New research on miniaturing

[manatic]

Hi all!

I work as a postdoctoral researcher, and while most of my work focuses on digital gaming, it's nice to have some side projects, as with miniatures! And speaking of miniatures, I've done some research on them with two brilliant colleagues, and our paper has just been published in Simulation & Gaming.

Miniaturing has been researched surprisingly little compared to role-playing games, let alone digital gaming. If there's anything years of hobbying has taught me, there's a lot of interesting stuff (scientific formulation, that) going on. As the name suggests, our paper, More Than Wargaming: Exploring the Miniaturing Pastime, is a look at the various dimensions of this pastime.

You can access the paper through this link, and it's fully Open Access - meaning that it isn't behind a paywall as is commonly the case with research articles. Should you be in the mood for an academic exploration of what we do, dive right in! It would be very interesting to hear your thoughts on the paper: do you feel that it captures the phenomenon? It should be a light enough read, even if you're not partial to the academic style of writing. If you don't have the time, here are the conclusions we arrived at:

The data presented in this paper illustrates how miniaturing is a multifaceted activity with a dual core. Gaming with miniatures and crafting new ready figurines, scenery, and dioramas are central to miniaturing, but collecting, storytelling, socializing as well as displaying and appreciating are also important parts of the pastime. The pastime can be situated and framed in numerous fashions: for example as gaming, as playing, as toying, and as crafting. None of these framings apply to all of our respondents, but all of them are relevant to some subsection. Some of them are actively contested, such as viewing miniaturing as playing with toys, but even the contested approaches seem like fertile angles of approach in future research.

Now, to a miniatures enthusiast this obviously isn't big news - although there might be some new and interesting perspectives in there. This is, however, to our knowledge the first academic paper to really tackle what this great pastime of ours "is all about", so it builds a foundation for more research in the future. For example, we have a paper on so-called "piles of shame" in the works...

[Shahbahraz]

Thanks for sharing that - I am not sure I will read it in full, but it's an interesting approach. I tend to think a lot of it is due to seeking simpler solutions in a complex world. If you deal with wicked problems in your day to day, a game with controlled representation with a defined end point, but requiring effort and intelligence to 'solve' seems like a challenge and a relaxation.

[manatic]

Thanks for sharing that - I am not sure I will read it in full, but it's an interesting approach. I tend to think a lot of it is due to seeking simpler solutions in a complex world. If you deal with wicked problems in your day to day, a game with controlled representation with a defined end point, but requiring effort and intelligence to 'solve' seems like a challenge and a relaxation.

Thanks! Yeah, that's a key motivation for some people to engage with games of all sorts - for example in my studies of digital gaming, people have turned to games for immersion, escapism and stress relief during this whole Covid affair.

[Michi]

That is an interesting subject indeed. Here is another approach:
I'd rather spend my few leisure time building, painting and gaming instead of reading or writing about it...