Board Game Players as a Youth Cultural Scene: Meanings, Practices and Boundaries of Leisure

This paper aims to investigate the community of "board game players" from the perspective of the concept of "scene", which will allow to show its applicability to youth communities whose cultural practices are not connected with the consumption and production of music within the space of the city of St. Petersburg. The main goal of the study was to identify the ways of (re)production of the youth cultural scene (community of "board game players") in the city of St. Petersburg. The scene approach, and with it the solidarity approach, as a (post)subculture, allowed us to consider the scene of the board game community not only from the perspective of its participants, who (re)produce cultural practices, but also from the perspective of the anticafe space. The value aspect allowed us to understand the values around which the symbolic struggle between the participants of the scene and representatives of other youth communities takes place, how the boundary is built between those who are included in the group and those who are not part of it. Thus, the "board game players" scene takes in all the multifaceted cultural practices and interactions that the youth form of sociality in question offers. The method of the dissertation was a semi-structured interview with board game players and an expert interview with employees of an anticafe in St. Petersburg. In the course of the study the main ways of (re)producing the youth cultural scene of "board game players" were highlighted in terms of its social structure (participants, hierarchy), institutional (rules, norms), cultural (value) environment, unity of space and time, DIY-practices and community events.