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Games & troublesome themes: real data and a fake conversation

2/16/2015

3 Comments

 
(This is a guest post. My thanks to TPG for hosting these thoughts, that were developed in conversations with him. TD) 

A while back, TPG told me the following story:

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During my first gaming conference, I stumbled on an odd war game. It seemed the usual sort at first, some map with two opposing colors and different tokens and lots of dice. The players were not into chatting about it, but the name of the game fixed me to the spot:

“Jerusalem"

A war was going on in my hometown. Not exactly out of the ordinary, but which one? Romans vs. Zealots, or maybe some Crusading Knights thing? The players were reclusive, but the presence of Stars of David and armored cars narrowed down the range. The guy who kept mumbling “The Arabs are on the move” clued me in to the other antagonist in the story. 

I had it mostly figured out but still insisted on an explanation, and one of the guys finally relented and explained that this was 1948, and they were playing a scenario called 'War of Israeli Independence' wouldn't you know. The Arab forces were sieging the Jews in the city, and the Jews were building a new road to break the siege. 

I then noticed little tokens with armored cars on them scattered along a road on the board. I can easily bring their real life images before my eye, their shells still decorate the main road that leads from Tel Aviv to Jerusalem. As a kid, in the backseat of a car driving up the winding road, I looked out the window and counted the armored cars on display. At night they were lit with special projectors. 

I wasn’t exactly sure why back then, and maybe I still don’t have an exact reason now, but the whole seemed, at the time, grossly offensive. 

====

Here’s what I don’t want to talk about: Should TPG have been offended by the game? Was the game offensive? Should we censor games?

These sort of issues have been discussed ad nauseam, and I don’t want to talk about that. I also don’t think we should censor games, so let’s get that out of the way.

Here’s what I do want to talk about: If games are an aesthetic thing, why and when do some topics cause us moral anxiety and offense? 

To put it differently: Nobody would think it’s wrong to write a book or make a movie about the 1948 Arab-Israeli War. By contrast, something about making the 1948 Arab-Israeli War into a game is offensive to some people no matter what you end up with.


Sure, a director could do a bad job of it and create something offensive, but that’s not the point. In art and literature and movies, the specific thing might be offensive, but the general idea isn’t offensive. In games, the general idea itself can be offensive. 

Why?

If games are something like books or movies or art (as Frank Lantz and others put it), why does it seem wrong to make some things into games, in a way that doesn’t apply to books or movies or art?

To test your own intuition on this, try answering the following:

* Is it OK to write a book about the holocaust?

* Is it OK to make a game about the holocaust?

* How about I make a movie about slavery?

* How about I make a game about slavery?

If you felt a different gut reaction to these questions, this post is for you. If you say that you’re equally as fine with any of these things, this post is also for you, but you should know you’re in a minority. 

To get a sense of the general population, I asked 100 random people, using Amazon’s Mechanical Turk service. People rated how much they agreed that certain topics (the holocaust, slavery, the Armenian genocide) can be addressed using movies, books or games.
Picture

The basic result is that people approved much less of producing a game about a difficult topic (e.g. the holocaust) than a book or movie about the same topic. 

We can dig a little deeper into the data, showing individual results:
Picture
Each dot in this graph is an individual response to a single piece of media about a particular topic (for example, "Is it ok to make a movie about the Armenian genocide"). The point of the graph is that some people think it’s ok for games to handle difficult topics, and some don’t. Those that don’t outweigh those that do. That’s how this second graph becomes the first graph. 


So what’s going on? 

I can think of several explanations for why this intuition exists for the majority of the population (partly aided by the comments I got from participants in the survey). 

Let’s imagine advocates for the different explanations sitting together in a room:

The Patrician: The plebs just don’t get it yet

First to speak is The Patrician: She’s a hard-core gamer,  likes talking about the systems behind games as much as she likes playing the games themselves. She's caught up on the literature and conventions, possibly dabbles in academia.

The Patrician says:

“Your survey just shows the masses have a bias against games compared to other forms of art. This bias is because people have in their heads stuff like ‘Monopoly’ and ‘Risk’, and when you ask them to imagine a game about the holocaust they imagine Monopoly with concentration camps. 

Us enlightened folk at the cutting edge understand that games are an art form like any other, but it’ll take the others time to catch up, and in a century or two nobody will think it’s any odder to have a game about the holocaust. I don’t have a problem with games about the holocaust as long as they’re tasteful, but that’s true of movies as well. 

Think about art - people used to think art had to be beautiful, or that the best art was the most lifelike art. Nowadays artists understand the medium as a way of exploring concepts. Sure, there are still the plebs who are a century behind and look at modern art and say ‘My kid could do that!’. That’s because they have antiquated standards, but they’ll get there eventually." 


The Ambassador: Games are Fun, Some Topics Should not be Fun

Fidgeting uncomfortably through the previous speech, The Ambassador now has his say. He plays games on occasion, though he’s not as committed as The Patrician. He thinks he understands both the hard-core people and the general population. 

The Ambassador says:

“It’s a basic property of games that they’re fun, or supposed to be fun. We can’t run away from that fact. It’s not like art or books. Fun is as essential a property of games as “moving pictures” are of movies. People in the general public understand that instinctively. Take out the essential property and you’re just dabbling in some weird philosophical or artsy experiment. 

And since fun is an essential property, it clashes with some things that we instinctively feel we shouldn’t enjoy. The Patrician is wrong - we’re never going to get over it, even centuries from now. We’re not supposed to get over something essential."

The Psychologist: Games have Agency, Some Topics Should not be Emulated

Shaking his head vigorously, The Psychologist stands up. He’s more into running experiments and reading books about games than playing them, but he enjoys games too, especially quick party games that are easy to pick up. 

The Psychologist says:

“Games are like art and music and books and movies. They’re a way of exploring a system of rules and concepts. I’m on board with the Patrician on that. But I also think there’s something special about them. Books aren’t movies, movies aren’t sculptures. Each has their own unique aspect. The Ambassador is right that they have an essential property that clashes with these things. 

Fun isn’t it though. I think it's agency, the fact that you are the one being allowed to make these decisions rather than passively consuming them. Acting in a bad situation makes you feel tainted by association. Not only that, agency also let’s you pretend you know what it’s like to be in that situation, and some situations are too awful to pretend that. Centuries from now we won’t be over it, but not for the reason the Ambassador said."

The Philosopher: You’re all Kind of Right, and Wrong

Finally it’s The Philosopher’s turn to speak. She has a habit of dissecting games as they’re being played, over-analyzing and can’t really get into the theme. 

The Philosopher says:

"You’re all right.

(the others groan)

It’s true that art forms evolve their meaning over time. And it’s true that the more you study an art form, the more you become obsessed with the hidden rules. But that doesn’t mean the Patrician has a better handle on the experience of games. Like a movie critic who over-thinks the lighting of a scene, or the music aficionado who has moved on to atonal music because it’s so different. You can be an expert without being the avant-garde.

And yes, games form this sort of nebulous concept cloud of agency and fun and all that. But we can imagine games with agency and fun in horrible situations like war and galactic genocide, and people seem to accept that. 

It’s history and realism, on top of fun and agency, that drive the unease and offense. Emulating war is an acceptable game. Some kid emulating a specific war where people you know fought and killed and died is bothersome. 

Perhaps in a few centuries we’ll feel the same towards books and games about some abysmal situations in our recent history. But it won’t be because people will evolve a different understanding of games. It’ll be because those people will lose that personal historical connection to the topic. It’ll be a bit sad, when the game Jerusalem 1948 AD will elicit the same response as Jerusalem 67 AD. But that’s just how it goes.”

------

I can see the point of each one of these people, which is why I made them up. I don't think there's one necessarily right answer for this question, and obviously some people don't even think it's a question. 

I can tell you that the boring answer for me would be if the Patrician or Ambassador were right. If the Patrician is right, it means there's nothing that different about games compared to other art forms. If the Ambassador is right, it means that what makes games different is that they're fun, which is not that interesting. 

It would be more interesting if games were different, and special, and this whole topic was a window into that.
3 Comments

How to teach games? Dice Tower Showdown

2/13/2015

4 Comments

 
A short one - I recently participated in a round-table discussion on the Dice Tower Showdown about how to teach games. Heres' a brief summary of the main points:

  • Teaching games takes time. longer than you might think
  • Know your audience. do they want to know every little rule or do they want to start as soon as possible?
  • Do your homework. Read the rulebook ahead of time and teach games you know well
  • Get people excited. Start with the theme, let people play around with the cool components (but leave aside any player aid with text)
  • Tell them how to win. The first and most important rule to clarify is how to win the game: what are the victory conditions and how to get there

You can listen to the whole show right here:

http://traffic.libsyn.com/dicetowershowdown/DTS032-DiceTowerShowdown-Episode32.mp3

Good luck teaching!



4 Comments

Your Gaming Collection as a Window to Your Soul

2/10/2015

70 Comments

 
Today we diverge from our usual focus to participate in the The Knights' Forum, a monthly discussion that takes place in the Village Square, over where they slay the dragons on a daily basis. I have never been knighted, yet they call me the perpetual squire. If there's something my very many years as squire prepared me for is discussion, Let's just say that battles are not my forte.

Interestingly, people who like board games tend to define themselves as gamers, though many of them, yours truly included, are much better described as collectors. I can remember the moment I transformed from a gamer to a collector. Or to be more precise, the cocooning period where I huddled around myself like a little zergling morphing into a rolling baneling. And it's not that you really stop being a gamer - I still love playing games, and that's the driving force behind it all. Once you start collecting games, your attitude towards them changes. The way you look at them, the way you research them and even the way you play them - everything changes. You are not only thinking to yourself 'is this fun' or 'what is my next move' but suddenly there is this whole other question - do I need this game in my collection? Do I need it? Oh my, I really need it!
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My friends and I were gaming/cocooning the other day. It was... green
Andrew of iSlaytheDragon suggested we think about games in our collections in terms of their potential. I think that's generally a good idea. As a gamer, you like certain games and perhaps certain game styles. When you start collecting games, the reasonable to do is collect games that you will either play a lot or have a blast playing them when you do. If you have limited space, you might want to bring in cubic volume into the equation but otherwise, I would say that you can value each game in terms of the fun you have playing it times the frequency you will play it. I own a spectacular fan designed copy of Dune, which is a game I rarely play. But when I do, it's a superbly unique experience (some people own Twilight Imperium III for the same reason) . On the other hand, I have Splendor, which I enjoy but isn't half as epic as Dune. But Splendor sees more play and can be played with two players on a weeknight in half an hour. So these two games might end up having the same 'value' when I consider adding them to my collection. In sum,  you can think of a game's potential, or value (v), as the number of times you play it a month (p) times the subjective grade you give the for the experience of playing it.1 

This is a fine way to think about game potential, but it's not how I manage my collection. Partly, that is because I think that what I care about is not just a game's potential, but also how it fits in my collection. When you become a collector - be it games or anything else - you don't just care about each individual item in your collection, though of course you do. Instead, you care about the collection as a whole: you want the collection to have some overall qualities and each item starts to matter partly because of the way it is reflecting on the collection as a whole. If you ever had the though 'I can't have that kind of game in my collection' than you know what I'm talking about. Your collection starts defining you as a gamer - you are the person who owns these games, nay, you are the person who curated these games. The volume and character of your collection is a reflection of your ideal as a gamer, it is your identity as a gamer. It is who you are in the gaming world - a Stephen Feld fan, a Euro-gamer or a political gamer. You are your collection. 
Picture
A taste of my collection... Or perhaps, of my gamer soul
And that's why, I think, one of the things boardgamers do when they coalesce at a virtual place like facebook, is introduce themselves by showing pictures of their collection. And it's interesting, though I won't pursue it further here, that they often share pictures of their actual shelves rather than an image such as the one I shared above. I guess there's something beautiful in the art on the boxes arranged on the shelves, or we just like to show off a piece of our life. In any case, it's striking that what we share is a picture of the collection as a whole as a way to introduce ourselves - this is who I am, this is my collection.

So what kind of considerations do we have when we think about our collection as a whole? First, there is the quality threshold. I want all my games to be good games, even pretty great games. I don't want anything in my collection that I don't really appreciate as a gamer. It really hurts my eyes to see that copy of Set in the middle between Sheriff of Nottingham and Quantum (why do I even include it? Well, I can't like about what I have... it's who I am!). I mean, Set is a fun little game - I had some good times with it. I never bought it or anything, we just got it as a gift. Still, it doesn't fit with my collection. It really lowers the bar of what should be admitted to a collection such as mine.

Second, we want our collection to reflect our tastes in gaming. As a political gamer, I couldn't pass on Tammany Hall, Warrior Knights, Diplomacy and even Dead of Winter. These games are just to important for that kind of genre to not have them included. To each his own, of course - the Uwe Rosenberg farming fan will have different 'must haves' than I do, perhaps aside from the value/potential as defined above. 

Lastly, we might care about other things that have to do with our role in our gaming group or environment. I might be a gaming missionary, wanting to introduce and convert non-gamers to my creed, so I'll want to have many light gateway games that with different themes. Or, I may be a gaming connoisseur with a regular gaming group and so I'd be stacking myself with only the most exquisite and rare deluxe editions and rare out of print games that nobody else has. Or I may be the only one buying games in my gaming group, so I'll want to have a diverse well rounded collection - with a bit of everything. If you ever thought something like "I really need a non-real-time non-space-themed cooperative game in my collection" then you probably have this kind of consideration in mind.

So... What goes through you mind when you think of your collection? Any considerations I missed?


1 I clearly haven't though this system through, but one thing that seems clear is that if we want to multiply the numbers, we would have to standardize the values. As it is now, the number of plays a game gets a month (at least in my collection) ranges from probably 1/12 to 4 or 5, which is very different from a 1 to 10 scale of subjective appreciation. You could translate frequency into a 1 to 10 scale, which  would probably make this thing a bit more useful. 
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