Cultural Legitimization: The Evolution of Authorship in Board Games in Europe and the United States

The authors examine the evolution of board game authorship between 1845 and 1984, based on an analysis of a corpus of more than thirty-seven hundred games from the University Sorbonne Paris North's Fonds Patrimonial du Jeu de Societe, a board game collection of more than fifteen thousand titles. Overall, they show that game authors have rarely received credit from publishers, although they increasingly do so now, testifying to the existence of a legitimization process for board games. The authors also discuss the difference in the status of the author for games in Europe and North America, highlighted by the different proportion of games credited or in the terms used for such crediting. Finally, they explore the questions of author gender, transmediality, and the porous distinction between intellectual property and authorship. Key words: authorship; auctoriality; board game creation; cultural legitimation; game designer