On politics and board games, not necessarily in that order
The Political GAmer
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What is A Political Game?

3/18/2015

9 Comments

 
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Diplomacy. The mother of modern political board games
PictureTammany Hall's brilliant and political twist
There are two ways people use the term political game'. The first is to refer to a politically themed game, like Tammany Hall or 1960: The Making of a President. These are games that are about what we normally call politics - elections, mostly, but also diplomacy, secret service missions, alliance formation and so forth. These games interest me, usually, because I'm interested in politics. And if the theme is well integrated and the game makes you feel the right way, as it does in Twilight Struggle, these games can be an awesome way to learn through experience about the politics of a specific time and place, or of a certain kind. 

This first definition might be behind the BGG category of 'political' games, though I'm not entirely sure - I guess you could say Coup kind of has a political theme (its original incarnation certainly had one), Twilight Imperium has that a phase explicitly termed 'political' and Warrior Knights has that piece with the parliament where you vote on laws (though so does Lancaster, which isn't categorized as political - not to be confused with Wars of the Roses: Lancaster vs. York that is categorized as political, though its parliament phase has no voting and is not very... well, not very political). So these games have themes with political flavor. But Diplomacy's theme is basically war, not politics - it is won by dominating the map not by passing laws. But even if it isn't, there's something missing in saying that Diplomacy is a political game because one of the thing it simulates is the diplomatic relationship between countries at war. Diplomacy is a political game because of what it encourages us to do. 

Which leads us to the second definition: a political game is one whose core mechanics create or encourage a certain kind of interaction, which I will for now term 'political'. This is a bit vague but bear with me for a bit here while we explore this. This the kind of games that I find even more interesting, and will be my focus here. Now, it's important to note that these categories of games are not mutually exclusive: Tammany Hall, for example, is certainly both. But what kind of interactions we think of as 'political'? What's special and great about this kind of games? What's horrendously awful about them?

You might be reminded here of my discussion of political analysis of games. I said there that what we focus on when we analyze games politically is the way people relate to each other, and specifically the powers they have over each other. And that's the first clue as to what is a political game - it is a game that encourages, or requires, people to do stuff to each other. More specifically it's a game where players stand in relations of power towards - they have specific things they can do to each other. Often, these powers are encapsulated in roles that are basically titles for specific game states that bestow powers on one or more players. 

Now that's still a pretty general statement. And in some ways, it's true about every game. In Splendor, players buy cards from the main rows that are offered to everybody. It is not a  bad idea to try and snatch away cards that other players want, not to mention the race for the nobles. But Splendor is not, or so I think, a political game. Don't get me wrong - I like Splendor. And though it's light on player interaction (on in general, a light game) - I don't consider it 'mutliplayer solitaire'. But the line has to be drawn somewhere. In Splendor you only do things to other players by buying cards or achieving your own goals. This ability is equally distributed among players and among all strategies. The only thing you can do to another player is ruin their plan by taking what they need and using it in the building of your own project. And that isn't much, essential as it may be for the superb Splendor strategist. 

It seems like this is not a dichotomous criterion. There is definitely a continuum - some games are more political than others, and the more political games allow (or encourage) you to do stuff to other players. Let us go back to our Diplomacy example. In Diplomacy, the main thing you can do to other players is attack them (you can also support them or ferry their armies across water). That's not very political, in my opinion. But you are also encouraged to make deals with them because the equality of units on the board and the geographic location of some powers (Ahem, Austria), means that you absolutely cannot go for it alone. At the same time, the game provides you with a great opportunity to renege on these deals because orders are submitted secretly. This mixture of conditions has people doing all sorts of things to each other aside from attacking - promise, threaten, cajole, beg, reproach and just plain old manipulate to get what they want. Furthermore, the fact England needs the help of France but cannot know for certain the French are telling the truth means that the French has power over England. Depending on the board position, it might be quite a bit of power - as players often depend on other players for their survival. And that's a lot more interesting than just killing each other. 

It's easy to think that this is all political gaming is about - people needing things from each other and therefore making promises that they don't intend to keep for the ever-sought-after-but-never-really-achieved perfect backstab. But good political games go way past that and play around with the interesting things that people can do to each other and the powers that they have over each other. In Diplomacy there are no special roles explicitly assigned to players, but the dynamics of the game often make it the case that one player becomes your ally, and therefore stands in a special relationship to you. The fact victory can be shared also encourages that kind of long term partnership. But the same idea could be played around with in interesting ways. In Dune (aka Rex) there is a Nexus phase that comes up randomly every few turns which is the only time alliances can be formed. Alliances are formal in Dune and allies win and lose together; once you're in an alliance, you cannot break it until the next Nexus, which means you really care about your allies' condition. A good Dune player will jump into and out of an alliance in opportune moments, but that's a risky and complicate trick to execute, and requires quite a bit of skill. 


Dune is still an area control game where combat is a main component. Consider Tammany Hall again - it's a game that has much more of a Euro feel, a la El Grande. It's an area majority (rather than area control) with much fewer opportunities for direct confrontation (though you can remove opponents' pawn with 'slander', it is costly and comes at limited supply). The theme is political, but it is to a great extent a game of managing resources - how do I win most areas with the least amount of pawns in each? 
But then the game makes the brilliant, and political, twist. The theme may be political but that doesn't make the game any more political (El Grande technically has this 'war' theme with your cubes being 'knights' but it doesn't feel anything like war). Two mechanics draw out the political aspect. First is the simultaneous blind bidding during election time. Following the footsteps of Diplomacy, discussed above, it makes players depend on each other and encourages horse trading in a distrustful environment. Second, it has the cool mechanic of roles assigned by the mayor. When you win election, you get to be mayor which gives you some valuable victory points. But then you, the player, assigns other players to offices that give them special abilities. And these are quite important for success in the game. Now the designer could have said that whoever comes in second gets to be the Deputy Mayor, the third is Council President and so forth. This would have made for a more strategic, yet less political game - it would have allowed the players to strategically aim for a certain role by coming in third or force. But the fact it gives one player such interesting power over the others makes for a game that's much more politically interesting.

Political games are not the only games that I like but they hold a special place in my heart. I love strategy and the competition that more deeply strategic games allow. But its the Coups and Sheriff of Nottinghams that really make for interesting interactions between people rather than between strategies employed by people. I usually don't like playing political games with people I don't already know and trust, because they can really impact relationship and are much more fun and interesting when they're used to explore relationships. If you're interested in board games because of the interactions between people, political games are for you. 

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Games & troublesome themes: real data and a fake conversation

2/16/2015

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(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.
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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:
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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.”

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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.
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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!



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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. 
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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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On Controversial Themes - a Response to Bruno Faidutti

1/12/2015

1 Comment

 
Since I wrote my post about the morality of war games, and game themes more generally, I got lots of interesting responses with people’s perspectives about why the like certain games with problematic themes or other games they won’t play. I also came across a number of very interesting pieces on the topic, the most interesting of which by far was this one about a book by Peter Gray on the way playing games helps the development of kids. Drawing on lessons from kids playing in the Ghettos during the Holocaust, Gray says this about violent games with controversial themes:

Some people fear that violent play creates violent adults, but in reality the opposite is true. Violence in the adult world leads children, quite properly, to play at violence…  It is wrong to think that somehow we can reform the world for the future by controlling children's play and controlling what they learn. If we want to reform the world, we have to reform the world; children will follow suit. 
This seems a little overstated, as I can imagine violent play getting out of hand and starting to shape reality. But there’s certainly truth in it and it’s hard to argue with it in the context.

There were other interesting pieces, such as this piece which offers some serious criticisms of the popular game Cards Against Humanity or this one trying to give advice to prospective designers who are considering controversial themes for their games.  But the most interesting one was an interview with famed designer Bruno Faidutti on the most excellent podcast Ludology. They decided to interview him following his article “Post-colonial Catan” which I cited in my post. I enjoyed the article and I’m a big fan of Faidutti’s designs in general. Which is why I was disappointed to disagree with most of what he said in the interview. I started writing a comment about it in the forums but it became so long that I decided to make it into a blog post.

I'll start with what I agree with - near the end of the episode Faidutti says he wants to see greater diversity of designers - more women, more black people, more young people and in general more variety. I couldn't agree more. This is a general issue that has special importance when it comes to artistic and cultural creation. I also agree that it's a good idea for designers to have a more conscious vision of their themes and reflect about the social message of their games. Given this agreement, I don't quite understand why Faidutti says that he doesn’t wants designers to do anything differently, but he is spot on in saying that there is a paucity of analysis and reflection on board games and that board games don't get the attention they deserve compared to other art/cultural forms. When I started my blog, that was exactly the kind of thing I had in mind - to do political analysis of games that takes them a bit more seriously than they are taken in mainstream media. I wanted to do it from the perspective of a gamer who loves games so that they would be treated with the love and seriousness that we usually treat them when we talk about the endlessly on BGG forums, but also thinks about what they mean as meaningful cultural creations. I haven't done much on this front thus far and I'm not sure I'm the right person to do that, but hey – at least I’m trying. 

Which is why I was disappointed that Faidutti decided to start the interview by repeatedly saying people shouldn't take his piece so seriously, that it started as a joke and even though he thinks it raises interesting issues, we shouldn't take them very seriously. I always find that kind of response surprising, as he obviously spent a lot of time and effort writing the piece, but it seems to me that he was mostly trying to calm things down, having received angry responses of people who thought his post aims to censor their board games, or that the such posts would lead us to a boring world of politically correct gaming where all the fun has been squeezed out of everything.

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The Inquisitor in the latest expansion to Coup. Awesomeness
Faidutti is right to think these reactions are misguided, but it's not because his analysis shouldn't be taken seriously or because it means that we shouldn't do anything differently. They are misguided because we can have serious discussions and even disagreements about serious things without losing our senses. Or, at least, so I hope. More to the point, in this specific case the anger is completely misguided - as I wrote at greater length earlier, criticizing something doesn't mean we want to censor it. The point of discussions of this sort is to persuade - and make changes to the norms we already have. You can always go against the norm though obviously that’s not easy. When I discuss these things, my goal is to convince people (or be convinced - there are often things I haven't thought about), and if I'm successful the change will come not because there will be censorship of games, but because people's attitudes will change. 

For example, in his comment about this podcast Isaach Shalev mentions the way the characters in Coup and The Resistance are racially diverse, and there is equal representation of women in a way that is not demeaning. That is, sadly, not the standard in our hobby. I say sadly because I am saddened by it. I'm perfectly aware that there are people who don't care, and I think it's totally their prerogative. I hope to convince them to care because right now the state of affairs is that there are many great games that I really love, like Mage Wars, that has art on them that I find problematic. Mage Wars is a game I really really love – it’s one of my favorites. And it's not half as bad as a bunch of other games but still, that's a turn off for me - I hate seeing female characters sexualized for no apparent reason, going into battle with unwearable armor which emphasizes their body. Not because I mind nudity - I am very liberal in the art that I consume - but because it bothers me that the same game has the men wearing combat gear while the women wearing shiny metal bras or almost nothing. It's also troubling because of the way it relates to the history and context of troubling depictions of women. And I guess I could say, that on some level, it offends me a little (and I’m not the only one). To me, it's just bad taste - I feel like we could, and should, do better than enhance these stereotypes and when I see game that's so innovative, so smart, so full of love - a gigantic amount of time and attention was invested in it - and it couldn't be saved from these dated tropes - I cringe. In the same vein, I'm disappointed, like Niki from Board With Life, when a fabulous game like Sheriff of Nottingham has only playable female character (out of five) - even if I still would consider this game one of the best games of the year.  

As it happens, I often have to choose between a game that I love and art/presentation that I dislike. And I accept that that's my problem. It's not half as bad as it in other parts of our culture (as in video games), and it usually won't stop me from getting the game. Yet I think it’s a problem, mainly because of the way it makes gaming less hospitable for women and girls who would otherwise want to be a part of our hobby. It’s an issue we should not just be aware of, as Faidutti says, but also do something about. And we can - if enough people were bothered by it, the market dimensions would change. Naked sexualized warrior-women (or very few, if at all, playable women) would no longer be the default in gaming (I think we can see this change taking place, though very slowly). Of course, they would still be out there for those who really want them - so no censorship involved - but the default would be to challenge ourselves and break new grounds on this front. The same goes to all those issue that Faidutti mentions - from racial diversity to perspectives about colonialism and other forms of exoticism. True, it would be great if there was more variety in the realm of designers. But bald white men, such as Faidutti and myself, can still challenge ourselves to think out of the box and do better on this (on our own standards - so no imposed standards of censorship).

The second point of disagreement is about board games as vehicles for meaningful content. Faidutti insists in a variety of points that board games can really only have very simplistic content because they are more like pictures than novels and you only have very few elements. With so few elements, he says, you can’t delve very deeply into anything. This is what Faidutti calls the 'technical' reason why there are simplistic themes in board games (as opposed to the ideological reason that is related to the aforementioned fact that most game designers are old white men). The technical reason seems completely false to me so I wanted to say something about it. Faidutti says that "board games are simple, short rules, always a bit abstract" (16:56). Because we are abstracting from specifics and only have a few rules, we can’t say much and what's more important - we can't say anything serious.

I think that's obviously false. Some of the most evocative and expressive art forms involve very few elements. Poetry is one of the most obvious examples but there is a variety of other examples, including Hemingway's short short story. But it's also obviously false about games. We just mentioned Coup, a game whose original graphic design seems completely in line with boring traditional gender roles (only one female character with a passive ability) got reskinned as superbly interesting and diverse game which Shalev now rightly notes to be social commentary. In the new version of the game they realized that maybe the Duke has to stay male (though I think that's a frontier we can also smash one day), the assassin and captain don't have to, and neither does the Inquisitor - and I think that's fabulous. Likewise, Love Letter is a tiny game that has only 15 cards but as its gazillion implantations show, it offers a great variety of options. And they feel different, because getting a love letter to the princess feels differently than getting the Munchkin loot. And you won't be surprised to find out that the Batman version is not about courting Batman, though, of course, it should be.
Moreover, I think the claim that games are pretty abstract and not accompanied with as much story and lore as novels is pretty false. This might be a matter of style and of course there are games, like Settlers of Catan, that say very little about their own world. But so many game designers spend so much of their time on the lore, and so many games are accompanied with long pieces of fiction, whether in the rulebook (as in City of Remnants or Twilight Struggle), on the company's website (as in Summoner Wars or Terra Mystica) or as actual books that come out following the game (as in Sentinels of the Multiverse). In many of these games, there’s lots of story on the cards and you discover it through playing the game (as in Dead of Winter or Twilight Struggle). That's not every game, and I'm aware of the fact I just mentioned three games by Plaid Hat Games, who specialize in thematic games. One may say that Euro games tend to be more abstract and less specific (partially because they tend to be language independent and therefore avoid flavor text on components) and that might be true. But there is really a large swathe of games that do a lot more than the bear bone abstract theme that Faidutti talks about (which, as I said, is not free of content even if it's minimal). The recent (and fabulous) Dogs of War from Paolo Mori is an example of that - a brilliant worker placement game that's very Euro-ish in style yet more than half of its rulebook is a very elaborate fictional account of the world the game is set in. I really like Dogs of War - it's a unique and interesting hybrid - but I personally think the fiction in the rulebook is not very good. The game is still mechanically brilliant and very enjoyable, but I think that if it had better fiction with less hackneyed clichés and more character development - the game would have been much more interesting (also, Niki from Board With Life reminds us that this is another excellent game she loves that only has one playable female character). I think that good games make good stories; very few of us play just the mechanics without caring about the theme. 

Last point on this is that even when the theme is historical or founded in an existing fiction (such as Lord of the Rings) and the game theme is very abstract and minimalist (like many Euros), the designer still makes choices about what of the content to include. Who are the playable sides in this war? What kind of feel do we want to give to this historic setting? The argument that abstract games with thin themes don't have much say is really weak, in my opinion.

The third disagreement is related to the previous one and it's about the kinds of themes we want for board games. Faidutti says that games need to be fun and therefore they have to be light-hearted. In board games, we look for light settings that would make people smile. You can't have a setting that's too involved - as you would in a movie or a book - or that would spoil gaming night. Board games are not meant to make political points and when they try to do that - they are not fun. 

I agree that the main point of board games is not to make political statements. In fact, if you want to make a political statement, I don't think designing a board game is a great way to go about it. But that it's not the main point doesn't mean board games don't carry with them any political content. They inevitably do, as any work of art. If board games were only bare and abstract mechanics, they wouldn't be very much fun for most of us. True, the theme helps us understand and internalize the mechanics - but that can’t not the only reason we have themes for board games.

And it's not the case that we want light themes for game night if we are to have fun. I actually think the opposite is true for most games - we want things that matter and raise the stakes, or we would feel like we're playing kids games. That's one of the reasons, I think, we play war games - we want to feel like the stakes are really high.
In other cases we want to lower the stakes and not take what we're doing too seriously, which is why the second edition of Cash and Guns make the art more cartoonish.  I think they made the right choice - when we're pointing foam guns at each other, some may feel like realistic art might be too much. Different people will have different threshold, but it's just not true that most of our games are in light-hearted settings that make us smile. Does the Cathulu world make you smile? Does the Star World universe? 

It's also not true that we can't have fun when the theme is serious or one that invites thinking deeply. At some point Faidutti compares board games to light novels, which is true for some games. But many many more of them really aren't. They are much more like a sprawling fantasy novel, a historic drama or an economic report about the development of the car industry. We have lots of fun doing serious things - we read long and dense novels for fun. Why else would we read them? We read non-fiction for fun, and argue about politics on the internet for fun. There is a great variety of things we do for fun and these are such different ‘funs’ that perhaps we shouldn’t use the same word. But we do. If you think about it, fun and serious are really not mutually exclusive.

So I don't think it's enough that we are aware of the exoticism, and are making fun of them. I think Faidutti is right to be concerned about the colonists in Puerto Rico, where we white-wash these of our history (and we do so not only, and not primarily, in games). I think being aware and making fun of it, as he suggests, is definitely one way to deal with these simplifications, but it's not the only one and perhaps not even the best one (and, contra Faidutti, it certainly doesn't seem to be the case in Five Tribes where there is no trace of self-humor or even self-awareness). We can do better, as designers and gamers, if push ourselves to think a little more broadly about the themes in the games we make and play. And we can do better, as consumers, if we voice our displeasure with hackneyed stereotypes and opt for games that have unusual themes or depictions. There's only so much courage we can expect from commercial companies if we, as board gamers, don't send the message that we want gaming themes to be broader, more appealing to a wide audience, more diverse and more deeply interesting. 

That's my take on the matter. I don't support censorship of board games, but I think we are, for the most part, stuck in a limited world of hackneyed clichés. We can do better than that. Every year amazing games come out with innovative and brilliant mechanics that break new ground. And we see a greater variety of themes and stories. Yet we can do a lot better than Settlers of Catan on that front. Not every game needs to be a breakthrough on all fronts and I'm not saying that I won't play another game that pits orcs against humans or has me kill zombies. But in my book one of the parameters of a good games that it says something interesting. And other games? It's not that they have no message, it's just that the message they have is not very original. And that's a shame.

Post script: Almost immediately after I posted this, I found this remarkably thoughtful series of articles on Across the Board Games by
Luke Turpeinen that covers the importance of themes, racial representation in games and the importance of consumer cry for diversity ( #WeNeedDiverseGames). A great read for those interested in the topic. Also this discussion of Faidutti's article and interview.
1 Comment

Table Talk

1/8/2015

7 Comments

 
One of the biggest aspect of tabletop gaming is the fact that we sit with each other and interact in person. It may sound trivial but in the age of digital gaming, that's what many tabletop gamers point to when they explain what they love most about their hobby. Having that direct interaction, that physical proximity - both with the game and with each other - is a huge part of the fun.

So why is it that so many of us don't talk while we play games? I once played a whole game of Spyrium (not a long game, but still takes over an hour) where not a word was uttered. The game was terrific, fun and tense - yet I felt odd after we finished it. What kind of interaction is this if we spend the entire evening not communicating at all? (at least, not in that most direct way of using words) Are we even interacting?
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Shh... No talking around the gaming table
The answer is, of course, yes - we are interacting. Even if we're not talking while we're playing, we're communicating in a variety of non-verbal ways. the obvious ones are giggling, guffawing, making faces, sighs and the like. But these are just 'cheats' - they are ways we 'talk' when we can't talk. We also, always, communicate via what we do in the game. If we are intensely engaged in a game, we will enjoy talking about it afterwards - just like we enjoy talking about a movie we watched together (and I never really could enjoy going to a movie alone, the conversation afterwards is for me the heart of the matter). And that in-game interaction is priceless, even if we don't say a word during a game (or talk about anything but the game in front of us - which is also pretty odd).

Yet I still feel like something is missing when there is no table talk. I tried to think about why that is and what I came up with has to do with the kind of games we most like to play, and that basic division between Eurogames and the so-called Amerithrash style (note: thrash, not trash).

Now I know that the distinction between Euro and Amerithrash is obsolete, and that most games today blend the styles in whichever is their most preferred way. My personal favorites are what I call Hybrid games that do exactly that (an example of one discussed below). But I think the distinction is helpful as an analytical tool. So bear with me as I make these very stylized and cartoonish definitions of these terms. These are controversial things, and I'm sure some people will disagree; but really these are not definition but more like lists of attributes (cluster concepts, as philosophers call them) - no game would have all these attributes and none of them is required in order to define a game as a 'euro'. Yet every Euro would have most relevant attributes and likewise with Amerithrash.

Eurogames are games where each player is mostly focused on building his or her own village/farm/empire the goal is to do so in the most efficient way. Typically, players can only build or change their own things and not directly interfere with
(or destroy) other players' stuff. Players compete for scarce resources and resources management is therefore crucial for success. There is no player elimination, gameplay tends to be short and the games are usually very abstract, with economic, industrial, historical or pastoral themes that are not central to the game. These games tend to be language independent and have relatively little story or flavor text. They are low on luck in the sense that they avoid randomization mechanics and specifically dice. They tend to play in a given set of rounds and determine the winner by victory points (which typically come from various sources - also known as 'point salads'). Eurogamers love wooden components and dislike table talk.

Amerithrash games are long, immersive and thematic. They tend to have lots of background story, flavor text and draw in players to immerse themselves. Their traditional settings are fantasy, sci-fi and space - though historically themed war gaming is closer to this camp. They often include area control or conflict, where players can spend resources to directly destroy what other players have spend their time and effort building. They tend to include a lot of dice rolling and therefore are open to 'lucky' swings and unpredictable developments. The conflict is often accompanied by structured negotiations where players can formally form alliances (as in Dune) or the game allots specific time for negotiation (as in Diplomacy). There is often hidden information that players hide from each other (simultaneous turns is one particularly effective mechanic). Amerigamers love plastic pieces and particularly miniatures (in general, miniature and role-playing games have a lot in common with Amerithrash) and they consider table talk a huge part of the game.

We can already see that these two style of games pull us in different directions regarding table talk. And of course, these are not just style of games but they are most importantly style of gamers. Eurogamers see their games as 'decision-making contests' - a competition whose goal is to reward the best decision-maker. Because of that, table talk is frowned upon - if we are competing to see who is the best decider, pooling together information or sharing perspective gets in the way. If you point out something to another player, you are literally ruining the game - it is like giving a boost to one runner in a race. Now, of course, you might be lying or misleading but figuring out if you're lying is not one of the skills that the game aims to reward. People often lament certain cooperative games because they have a problem of 'quarterbacking' (aka as the 'Alpha gamer problem' and by the lesser known name 'Beta game problem') - where one players tells all the others what to do. The truth is, quarterbacking can happen in non cooperative games. Some people just can't keep their wisdom to themselves and really love to guide other people around a game - whether or not it also serves their own interests them in the game (though they often emphasize, perhaps unconsciously, the smart move that also serves them).

In contrast, Ameri-gamers see the heart of a game in the story players create. And that story may include strategic decisions that they made, but it's more about what they do together and to each other. Many of them see social deduction skills as part of the game - where the point is to figure out what exactly other players are hiding on the basis of your ability to 'read' them (and not on the basis of what you perceive their strategy to be as can be surmised from their in-game actions). Bluffing games are all about that, from Coup to Sheriff of Nottingham, as well as party games like Werewolf, The Resistance and Spyfall. It is also at the heart of games with a traitor mechanic or hidden goals, such as Dead of Winter, Battlestar Galactica and Shadows Over Camelot. And they play a huge role in traditional area control games from Risk to Diplomacy, from Dune to Game of Thrones. In any of those games (and many like them), misleading and manipulating the other players is the pretty much the point of the game, so it feels very natural to allow any kind of table talk. If you point out something to someone, you are probably doing this to direct his attention away from harming you. These games often depend on the players for balance - if they don't 'bash the leader', as the saying goes, these games would be no fun.

One interesting caveat is the idea of trading. Settlers of Catan, the almost paradigmatic Eurogame, thrived exactly because it diverged from the hard Euro line be adding the trading component. Trading makes games less about the competition of strategic decision-making and more about social deduction - you have to persuade people and understand what they value. It opens up space for negotiation and 'irrational' players might ruin the calculation of a strategic player. Though it's not as confrontational as lying or betraying and players can only make positive offers to each other - they can't really threaten each other because there's no way you can harm someone. Sure, you can threaten never to trade with someone but that's typically not a credible threat and even if it is - it's more like 'I'm not playing with you ever again' than 'if you attack me here, I'll have to retaliate over there.'

That means that the extent and kind of acceptable table talk depends on the game you're playing as well as the style of gaming you and your group likes. But what about the new wave of hybrid games that mesh up these game style? They are faced with a conundrum. Some of them have rules that encourage opposite tendencies and you can sometimes see the designer struggling with the game's identity. A striking example is in the wonderful, and decidedly hybrid, Wars of the Roses: Lancaster vs. York, which I love to bits though it might just be one of those games that try to please everybody and ends up making everyone unhappy. It's an area majority game based on card drafting, reminiscent of the classic Euro El-Grande, but you can aggressively kick people out of castles. Yet the battles have no randomization - they are strictly 'deterministic', where commitment of troops is done through simultaneous action selection. And alliances are kind of forced on you, since every two players have joint interests in parliament votes. But, the winner is not the one who destroys most troops or controls the board at the end of the game. Instead, the winner is the player with most victory points at the end of five rounds, and those points are awarded in a 'point salad' system.
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Wars of the Roses has some of the most gorgeous components in the business
In my experience with the game, it truly lends itself to lots of negotiation and table talk. First, simultaneous action selection is always an invitation for promises, threats and backstabbing. The entire game of Diplomacy, famous for its backstabbing cruelty and its ability to ruin friendships, has only one mechanic: simultaneous action selection. You can make promises but the other player can't wait to see what you do before he does his part, and that creates a great temptation to break (and therefore make) promises. Second, the alliance aspect makes it almost impossible not to have discussions with your partner. The possibility of redundant attacks or needless in-fighting really encourages coordination. But allies also have their own distinct interests, so such coordination is never full-proof: in fact, the game provides you with almost as much of an incentive to promise and then betray your ally as it does for your enemy. Lastly, it's an area control war game. You can really harm someone, if you feel like it, and they know it. So they are bound to try and offer you stuff so that you won't. Trying to abolish table talk in such a game seems almost silly. Yet the designer chose to add the following curious note to the game:

Note: Specific strategic and tactical discussions between players are not allowed. For example, “Blue is winning, so you attack him in London and I will get him out of York”. This is particularly important in the 4 player game where players are allied. (p. 6 of the rulebook)
I read this and I thought - really? Needless to say, in my group we have ignored this rule because that's not how we want to play the game. Yet I think this just shows how the designer struggled with designing a game that's all about strategic decisions made under conditions of uncertainty (where you have to guess your opponent's move by inferring it from their strategy) and a game that's all about backstabbing, alliances and social deduction. My friend thought it was silly to even write a note like this in the rulebook but I disagree: as the designer, you can definitely include rules about what kind of information players can share. The new hotness, a Polish game called Mysterium, is an entire game centered around one player who cannot speak to other players. It's similar to time restrictions on negotiation phases or the requirement that certain information (like your hand of cards) be kept secret. Yet a game has inner tension if the designer wants you to keep something to yourself while the other mechanics of the game strongly encourage you not to. That's the case with cooperative games that try to just tell you to keep your hand of cards secret without giving you an in-game reason to do that. Many people ignore that rule, and rightly so, because it doesn't feel like it makes sense. The no-discussion rule in Wars of the Roses feels that way to me.1

Yet I see the problem - so much relies on what kind of strategy you're going for that discussing tactics might just reveal what players should work hard to discover themselves. I guess there isn't really a good way to restrict one kind of discussion while permitting the other, so for me this game comes a package with lots of table talk, distractions, misdirection and of course - backstabbing.

To sum, if want to have fun with your friends while you're playing games, it's a good to have everybody on the same page regarding what they enjoy when they play the game. If you really want the game to be a competition of strategic decision-making, it's really best to talk about something else during the game. Many gamers feel responsibility for the games they introduce and teach people. They want these people to enjoy the games, and one way to enjoy a game is to win. So gamers often help their friends with strategy on their first games or just quarterback in general. I suggest that you remind yourself that making poor decisions is also fun - if they are your decisions and if you learn from them. After all, we wouldn't enjoy the game if there was a clearly superior choice to make at any point. If you, like me, have the tendency to do that - remind yourself that it is their game to play and their mistakes to make. Trust the game to ensure that they enjoy it. You liked it, hopefully they will too. If we do this well, we would have fewer comments in rulebooks about discussions and more fun at the table with our friends.

This week's recommendation: Keith Burgen started a new youtube channel where he discusses his game design ideas in 3 minute segments. He's a controversial guy when it comes to games, but his stuff is pretty brilliant and definitely worth a read. I really recommend his episode about depth and elegance in game design.

1 One caveat for my discussion of Wars of the Roses is that it might be the case with the game - and I haven't played it enough times to figure it out - that table talk does actually ruin the game. This would be true if the game presented many cases where negotiations would be without tension because it would be clear what players should do if they could only talk about it. A type of such cases is what game theorists call 'coordination problem' - an example would be where there are two towns we need to conquer, neither of us cares which one we occupy but it's crucial for both of us that we don't both go for the same one. This situation is quite possible in this game, as allies share interest in their joint domination of a region. Yet they each have an interest in their own domination over their ally, and different towns have different values, so the problem is rarely one of pure coordination. If this happens a lot in the game (I haven't played enough to find out) than table talk can indeed ruin a lot of the fun. If this is the case, I would argue that the game has some serious design issues that should have been dealt with in the playtesting phase. May be it is a beta game. The game would then be ruined not by table talk but by the inner tensions of its design. I truly hope that this is not the case because so far, I'm really loving this game.

7 Comments

The Morality of War Games

11/24/2014

13 Comments

 
(note: this is a very long post. I realize this may not be the best way to start it if I want people reading, but I thought it would be fair to give warning. It's been in the works for a while and it's the reason I didn't post anything else in the meanwhile. I thought of breaking it into several posts, but I figured I'll just leave it to you to take breaks while reading it. I did when I was writing it.)

(Update: I have deleted the picture of boardgaming legend and icon Paul Dean from the top of this post because people thought he was the author of this post. While the comparison is flattering, and I do appreciate gaining traffic, I have decided to remove the picture so as not to mislead people. Apologies to anybody who was confused)


I was pleasantly surprised recently to see a recent video on the rightly celebrated Dice Tower Network addressing the morality of War Games. Some time around that week, the flagship podcast of the Dice Tower network had Tom and Eric discuss controversial themes of board games, touching on some of the same points that were raised in the video. It is such a touchy political subject that it seemed only appropriate of the political gamer to weigh in. Wars are such an awful, horrifying and depressing human practice, quite probably among the worst and most terrible forms of organized human interaction. Games are such lovely, harmless pastimes that we pursue in order to avoid the harsh realities of human interaction. Why on earth would we blend the two? And isn't there something fundamentally wrong with playing around, for fun, with some of these darkest chapters of human history? Isn't it troubling to teach kids (and adults) to enjoy killing and destroying human-like figures, defeating their friends and family by literally eliminating their stuff?

There's something funny about asking war gamers about whether or not playing war games is moral. Unless you are going to a meeting of a group intended to help you with an addiction, you are not likely to hear people condemn the things they do fairly regularly. Still, it is interesting to hear the people who play war games explain why they do so and how they explain why it's ok. And the question is not particular to war games - as these discussion reveal, some people find all sorts of themes morally problematic. Tom Vasel and Sam Healey from the dice tower got a lot of flack for complaining about the theme of Chaos in the Old War, which lets players control evil demons fighting against each other for who would more quickly enslave and destroy humanity. Others thought there is something wrong with a game that encourages players to use nuclear and biological weapons to reduce the world's population. More recently, people have complained about the fact there are slaves in Bruno Cathala's hit game Five Tribes and there have even been people complaining about a game that has you play monsters that go around destroying a city and eating peoples, ahem, meeples. And this list doesn't include the very real issue of representation of women in board gaming, recently rekindled by a controversial Essen release and the troubling treatment of women critics in the video gaming community. I hope to treat this subject separately at some point, but I will note for now that the discussion I've seen in the board game community was much more constructive than the rest of the gaming world. As I noted, discussing these issues tend to become acrimonious really quickly, because, well, people don't like it when other people say that things they like are immoral. So I try to proceed with care about this.
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Kids enjoy playing Rampage, as do I. Photo from BGG
Let's get to it - is playing war games morally wrong? I think the answer is no, but there are qualifications, and important ones at that. To get to those, here are some common answers that are not very good ones, in my opinions. Then we can talk about some specific games and issues.

"It's just a game" - I never quite understood why people so devoted to games would so quickly belittle their own hobby. Would we care about these things if we treated them as just games? But really, the main problem with this argument is that if you think, you're basically saying that you would play anything if the mechanics were interesting. Yet there aren't that many games in the market where you playing baby torturers, collective victory points that are baby tears. If would play the baby torturer game, than I probably have nothing to say that will convince you. If you won't, then it's probably a good idea to think about why. Games are art works, like movies or novels, and we should take care of the kind of content we consume when we engage in them. I believe theme matters. Every now and then I enjoy a crappy movie and heaven knows I sometimes consume cultural pieces that lack depth or are actually offensive, but I think it's best to be critical of what's out there.

"Criticizing games is PC culture run amok, trying to censor things you don't like" - no, it isn't. Nobody's after your games people - if you want to keep playing your baby torturing game, go for it. My point in criticizing gaming content is not to have it banned, but to discuss the merits of its content. The purpose of discussion is to persuade you that it's not a great idea to have certain types of theme in games, or that we need to be conscious about the way we handle things like war and history. My hope is that if I persuade enough people, some themes would be as prevalent as baby torturing - they would be crowded out not be fiat and censorship, but by a popular consensus that is based on discussion. And dissenters could swim against the current with all the bravado of the free spirits they are. 

"Different strokes for different folks. This discussion is pointless" - my response to this is not very different from the previous one. Sure, moral discussions are open for disagreement and I don't think anybody should take my opinion over theirs just because I say so. The only reason to endorse a moral judgement, in my opinion, is that you personally find its force compelling. And if in your judgement playing the baby torturing game (or anything else) is fine, I don't think you should change your mind just because I, or even most people in the world, think differently.
"If all mankind minus one, were of one opinion, and only one person were of the contrary opinion, mankind would be no more justified in silencing that one person, than he, if he had the power, would be justified in silencing mankind."  Yet we live in a society, and the ideas that are commonly held matter. For once, they matter because they would determine what games would have demand (I guess you'll have a hard time kickstarting that baby torture game). But they also matter, because it's hard to resist social pressures when they are formed. You won't find people to play with and you'll be embarrassed to ask because you'll know most people would be averse to it. "Society can and does execute its own mandates: and if it issues wrong mandates instead of right, or any mandates at all in things with which it ought not to meddle, it practises a social tyranny more formidable than many kinds of political oppression, since, though not usually upheld by such extreme penalties, it leaves fewer means of escape, penetrating much more deeply into the details of life, and enslaving the soul itself."
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John Stuart Mill had probably the best hair of all modern era philosophers writing about Liberty
So the discussion is not pointless - we should form our own opinions on these matters, and though it doesn't seem this way in the age of the internet, we can sometimes persuade each other. And it's important to have these discussions, even if we don't usually agree - because without trying to persuade others that we are right, we don't often really test our own convictions. We should argue even if just to try and figure out for ourselves that we really believe what we think we believe.

"You're a hypocrite because you criticize this one thing though you're totally ok with a bunch of other terrible things so we shouldn't listen to you" - this one is among the least persuasive responses for me, but it is really very common. The reason I don't find it very persuasive is that hypocrisy ranks pretty low on my list of sins; I don't think hypocrisy is great, but I definitely think it's overrated. A hypocrite doesn't practice what they preach, but what they preach may nonetheless be correct. I prefer to deal with the content of the sermon rather than discredit the preacher. But more importantly, someone can have good reasons to think that the way Five Tribes handles slavery is bad while not be troubled with the fact it includes assassins. I will explore a few such reasons below, but the general point is that people can have complex attitudes towards cultural depiction of morally troubling issues. They may not be able to articulate them in the most persuasive way, but that does not make them hypocrites.

Where does this leave us? Is it, on reflection, morally wrong to play war games? I've said so much about bad responses and nothing at all about what I think are good responses, while this is getting long. Here is a start.

Theme matters, and as such it's not at all trivial that playing war is that great of a thing. But avoiding it as a theme is a not a great thing either - war is, and has been, a tremendously big part of human history. And even if we want to make it obsolete some day (which some people believe is impossible or not even desirable) - it's not clear that the best way to promote that is to avoid engaging with it. In general, I think that when it comes to war, the same rules that apply to books and movies apply to games - it's important to discuss war and reflect it as a grim reality, as long as we don't trivialize human suffering, glorify war or make offensive and demeaning remarks on certain groups of people or their history. Yet gaming is somewhat different than other mediums (a post about that hopefully some day too), since they are interactive. In games, you don't just experience or consume it passively - you also actively participate in it. It makes a difference, and it's why games (mostly video games) are sometimes criticized as horrific activities. We have to modify our normal cultural rules when we deal with games.

History. Many war games are historical games and I personally think gaming is a great teaching tool. The Chief, in the aforementioned video, says he learned a lot of history from playing war games. You can learn a lot of history and geography from realistic games which is a main reason I love them so much. If you played enough Wars of the Roses, you'll remember where Sandwich is and nobody will have to tell you that Neville was the kingmaker - you'll remember that, with great frustration, because he will literally be the one noble to swing things around, costing you the game (and the crown). War games are often a great way to learn about history, even if sometimes the fascination with war is exaggerated or excessively divorced from the historical context.
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Yet the historical argument should be overplayed - when we depict historical scenes, we necessarily pick and choose. We mention some things and abstract away from others. It is especially important in the choice of playable factions/characters which by definition includes, well, picking sides. This is why there is something troubling about all those games which depict colonial European explorers as protagonists and relegate all natives to pesky NPCs which can sometimes ungratefully revolt. I haven't played Archipelago, but I wasn't very impressed with how much progress they made by making sure that "A balance must be found between expansionism and humanism, between commercial goals and respect for local values... the reckless exploitation of the islands’ resources and their inhabitants will ultimately lead to chaos and revolt."  Since the designer bothered to explain this, it seems he is obviously troubled by the indifference to colonialism. Yet the message he ends up with is that when colonialists treat the local fairly, they have no reason to revolt. Adding a 'betrayer' mechanic which allows one play to be a 'separatist' who stirs the game towards "chaos and uprising" is not helping. Likewise, making native Americans unplayable red meeples in Lewis & Clark which are basically another kind of resource to manage, is a choice that defies historical justifications: it's a choice to treat these people in our history not as much as people with perspective, agency (the ability to make choices) and diversity but rather as generic things that are there for us to use. In historical context, picking and choosing matters.

In addition, we play fast and loose with histories
when in a variety of ways. We strain historical preciseness for gameplay, fun factor or just sheer fantasy. And when we do that, we make an important choice - the choice to forgo historical precision for some other countervailing reason. For that reason, history can never be a trump card. It's particularly troubling to hear someone justifies some offensive representation, such as the exclusion of women from a knighthood academy, on historical grounds while also permitting that the knights spend their time fighting dragons. You may not want women as knights in your world, which is your choice. Just don't blame it on history when you do that. In a similar vein, I was wholly unsatisfied with Bruno Cathala's explanation of the reason to include slaves in his game Five Tribes as a historical feature, while he also allows that Djinns have magical powers. If you are asking our suspense of disbelief on magical creatures coming out of lamps, it was certainly within your power and judgment to decide to skip that part of history. But again, what's important here is not that there is a depiction of slavery: because slavery is a part of history and there's all the reason in the world to treat with in a game. Some games do it well. But in Five Tribes, slaves come out in the line of commodities among silk and fish. You use your game-money to buy generic black men in chains who are not even granted the level of agency that meeples get - to do an action. I'd like to respectfully disagree with the esteemed (and talented) designer Bruno Faidutti, who thinks this is a deliberate choice done with irony to distance oneself from the crudeness of the act. Cathala's design choice don't seem to reflect such self-conscious irony, nor his own words: "
Because in ancient times, we still need a little slave at home." It is no surprise to me that some people found it more troubling that other things in recent board games.
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The slaves in Five Tribes. You judge if it is in bad taste. Photo from BGG
Empathy. Another great point that the Chief makes in his video is that playing war games has made him see historical episodes through the eyes of the people who experienced it, providing him with an opportunity to glimpse a perspective he wouldn't otherwise get. I believe this is a crucial advantage of games over other media - by playing different sides, by experiencing some of the challenges and trials that they actually faced we can learn to appreciate the reality of the situation in a way that no textbook can ever convey. Yet like the other points, this lesson is valuable if we spend some time thinking about who we're empathizing with and in what context. We probably won't think it valuable to empathize, in great detail, with the difficulty that a baby torturer explores while the babies' tears get in the way of his work. And if we do, we'll want to be careful about how we go about it. More often the issue with emphasizing is not who we empathize but who we leave out of the picture - either as non-playable intelligent being (AI or NPCs) or worse as usable resources/tokens for the player to acquire, manage and exploit in the most efficient manner. This does not allow to empathize with the struggles and trials of historical people and is generally not so great. However, it's exceptionally not great when these people are those most often marginalized in cultural depiction, so their voices are typically missing from movies, books etc.

War as a struggle. I have given some reasons to think it's valuable to play some historical war games, especially if they provide an opportunity to learn about important chapter in human history from perspectives we don't usually get, even if they relax their historical standards to allow dragons or djinnis. But many war games take place in completely imaginary worlds. Whether fantasy or sci-fi, future or past, Cathullu westerns or zombie-alien mash ups - what is the point of rehearsing war when there's no historical value?

First, I think it's important to note that no matter how far fetched your fantasy is, there is always some interesting cultural content to it. Imagined worlds are commentary on our real one. Zombies, vampires, aliens, wizards, dragons, orcs, goblins and the rest of them are typically, on some level, abstractions of humans. They may represent a side of humanity that we wish didn't exist, or our fears, or our fantasies. When we talk about zombies, we are talking about our fear of death or the unknown, or perhaps the fear that death is not what we thought it is. And if we aren't talking about any of that, what we're saying may not be worth our breath.

Second, even if there is absolutely no commentary in the fantasy or the historical setting, it's important to remember that war itself has multiple meanings. We use war as metaphor in our everyday life all the time. We talk about the following things as wars: internal struggles to get out of bad, petty office rivalries that may or may not include silly pranks, the set of policies a state enforces to eradicate drugs/poverty/anything else really, a TV show where people compete at making cupcakes and many other things. Granted, in many of these cases the use of the term 'war' is a conscious attempt to shock or scandalize. But the point remains - we understand that war doesn't have to mean that dangerous business, that act of violence
which in its application knows no bounds. We exaggerate our office quibbles, hyperbolically treating them as if they know no bounds, while in reality the competition between cupcake makers might elicit a few teams and some pranks go too far but they are typically done with very strict bounds or plainly laid out rules.

War games are a little different because they actually depict war. Yet I think that they are totally fine so long as when we play them, we treat the war as an exaggerated metaphor for the struggle of wits and luck that we are engaged with. The concern would be that games glorify war - this would be the case if we were playing the game in preparation and hope for the day we can engage in the real thing. And that's a real concern - people sometimes get the wrong message (as they do with movies or any other work of art). But more commonly, I think, the war in war games is more like a metaphor for the high stakes we want the game to convey. We challenge each other to war games not because we want to kill and destroy each other - but because we want to take this challenge seriously, as if it knows no bounds. So long as this is the game, I don't think there's any problem with that.

Channeling aggression
. Games are exceptionally good, compared with other forms of expression, and getting people to express themselves in certain ways. They are great at letting us experience situation but they often leave enough space for us to express ourselves in the game. That's why you can play a game of Catan with generous trading or with cutthroat road blocking that will ruin your friendships. Some games are more restrictive in what they let you do, like Agricola, while others are more sandbox-like with a great variety of possibilities.

What's distinct about war games, whether historical or not, is that they let you kill and destroy, sacrifice or take great risk. Like zombies, these are things we dream about with great excitement and fear. These are drives and emotions that people seem to have and even if we don't like them, we shouldn't try to avoid or repress them at all costs. These efforts might blow in our face. Instead, it's often good to channel them into something productive and manageable. Like sports, war games can serves as a great outlet for anger and aggression. As much as we don't like it, we might that we have lots of anger within us - anger that accumulates on the road, running errands, at work and in life. It's really best not to express that anger while driving. Channeling it to a game of Nexus Ops or The Ares Project  is a much more productive way to get that anger off of your chest.

The problem of Evil
. Last, but certainly not least, we have the problem of evil. I will not attempt to resolve this age-old philosophical question at the end of this already-insanely-long post but it seems like it's something that has to be mentioned, because it comes up in this context often. And yes, the length of this post has greatly impacted the chance that Nazis are going to be mentioned so we can't finish without mentioning them in the context of war games and morality.

How can playing war games be moral, someone may say, if we sometimes take the role of ultimate evil? In Nexus Ops you play a mixture of weird unspecified aliens and humans who fight each other for control over territory. Though a bit eccentric it sounds pretty reasonable. We want that mine, you want that mine. You get the gist. But in other games you get to play Darth Vader and execute his 'brutality' attack, or quite literally an evil mastermind, or the evil overlord or Cthulhu like creatures or the evil Sauron or any other horrible creature whose goal is to destroy or enslave humanity. Even board gaming legend and enthusiast his royal Vaselness found his limits with Chaos in the Old World, finding it hard to play as an evil demon on a map that's made of human skin. How can that be defensible? The Nazis come up when historically themed games are discussed. How can it be ok to play the Nazis? Aren't they the ultimate evil?

First, they are not. And as the Chief notes in the video we started with, there is a difference between the Nazi regime and the German army during World War II. Taking control of the German army in some WWII battles is nothing like playing Darth Vader. But more importantly, even if evil itself is a playable character, it's not necessary a problem. I want to be careful here, because I do think that there is a line to be drawn somewhere. But in general, I don't think it's a problem to have a game that pits good vs. evil and have people play both sides. The idea that there is evil in the world, and we should fight it, is a pretty serious one. I'm not saying that it's right, I'm only say that it's worth considering. And one way to explore is to provide cultural artifacts which let us step into that role and experience something of it. Ask ourselves, can people be evil? Can we be evil if we were in the right circumstances? Can anybody?

Of course, there are limits for that. I'm not going to draw them here, but I will say that it's a fine line between toying around with the idea of evil and giving a little too much life to the fantasy, enjoying it just a bit too much. Such imprecise wavering is the best to finish this post because I don't want to suggest that in discussing these issues and presenting what sounds, at times, like a very decisive opinion, I aim to say all there is to be said about this. My goal is to open a discussion, not close it - even if it sometimes feels futile or pointless.
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On theme AND mechanics

9/28/2014

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Game designers often think, rightly, that when they design a board game, theme and mechanics should match. Some designers start with an idea for a mechanic, and then find a theme that works well with it; others have a passion for a theme they want to have covered in gaming; there are few who start from inspiring components but it seems like many (most?) start with an idea of the mechanics they want and a vague theme that they are attracted to, often inspired by another game that they love.

For all these folks, matching theme with mechanics helps make the game more compelling and exciting. While it's true that a good mechanic can usually survive retheming (or even carry a game with little or no theme), theme helps make mechanics comprehensible, intuitive and easy to learn. What Eric Zimmerman, designer of Quantum, says about cards is true in general: "[a] card title and image serve as a kind of cognitive 'gateway' into understanding the card function. They help orient the player, making the rules component of the card easier to digest (and remember)." A tight match of theme and mechanics simplifies a complicated game, makes it easier to learn and retain the rules and helps keeping the game going smoothly. If you think about the adding of cards to your character as 'equipping' them, your mind will automatically makes assumptions that help the game: you can use it while others can't, you can't have too many things equipped at the same time, you can hand it over to someone who is nearby and so forth. At the same time, a game that violates thematic assumptions ("what? I can equip this but never drop it? How does that make sense?!") can be confusing, disorienting and very frustrating. Lastly, even most hardcore mechanic oriented players like a theme a little bit - it fills in the blanks of their superior wits in XXX, and gives a bit of meaning to what they did when they destroyed you just there.

For thematic oriented players and designers, who typically care more about the narrative of the game, there is sometimes a tendency to add more and more mechanics to accommodate the needs of the story. A game like Descent, that
focuses on story and character development, ends up adding more and more rules as the game progresses. Each scenario has some special rules that are added in order to capture the situation of that specific mission - its goal, its circumstances and the twists and turns of the plot. Every piece of equipment and even every monster is a little rulebook which changes the game a bit to give you the feeling that your character is progressing on its narrative arc in the world of the game. This is a very challenging design work, because there's still a need to keep the mechanics balanced within the great variety of options. The strength of thematic games is that they let people experience the story more closely - and it's no coincidence that they are somewhat similar to role-playing games, as they aim for the same kind of experience. But they are weaker if their mechanics don't present a great challenge, are are ever-changing or just don't make any sense. A good thematic game has decisions that make sense even if you strip them down to their mechanical bare bones. A good example of that is Dead of Winter, where each crossroads card has a story that presents you with a thematic decision like 'should we accept more survivors to the colony'. At the same time, it presents you with a great strategic decision that can be considered mechanically - do I pay the costs of one extra food token per round in exchange for an extra action die, another pawn to move around and a random special ability from the deck?

So much about matching theme and mechanic, on which much has been said. I raise this old issue again not to give another answer to the question 'how should we balance the requirements of theme and mechanics in a game'  but rather to discuss how the choices made in the balancing of theme and mechanics impact the politics of a game, or as I like to call it - the little social world created by the game. My previous post on political analysis, which explains that it focuses on the way players relate to each other within the game, might suggest that it is mainly concerned with mechanics. When I asked 'what can players do to each other in this game' I mostly gave examples of mechanics - they can take resources from each other or they can't, they get assigned special roles by the game or they don't. Does it matter what thematic explanation is given to describe the fact that you take a cube from somebody else's reserves?

I think it does, and an example might serve to explain.
In Village, your meeples die as time passes. Presumably, they die of old age after a long and satisfying life as a carriage maker, traveler or monk. Mechanically speaking, time is a resource you can spend (and usually, though not always, avoid spending) to gain some other resources. The cost of spending time is that occasionally, specifically every 10 units you spend, you have to give up one of your pawns (aka meeples/workers/etc.), in a certain order. Technically, that's not very different than trading sheep for wood, but in Village the game goes to great length to persuade you that the meeple really did die in peace, literally laying them to rest in the Village's chronicle or the graves behind the church.  
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R.I.P, dear little meeple
A different approach is taken by the designer of Arctic Scavengers, though he presents you with basically the same choice: give up one of your guys for some resource. Yet in this case, the image that the game presents you as the pretext of this trading action is very grim. Indeed, not quite sheep for wood in this case, more like sheep for... I'm not gonna go there.

In any case, I think it seems to me that putting your meeple to sleep on the pretty board in front of you feels very different from trashing a card, returning it to the box, while the evil cannibal is literally gazing at you from the table, holding his hands above a bloody plate. And this difference makes sense - Village is a game about the euphemized and imagined peaceful life of medieval Europe, which some have compared to a nice cup of tea for good reason. That meeples can die in this game is pretty surprising, as it belongs to a genre of games that avoids conflict and really doesn't want to make you feel bad in your stomach as you play. That they can pull it off and still appeal to the Euro crowd is an impressive achievement, especially since it is sometimes in your favor to have your meeples die sooner rather than later and the game incentives you to control this process. This thematic incongruence which is successfully integrated into the game is what most reivewers cite as its main innovation. In contrast, Arctic Scavengers does not want to make you feel nice. The game description starts with the death of the 90% of the world's population and then adds, if you missed the point that the "The world of Arctic Scavengers is cold and brutal" (emphasis, I kid you not, is in the original). no wonder some people said it was going to make you feel scared, and they said it while pretending that people are shooting at them. Go figure. 

 
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Please stop looking at me... It's freaking me out!
Consider again the crossroads card from Dead of Winter. The beauty of them is that they present choices that make sense from a thematic as well as mechanic point of view, and those match. But players' intuitions might pull them in different directions: the same choice, presented in mechanic terms, might lead people to choose differently than if thought about it in thematic terms. And Dead of Winter forces players to have that discussion, which is brilliant. Someone may say 'we cannot afford to have more mouths to feed, our colony is food' which is, essentially a strategic (mechanical) consideration, while another may respond thematically by saying 'we cannot leave these people to die out there in the cold'. Of course, both people could be thinking about both implications - or they could be thinking just about the mechanics, while using thematic explanations as excuses. But I have seen many people make decisions on the basis of thematic considerations, out of concern for the aesthetic or moral position of their character/s. The sacred and eternal battle between the min/maxers and the role-players, the author said, is the oldest and most intense feud in the history of tabletop, and indeed it will rage until the end of days. And in any case, Dead of Winter makes you feel guilty when you turn away helpless survivors because you know in your heart of hearts that it's wrong, but you think it's the right decision given the game situation.

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Difficult thematic and strategic decisions
To sum, the theme of a game is very important for political analysis. Not because you can only analyze political games that have an explicitly politically theme, like 1960: The Making of the President, but because there's a lot to learn about a game from exploring the story it tries to tell, and the way it ties it to the mechanics. Sometimes a game tries to tell you that it's not very serious about its thematic commitment - as when a character 'dies' but comes back right away. This is a mechanic hint that the explicit theme is not to be taken too seriously. Analyzing the game politically requires looking at the intersection between theme and mechanics to see what the game purports to say and what it actually says, and how the relationship between these two things affects the way players, which are real people, treat each other around the table as well as on it. It starts with the basic setup of the game - are players fighting each other? Competing? Working together? And it continues to the actual actions people take and the ways they affect other players. What does the game call it when I take one of your resources?

How one understands a theme is open for interpretations and will vary from person to person. Of course, this doesn't mean that it's meaningless to have a discussion about it or point to some aspects that are not completely subjective. This is, of course, dangerous waters, but it's part of the mission of the political gamer.
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Scottish Independence and the Rules of the Game

9/18/2014

1 Comment

 
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Anybody who is interested in politics probably knows that today the Scots are going to the polls to vote about their separation from the United Kingdom. If they vote yes, they would become an independent state, breaking the 300 year old union in England that was not formed by a vote, to say the least. I am not Scottish, I don't have the right to vote nor should I. Still, I have some opinions and I would like to share them. I have one argument in favor of independence, one against it, neither of them conclusive. Then I'll connect it to games somehow by saying something about why I think referendums are a bad idea and not a terribly democratic one, though they are obviously a step forward from conquest, occupation and monarchical matrimony.

What reasons do people give in favor or against Scottish independence? To put it very crudely, not having followed the discussion too closely, the Yes argument is mostly nationalistic and the No argument is mostly economic, which is basically to say it's about welfare. Thus, the Yes people are saying that Scots are a nation and therefore they deserve to have their political independence - it is their right to control their own collective affairs. The No people are saying that an independent Scotland will either do worse than it's doing now or terribly bad, with all sorts of catastrophic scenarios flying around. Of course, the Yes people have responded by saying that independence would not have such dire consequences and may even have some economic benefits but their argument is still, for the most part, about national self-determination.

That brings me to one argument in favor of Yes. It seems really important to have on the history books a living example of a nation achieving independence through a vote. It's a chance to have a nation gain statehood by ballots, not bullets. Some political leaders are worried that other national minorities in Europe are looking at this vote and thinking about their own national aspirations. Those leaders are worried that a successful secession would lead to instability but it seems to me that such a peaceful campaign is a remarkable example of the potential of discursive, non-violent means of achieving political goals. That's especially true due to the positive nature of the Yes campaign that, as far as I've seen, avoided vilifying the English to get votes (though it would have been popular among some Scots and they probably have good reasons for it too). Whether or not an independent Scotland would be successful is a separate question that might also impact how other minorities think about their own independence, but whether you think your national minority group should secede or not, I think it's preferable that you think  about trying to achieve it through the ballot box.

Which leads to the problem of that Yes argument. That the conversation has been couched mostly in nationalistic terms is a source of concern. For various reasons I can't enumerate here I am very skeptical about the idea of nationalism in general and in particular about nationalism as a basis for political independence. One troubling aspect of nationalism is that the idea that nations should have their own states and states should be nation-states forces people to choose. Why can't someone be both Scottish and British? If nations are to have their own state, each state should have a clear nation. If there's a nation that doesn't have a state - either it should have its own state, or live as a minority in a state that isn't its own.

Ultimately, I think that there is an important component that's missing in this discussion. That is the democratic component: Would a new independent state would improve the Scottish people's ability to affect the matters the concern their own lives? Some Yes people have made that argument, usually within the nationalistic framework: As a nation, the Scots will be in a position to manage their own life. But I'm not interested in the Scots as a nation, but in Scots (and the English, and all other affected parties) as individuals. Would it improve individuals' democratic standings? Will they have more say in decisions that impact their lives?

I'm not sure, and I haven't heard many people make a persuasive argument this way or the other. Some Yes people think that an independent Scotland would result in an improvement in democracy because there is a difference in preferences, generally speaking, between the population of Scotland and the rest of the UK: Scots tend to support more social policies, such as government investment in education and healthcare than the policies of the UK government. Therefore, an independent Scotland would reflect better the preferences of most Scots while the remaining citizens of the UK would have policies that reflect their preferences.

This might be true, I don't know enough about the UK to say much about this. I do think, however, that there are various other issues that may complicate the story. Will an independent government in Scotland be sufficiently strong to even have its own policies in the face of pressures from International markets and a strong neighbor? For example, if the now independent Scotland attempts to regulate labour standards more rigorously will they be able to enforce it given the competition with their Southern neighbors or will they have to end up complying with the standards of the Westminster government only that now it'll be a much more conservative government in which they will have no vote?

Which leads me to the last point about referendums being not terribly democratic. Of course, they are much better than bullets, in terms of their democratic credentials, and definitely better than conquest, annexation and monarchical matrimony. But if you think democracy is about people participating in the government of their own collective lives, you want to create more opportunities for people to govern, not less. The way decisions should be made is continuously over time, not in a one-off moment where an on/off switch is thrown this way or the other. We need to have processes of deliberations where elections take place regularly, allowing people to think and rethink their positions, and also experiment with one kind of policy and later replace it with another.

The problem with this particular question is that, of course, it's not normal policy issue. In terms of games, this is exactly the moment in the game where players start arguing about the rules of the game. And as any gamer knows, it's really hard to adjudicate the rules of a game in the middle of the game where one's interpretation of the rules is clearly influenced by one's position in this one particular game. This is why when it comes to games, we are very keen on having clear rules ahead of time. If possible, we would like to have an authority that would adjudicate any problem that might come and we think it's a design flaw if the game requires to consult such adjudication to often or is unclear on many issues.

But of course, we have no choice in life but to have such arguments about the rules of the political game. We have to set the boundaries of democratic units and we have to do it in a way that would itself be regulated by the rules of democracy. This is why this referendum is a huge step forward in many ways and a tremendous historical precedent for any group of people in the world that feel like they are disenfranchised. You can win the state of having your own voice through a democratic process! it shouts. But since we want to have the process of setting boundaries a democratic one, we want it too to be an ongoing one with the option to test different setups, to change our minds, to have an ongoing discussion and debate about it. Which is why I have reservations about the referendum and particularly about a Yes vote, and would much rather see an increase in Scottish independence within the union - allowing people to take part in more rather than less decision-making processes, having more decision-making forums (or fora), not less. That's especially true given how little we know, and how much we need to speculate, about the consequences of a Yes vote. That's my qualified and tentative argument against independence.

Whatever happens today, it's a pretty remarkable day for anybody who is interested in politics. That this kind of momentous decision can take place in such relative peace is an incredible achievement, which means whatever way the vote goes: It's an historic win for democratic ideas and non-violent resolution of conflicts. Good job, Scotland!

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Political Analysis of games - what's that?

9/6/2014

8 Comments

 
I have started writing some political spotlights, analyzing specific games with some of the tools of political thought. In the first one I thought I'd say a little bit about what it means to analyze a game politically, but it was getting too long. So I thought I'd write it here separately, and the political analysis of games will have to wait a bit. What is, then, political analysis of games? How is it different from other reviews, or even the ludological or moral analyses? 

First, a political analysis is about the way people relate to each other. This is why moral and political analyses are often intertwined - politics concerns the rules that regulate the way we live together, and morality is an evaluation of these rules. Politics asks how do we live together? While morality asks: how should we live together? Games are systems of rules that recreate little social worlds, sometimes with the explicit aim of simulating a historical event or the environment of a period in a place. A political analysis of a game is an examination of this little world - what kind of world have we created here? Are we building little towns and trading goods, as in Settlers of Catan? Or are we building a technologically advanced civilization that may nuke its neighbor as in Civilization? Those are two very different social worlds, they give a different feel and they make us treat each other differently. 
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"Politics says, 'Be ye wise as serpents,' to which morality adds (as a limiting condition), 'and innocent as doves'" (Immanuel Kant, Appendix to Towards Perpetual Peace)
Second, a political analysis centers around a specific kind of relationship: the relationship of power. One prominent way in which people relate to people is by making them do stuff. We investigate power relationships by answering the question: what do people do to each other in this game? What does the game allow them? What does it encourage and reward? This is one way in which war games are very different from even the most competitive cube-pushing economic Euro games; cutthroat as your Agricola group might be - in war games you get to kill and destroy your opponents (or at least their units/people/stuff), in Euro-games you get to outsmart them by being more efficient. No matter how seriously you take gaming, it's just not the same attitude. 

Thirdly, when you look at power relationships, you develop a special interest in conflicts, and more importantly - in the way the game (or the society) manages them. There are lots of interesting things that rules can do with conflicts - it can channel them to certain places and times (like early or late in the game), it can fan them or try to mitigate them. When players have power over each other, they may use it in different ways. And when they use it in ways that other players consider disagreeable, we have a conflict. The conflict exists, for the most part, in people's minds, it is not just an analysis of who harms who, but who does that as part of an ongoing, unresolved series exchange of blows.

Fourthly, politics look at the roles that the game assigns players. Roles are ways in which we make social rules simpler - we create positions that can be filled by different people and bestow them with powers. Thus, we have special powers that go with specific position, and now we create another interesting political game with regards to those positions. Many games have a special interest in the position of the first player, and there are certain things you get to do as a first player. Moreover, there are certain things you can do to become first player. Other games give more elaborate titles and incorporate positions into the theme of the game - in Dreaming Spires you can be the Chancellor, in Warrior Knights two players get special roles, as chairman of the assembly and head of the church, and of course Game of Thrones has several special roles, including the current holder of the iconic Iron Throne. What does that do to the way people react to each other when one player is sitting on the Iron Throne? I've had games where that person insisted that people address him as 'Your Grace'. And we did.
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Lastly, at least for now, is strategy. You would think that it would feature more prominently in a political analysis, given that politics is the one who tells us to 'be wise as serpents', but a political analysis is not a strategic guide for the game. Instead, it is focused on the way the strategic needs of players create situations that are common in the game. Instead of trying to tell players how they should play, we look at the incentive structure that the game sets in front of them and ask: how will that tend to make people relate to each other? If the player encourages attacking by giving extra victory points to winners of offensive but not defensive battles, as Kemet does, what will that do to players? Does the game incentives specialization or competition? These are the way the strategic dimension come into the political analysis.

That's it for now. The first political analysis will come up soon - and it will concern an intensely political game. Later we will analyse politically some games that are not usually considered super political but for now, we're just warming up. 
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    The Political Gamer

    A student of politics and games, trying to think about play and play with some thoughts.
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