Board game designer Amabel Holland joins me to discuss her recent board game The City of Six Moons. City of Six Moons isn't an ordinary game - the game is presented as an alien object, and the rules are in an unknown language. Amabel joins me to talk about what this means for games, rules, systems, communication, and knowledge itself. Along the way we also discuss one of her key design influences: the filmmaker Rainer Werner Fassbinder.

Checkout Amabel's video essay on rules as play: https://youtu.be/VDjK1jX93yM?si=RAWLAFzETNJpw7cM

You can see Amabel's games at her company's website, Hollandspiele: https://hollandspiele.com/

You can read the New Yorker profile of her here: https://www.newyorker.com/culture/annals-of-inquiry/the-personal-political-art-of-board-game-design

And you can browse the Criterion Channel's collection of Fassbinder films here: https://www.criterionchannel.com/directed-by-rainer-werner-fassbinder

This episode is co-hosted by David Hall, PhD Candidate in ECL at UNC. David and I are joined by Morgan Pitelka, Professor of Asian and Middle Eastern Studies and of History at UNC - Chapel Hill, joins us to discuss representations of the early modern period in Japan, video games and otherwise. Over a discussion ranging from 8th century historiography through responses to the 3/11 disaster, we chart a broad historical outline of Japanese cultural production practices as the context out of which video games emerge in the latter part of the 20th century.

Aris Politopoulos joins me to discuss David Graeber's essay "What's the Point if We Can't Have Fun?"

We also discuss Aaron Trammel's recent book Repairing Play, which you can find here: https://mitpress.mit.edu/9780262545273/repairing-play/

For more from Aris and to learn about his work at Leiden University, you can check out his appearance on my other podcast: https://player.captivate.fm/episode/23e2e876-b682-4df1-906e-77d15129dbe2/