The Data Driven Lives of Wargaming Miniatures

Abstract

We present an ethnographic study of the practice of miniature wargaming in order to shed light onto the complex lives of physical things and the ways in which they acquire data footprints. We take an extended view of the practice, revealing how people invest great effort into crafting miniatures, playing with them, curating and telling stories about them, and passing them on. Throughout, we emphasise the use of both traditional and digital technologies to build rich data footprints. In discussing our findings, we adopt a "thing-centric" perspective that focuses on the extended lifetimes of the miniatures themselves. This enables us to identify opportunities for digital augmentation in support of capturing "life away from the table" and a need for HCI to focus on designing trajectories of things.