We’re excited to share that this month Maggie had an essay published in the Board Game Academics online journal Victory Points! In her essay titled Something More: Nested Realities & Desire in Veiled Fate, Maggie explored Lacanian psychoanalytic theory around desire and ‘nested realities’ through her time playing a game of Veiled Fate.

Here’s an excerpt from the essay:

I took a seat at a round folding table with six men in a church basement on a Monday night. It was my third time attending the bi-monthly meet-up of my local board gaming group, Meeples-N-More, and, as one of only two women in the room, I was curious to see how the night would unfold…

On this particular night, the game being introduced was Veiled Fate,¹ a game of hidden influence and strategic social deduction where players manipulate the fates of nine demigods, each posturing for renown (victory points) through quests, the outcomes of which are determined by secret votes (fate cards). With seven players that night, we worked in unknown teams, meaning another player was working towards the same goal but didn’t know who the other ‘teammate’ was until the end of the game. Having an odd number of players also meant someone was working alone; Someone was the ‘odd man out’ and didn’t know it. 

As always, I started the game with eager excitement and the familiar discomfort of not knowing what I was doing—not knowing the rules or what the best strategy was for winning, and in truth, not knowing the people I was with except for one. While Veiled Fates was set up and the rules explained, I recalled a class I had taken in graduate school on the work of French Psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The course was called “Lacan Plays Catan,” and our professor, Dr. Hoard, used board games to help us understand psychoanalytic theory.² Through the class, Dr. Hoard invited us to consider that something more was happening while playing board games and to be curious about what psychological processes were being stirred up and activated in and between people. Seen through this theoretical lens, two phenomena I noticed during Veiled Fate were the seamless weaving in and out of the nested realities of the board game and “real life,” and the ways various desires were brought out of me through play.

You can read the whole article HERE

Something More: Nested Realities & Desire in Veiled Fate

1. Veiled Fate is created by IV Studio. Game Design by Zac Dixon, Samuel Cowden, Maxwell Anderson & Austin Harrison. ↩︎
2. I have tremendous gratitude for Dr. Paul Hoard who was instrumental in my counselor training at the Seattle School of Theology and Psychology. He introduced me to the work of Lacan, which I found simultaneously dizzying and irresistible, and helped rekindle my love of and ability to play in a big way. ↩︎