Media literacy has become an important concern to most people involved in education. It describes the ability to engage with media, reflect its content and contextualize it accurately. Media, though, covers a very wide field of things. From film, TV, video games all the way to social media and beyond. It’s obvious that each medium requires its own set of media literacy. We engage a film differently than we would social media.

With video games we talk about ludoliteracy. It’s the ability to engage with the contents of video games. It seems reasonable to look at what a ludoliteracy for board games would include. What does media literacy mean for games?

The first step, obviously, is the ability to play the game at all. It’s about grasping the rules quickly. It might help tp recognize influences and predecessors. But you also need to pick up on how the rules interlock, and the effect they have on each other. This is all part of ludoliteracy. As an aside, I think the term is not without its own set of issues. Literacy already carries a number of assumptions that may not be applicable to games and playing them. You may try to read a game (as you would tea leaves), but reading and interpreting a game’s theme is not the same as media literacy.

Instead this is about the sum of critical skills to help us grasp and articulate our experience. The next step would be evaluating the things we just articulated. What have we done? What does it mean?

It’s the answers to the first question that often end up missing the point. People often draw on the thematic description of events in the game, to talk about what happens. “I attack North America” (Risk), “I buy local inhabitants as workers.” (Archipelago) or “I drop a nuke on this city.” (Sid Meier’s Civilization). We do nothing of the sort, of course. So it seems nonsensical to judge our action on the words used to describe them. Even the suggestion that these games trivialize such actions, has to assume that the action described is enacted – even just symbolically. But even this is rarely the case, if at all.

We understand that Sir Anthony Hopkins is not a cannibalistic serial killer, even if he plays one in “Silence of the Lambs”. We also understand that Vladimir Nabokov doesn’t express his personal convictions, when the narrator in “Lolita” writes about his obsession with a 12 year old girl. Our media literacy in film and literature is developed enough to draw a line between fiction and reality. Similarly, we understand that fiction is used as a means to produce a specific effect.

When it comes to board games, it seems common to forgot this distinction exists. In individual moments this is perfectly understandable. The events described in a book can draw us in deeply. A film might lead us to be fully immersed in its narrative. This can often lead to us being so deeply affected by the events, that we react to them as if they were real. Our emotions do not differentiate between real or fictional causes for our emotional responses. It is other parts of our brain that temper our responses or even prevent them before they happen.

In order to engage a game, we must first accept the thematic-mechanical layer (i.e. our actions and how they’re described) as coherent and valid. It’s only through this step, that the coordinated actions of players are turned into a game. Huizinga describes this as stepping into the magic circle.

This step is similar to how we treat the narrative in a book or film as “valid and coherent”. It’s the reason why we’re irritated when playing a game, if the game’s inner logic is disrupted; or if certain situations “don’t make sense”. This describes the most basic layer of media literacy with games. It’s the absolute minimum needed to play a game.

So when we talk about ludoliteracy, it seems obvious that we must move beyond the basic understanding of what games are. We must consider this type of media literacy as the ability to look at games as more than just the freedom to fantasize. Instead, we have to recognize games as a medium or cultural practice, and evaluate it accordingly. Part of this is the understanding that games refer to certain ideas, concepts and themes and provide them to us to engage with them through play. When seen this way, a game’s content can not be separated from our playing with it. A game can’t be seen as distinct from play, just as play can’t be understood separately from the game. The medium only comes into being, when we consider those two aspects as one complete whole.

But media literacy isn’t gained for its own sake. It stems from a desire to deepen your engagement with games, and to enrich the experience of playing them. The value of media literacy, outside of games, isn’t just to be better equipped against manipulation. It’s about engaging media with a deeper understanding of it. Ludoliteracy makes grasping our own play experience easier. But it also demands the necessary critical distance to reflect the events at the table and to draw connections that go beyond our personal enjoyment of the game we’re playing.