Analog Game Studies

This paper treats the social deduction game Secret Hitler, including the controversies surrounding its release and online discourses among its player communities, from a critical board-game studies perspective, situating its thesis within broader scholarly discussions around colonialism and historical trauma in contemporary hobby board games. Firstly, the game’s genesis, marketing and mobilisation, which has been used to implicitly justify Nazi “role play” and to marginalise those with reservations about the game’s theme and content, reveals significant continuities with previous white supremacist impulses within the board-gaming hobby in general. Secondly, analysis of online commentary on Secret Hitler, both in reviews, and on fora such as BoardGameGeek and Reddit, evinces striking similarities with many of the tropes and themes which Natàlia Lozano-Monterrubio, Juan Luis Gonzalo-Iglesia, and Núria Araüna-Baró have identified as constitutive of online discourse around controversial colonialist boardgames. Using their analytical schema to parse the discourse around Secret Hitler displays this framework’s potential for far wider applicability in critical player studies. Finally, analyzing Secret Hitler and the debates surrounding its release and gameplay in detail proves definitively that even more “light-weight” types of analog games may still touch upon serious political and historical issues and shed light on the ways that board-gaming communities can be politicized.