For this session of our “10 Questions for the Historian of Science,” I talked to Alex de Voogt, who delivered the first High Gravity Talk for ASTRA in April 2025.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is your academic background?
Alex de Voogt: I am Alex de Voogt and currently a professor at Drew University in the United States. My background includes linguistics and psychology but I have a strong interest in history and archaeology as well.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the topic of your research and how did you become interested in this?
Alex de Voogt: My research concentrates on the history and development of board games as well as writing systems. During a stay in Zanzibar as part of my studies in African Linguistics, I was taught a particularly complex board game. The master players showed extraordinary mental capabilities that I subsequently studied with the help of experiments and game analyses. The game has a history of several hundred years across East Africa despite the complexity of the rules that take weeks to master. It became the starting point of my interest in the topic of board games from multiple perspectives.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your working theories and methods?
Alex de Voogt: Much of my research is based on fieldwork during which I document game rules and gaming traditions. Surveys of archaeological sites have added overviews of graffiti game boards that add to the corpus of board games even though game rules are usually missing. Finally, museum collections offer examples of board games and dice, which in some cases include playing rules. These descriptive data allow me to answer broader questions. For instance, game boards and dice have been helpful in studying processes of cultural transmission in archaeology or identify spaces where they facilitate contact and act as social lubricants.
Ole Birk Laursen: How is your research situated within the field of the history of science?
Alex de Voogt: Competitive board games often have regular tournaments and ranked players or masters. The expertise of masters is widely recognized and could be construed as systematic knowledge production but the history of board games and the development of mastership is typically not studied from the perspective of history of science. More generally, board game studies have not always been considered scientific due to the seemingly frivolous topic. The attitude that board games are of little significance has changed dramatically in the last few decades and can be traced to a few specific developments in board game studies.
Board games became an ideal testing ground for computer scientists and cognitive psychologists. Rating and ranking systems of players allow scholars to study expertise or how memory, perception, and decision-making processes are different between novices and experts. More recently, board games and dice have become an interesting testing ground for cultural transmission theory, illustrating how complex cultural traits travel across linguistic and cultural borders and survive for many centuries. But perhaps more fundamental has been the insight that board games provide unique information, such as identifying the presence of certain culture groups on an archaeological site or providing evidence of contact between different societies and strata of society.
Theoretical questions did not guide board games research but came after years of descriptive work and after answers to minor questions had been collected. In the history of science, board games can be studied as vehicles of knowledge production. At first, they were merely a domain useful for existing disciplines in the sciences, but the extent of their contribution is making board games interesting all on their own. So far, both masters of board games and scholars of board games are not yet comfortably situated in the history of science but are increasingly showing their potential.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the state of the history of science today?
Alex de Voogt: I am not an expert on the history of science but, probably by definition, I exist as part of science history. I was always intrigued by complex systems, whether board games or scripts, that were developed largely outside the Western context. This material often upsets general beliefs based on Western findings. But the development of these knowledge traditions, if that is an appropriate term, is not always seen as part of the history of science while historically science has not been keen on exploring non-Western contexts. Fortunately, this has been changing significantly and it brings the history of science in new territory with much to look forward to.
Ole Birk Laursen: Why do we need to study the history of science?
Alex de Voogt: The history of science, like most studies in the humanities, provides a historical context that makes you aware of how, what, and why we are doing things as scholars. Understanding how science develops over time, whether it is in the West or elsewhere, is particularly exciting when unknown historical influences are revealed. Awareness of different influences and contexts exposes the limitations of your own approach and directs you to unexplored trajectories.
But outside the need for those who work in the sciences, the history of science also helps general audiences understand that science changes over time. It helps to understand why we are doing things in a certain way and what history taught us about our theories and methods. It shows that science is not set in its ways.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the value and impact of your research today? How does it connect with contemporary debates in broader society?
Alex de Voogt: Pursuing your interests in research is not necessarily grounded in seeking impact or recognition in broader society. In board game studies, the relevance was gradual and came only after many years. It is only recently that archaeologists started noticing graffiti games on their site while many anthropologists still do not highlight gaming practices. Publication by publication we add incrementally to the impact of the study of board games.
Contemporary debates in broader society revolve around digital games, computer games, or role-playing games. Studies of those games needed less effort to enter the mainstream literature and the wider debates. Board games are a few millennia older, played in a much larger part of the world, but have taken on a different and less obvious role. Similarly, writing systems that are different from our Western alphabet are rarely part of contemporary debates. Still, board game scholars regularly get invitations to lecture on board games and then surprise their general audience with an elaborate field of study that has remarkable historical outcomes. In short, my research usually comes as a surprise to outsiders but only modestly adds to contemporary debates.
Ole Birk Laursen: Are there any unusual stories you have come across in your research? Anything that changed your perception of dominant historical narratives?
Alex de Voogt: Not sure where to start. Is it that Maldivian women have solved a competitive board game, playing ninety-two moves without the opponent ever getting a turn, or that their game is played more than two thousand kilometres away with exactly the same rules? Is it that the Rwandan national card game uses clear Portuguese playing rules while the Portuguese have had no historical contact with Rwanda? Perhaps it is finding out that a highly competitive game with masters and tournaments has situations on the board for which there is no rule. The latter changed my idea about rule sets and frustrated those who were programming the game. Not everything is or needs to be captured in rules when two people are playing, even at the master level. Only some computer scientists demand total clarity. Similarly, spelling variation in writing systems may be useful and interesting, an idea that goes against the dominant historical narrative of at least the last hundred and fifty years.
Ole Birk Laursen: What are your plans for future research?
Alex de Voogt: There is much research waiting related to graffiti games. Large inventories have only just started to be published and they allow for additional analyses. Whenever I get a chance, I keep describing game rules and gaming practices around the world. And I am developing more research on non-standardized writing systems. There is still much that is unexplored.
Ole Birk Laursen: What is the future of the history of science?
Alex de Voogt: Similar to my own fields of study, the history of science has much new ground to cover. For that reason, these are promising times!
Ole Birk Laursen: Thank you for taking the time to answer my questions!