Doctors Paul Wake and Sam Illingworth
This month finds us part way through a project that uses tabletop games to promote public engagement with STEM (Science Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) subjects. It’s a project that has involved us thinking through the benefits of using tabletop games in communicating complex ideas, and, more often than we’d expected, articulating the ways in which these benefits differ from those of their digital counterparts. It turns out that when you say ‘game’, people tend to start thinking about video games. So, what makes tabletop games different (feel free to think ‘better’) than video games?
Most obviously tabletop games – the clue’s in the title – are played around a table. The implications of this are huge, and they are to do with cost. However expensive tabletop games might seem to some, when it comes to investment in space and resource they’re a total bargain.