Sam Illingworth, Paul Wake & Esperanza Miyake - ‘DOOM: From Pixel to Plastic (and back again)’

Concerned with the relation of the digital and the analogue, our paper takes the insights of video game studies as its starting point in a consideration of Jonathan Ying’s Doom: The Board Game (Fantasy Flight, 2016), exploring issues of immersion, community, and identity as they translate from the digital to the analogue in the implementation of the longstanding Doom franchise.As Frans Mäyrä remarks, “the release of shooter game Doom in 1993 by id Software is heralded as a landmark event by most gamers and game historians” (Mäyrä, 2008, pp. 101). Released by id Software on 10 December 1993, the shareware version of Doom 0.99 (AKA 1.0), is estimated to have been downloaded by 15-20 million people (Armitage et al., 2006). Since then there have been 12 more full releases of Doom, starting with Doom II: Hell on Earth in 1994 and culminating with the 2016 reboot of Doom for the eighth generation of video games consoles. Multiplatform in every sense, the Doom franchise expands beyond the videogames, to include: a set of four novels; a comic book; a 2005 film adaption starring Dwayne ‘The Rock’ Johnson; and two board games published by Fantasy Flight Games (2005 & 2016).It is unsurprising, given its iconic status, that Doom the video game has been the subject of a great deal of critical scrutiny, prompting in-depth discussions of in-game and real world violence (Bryce and Rutter, 2002), gender politics ( Jenson et al 2015; Kafai, 2008; Thornham, 2008; Burgess et al., 2007), cinematic spectacle (Bryce and Rutter, 2002), immersion (McMahan, 2003, Mäyrä, 2008), modding (Laukkanen, 2005, Postigo, 2008), and VR (Loguidice and Barton, 2012). It is to this body of work that our paper responds, applying the insights of video game studies to Doom: The Board Game, and investigating the ways in which our readings of the analogue might prompt a reconsideration of the digital.