Date/Time
Date(s) - September 25, 2025
6:00 pm - 7:15 pm
Location
Never No Summer Ballroom, Lory Student Center
Categories
Join us for our engaging Gravlee lecture exploring the hidden cultural power of board games in Dr. Paul Booth’s talk, “Cardboard Contrafactuals: Analog Games and the Playable Politics of History.”
Board games are often dismissed as nostalgic diversions or strategic puzzles, but when viewed through the lens of media studies, they reveal themselves as rich cultural texts. Like novels, films, or television, analog games reflect and shape the ideologies, memories, and politics of the cultures that produce and play them. This talk explores historical board games as historiographic contrafactuals: playable artifacts that allow users to engage with the past not as a fixed archive, but as a dynamic, interactive system. At a moment when our cultural, political, and social notions of “fact” and “truth” are being stretched until broken, studying these analog games help reveal strategies for understanding a multiversal view of history.
Dr. Paul Booth is Professor of Media and Cinema Studies at DePaul University, where his research focuses on the intersection of media, culture, and play. His innovative work examines how interactive media forms shape our understanding of history, identity, and social meaning.