ROMchip Presents: Aaron Trammell on The Privilege of Play

Join us Friday, February 16, as ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories hosts games studies scholar Aaron Trammell for a talk about his recent book, The Privilege of Play: A History of Hobby Games, Race, and Geek Culture. The event will be at 2PM EST on the ROMchip Twitch channel, https://www.twitch.tv/romchipjournal. Sign up for our newsletter to never miss an update.

About the Book
The Privilege of Play contends that in order to understand geek identity’s exclusionary tendencies, we need to know the history of the overwhelmingly white communities of tabletop gaming hobbyists that preceded it. It begins by looking at how the privileged networks of model railroad hobbyists in the early twentieth century laid a cultural foundation for the scenes that would grow up around war games, role-playing games, and board games in the decades ahead. These early networks of hobbyists were able to thrive because of how their leisure interests and professional ambitions overlapped. Yet despite the personal and professional strides made by individuals in these networks, the networks themselves remained cloistered and homogeneous—the secret playgrounds of white men.

About the Author
Aaron Trammell is Assistant Professor of Informatics and Core Faculty in Visual Studies at University of California, Irvine and author of Repairing Play: A Black Phenomenology. He is Editor-in-Chief of the journal Analog Games Studies and was an honoree of the hobby game industry’s prestigious Diana Jones Award.

About ROMchip
ROMchip: A Journal of Game Histories is a free, online scholarly journal for game history. ROMchip develops, edits, and publishes ad-free, open access game history research for a range of audiences. It supports any discipline of work enlivening the history of games in local and global contexts, and embraces diversity in how game history is studied, documented, collected, preserved, and practiced. ROMchip is a donation-based organization fiscally sponsored by Fractured Atlas; to donate to ROMchip, please visit our sponsor website.