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. 

(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.

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:

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


So what’s going on? 

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

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

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

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

The Patrician says:

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

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

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


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

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

The Ambassador says:

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

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

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

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

The Psychologist says:

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

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

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

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

The Philosopher says:

"You’re all right.

(the others groan)

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

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

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

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

------

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

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

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

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!

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!

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. 

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. 

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.  

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. 

 

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.

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.

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!

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. 

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.

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.