Board Game Studies

Board Game Studies is " an academic journal for historical and systematic research on board games. Its object is to provide a forum for board games research from all academic disciplines in order to further our understanding of the development and distribution of board games within an interdisciplinary academic context. "

Board games? Studies? An academic journal?

Well, as a matter of fact, yes. For example, here, from Issue 3, a summary of Alex Kraaijeveld's article, Origin of chess - a phylogenetic perspective: "Board games are similar to biological species in that they can evolve and give rise to new forms. A field of biology, called phylogeny, has developed a body of evolutionary techniques to reconstruct the evolution of groups of animal or plant species. As these phylogenetic techniques have proved valuable tools in biology, an attempt is made to apply them to board games research, or more specific, to the question of the origin of chess. The validity of a phylogenetic reconstruction critically depends on getting the ancestral character states right. The evolution of a group of chess variants is reconstructed using 3 hypothetical ancestors: 2-sided Chaturanga, the 4-sided dice form Chaturaji and a form of proto-Xiangqi. Comparison of the evolutionary trees resulting from each of the three analyses with historical knowledge suggests that the ancestor of chess was more similar to Chaturanga than to Xiangqi." More similar to Chaturanga than to Xiangqi? Who knew?

Just about as academic as you can get, and yet it's about games! Academicians who have embraced the study of games are understandably among the few. And yet, games are as an important part of culture as religion. Even if you don't share their passion for research, you have to celebrate their largely unacknowledged contributions to the understanding of the human spirit.