights into the workings of the modern historical imaginary and contemporary culture alike.” The “immersive audiovisual worldbuilding of videogames” emphasized the “environments awash in visual and auditory detail,” making video games a unique way to encounter history. Undoubtedly, environmental historians should have much to say about these digital environments that kids and (increasingly) adults envelop themselves in during their free time.
Video games are not the only type of indoor play relevant to the intersections of environment and history. Last year, a panel of scholars held a digital roundtable on board games and environmental history. Finn Arne Jørgensen discussed the potential of thinking through popular games like Ticket to Ride as depictions of historical environments. Scout Blum, in turn, discussed the board game Rising Waters, which was specifically designed to address the history of the environment and Jim Crow in the United States South. Historians (me included) have used Blum’s excellent game in class, as well as less-reflective historical games such as Ceylon, in which players compete to build tea plantations in colonial Sri Lanka. These board games envelop players in geographies, ecologies, climates, and terrain, as players attempt to navigate complex pasts.
Through Playing Inside, we hope to develop a place to discuss the many ways that playing inside impacts people’s relationships with environments outside. We encourage participants to examine everything from games’ narrative, visual, and auditory components to the broader cultural context and potential of indoor play to educate people about history or the environment more broadly. We will consider a wide array of submissions, including (but not limited to) topics like historical board games and video games, contemporary games, and even other types of inside play that impact cultural and material relationships with nature; however, “nature” may be defined.
Playing Inside submissions can take the form of:
Blog posts (800-1200 words)
Photo Essays
Audio and Visual Projects
Auto-ethnography
Other types of expression and writing
Submit a 100-to-300-word proposal describing your proposed submission by emailing jesse.ritner@gmail.com by Friday, June 30th, 2025. Please include “Playing Inside” in the subject headline.
