Högskolan i Skövde

This chapter discusses how conflicts are transformed from real life, via narratives to a game. It explores four types of conflicts: intergroup, intragroup, interpersonal and intrapersonal derived from a material consisting of three cultural artefacts that are interconnected: Shakespear’s dramaThe Tragedy of Hamlet, the TV-series Sons of Anarchy and the table top game Sons of Anarchy: Men of Mayhem. The fundamental and underlining question in this chapter is what the board game medium is capable of preserving from a Shakespearean drama and real life conflicts. For each step in the transformation the conflicts take on a slightly different form. The world, objects agents and events undergo changes and conflicts are presented in terms of motivation, how they are initiated and how they are turned into events such as direct war player versus player. In the stepwise transformation from Hamlet to Men of Mayhem the characters as such disappear and only function as emblematic objects rather than agents. The main finding of the chapter is that there is no room for intrapersonal and intragroup conflicts in the game. Social structures and social conflicts are the common denominators between non-fiction, narrative and the game.