‘The Mechanic is the Message’: Board Game Design as a Performative Research Tool in the Historiography of Domestic Violence Against Children

This article details and analyses the process of designing a solo board game (working title: Black & Blue) in which players assume the challenging role of a perpetrator of domestic violence against children. Players draft cards to navigate potentially explosive domestic contexts which force them to add cubes to a tottering tower representing the imminent eruption of violence. Placed in the uncomfortable shoes of a malefactor, they must manage reputational damage (and ultimately conviction) by dispersing evidence of this violence across hospitals, courts, schools and police stations so that it never builds up in any one location. Inspired by Brenda Romero’s ‘Mechanic is the Message’ board game series, Black & Blue is a tangible thought experiment which lays out and works through the interrelated societal systems structuring, responding to and obfuscating domestic violence. After an overview of relevant historical and contemporary games, the article will frame the methodologies employed in such performative, practice-based research as an experimental and experiential prelude to conventional qualitative historiography, pairing Frederic Jameson's cognitive mapping strategies with Romero's visceral epiphanies.