autumn-and-eve:
I suck at chess but whatever it’s for fucking fascist feudalists anyway
Kings and queens? Bullshit
In anarchist chess every piece would be able to function a variety of ways based on the consensus of the other pieces and white wouldn’t be able to initiate force against black anyway
amouthygirl:
Autumn is onto something here.
autochthones:
“Let us take a limited example and compare the war machine and the State apparatus in the context of the theory of games. let us take chess and Go, from the standpoint of the game pieces, the relations between the pieces and the space involved. Chess is a game of State, or of the court: the emperor of China played it. Chess pieces are coded; they have an internal nature and intrinsic properties from which their movements, situations, and confrontations derive. They have qualities; a knight remains a knight, a pawn a pawn, a bishop a bishop. Each is like a subject of the statement endowed with a relative power, and these relative powers combine in a subject of enunciation, that is, the chess player or the game’s form of interiority. Go pieces, in contrast, are pellets, disks, simple arithmetic units, and have only an anonymous, collective, or third-person function: ‘It’ makes a move. ‘It’ could be a man, a woman, a louse, an elephant. Go pieces are elements of a nonsubjectified machine assemblage with no intrinsic properties, only situational ones. Thus the relations are very different in the two cases. Within their milieu of interiority, chess pieces entertain biunivocal relations with one another, and with the adversary’s pieces: their functioning is structural. On the other hand, a Go piece has only a milieu of exteriority, or extrinsic relations with nebulas or constellations as bordering, encircling, shattering. All by itself, a Go piece can destroy an entire constellation synchronically; a chess piece cannot (or can do so diachronically only.”
Deleuze & Guattari, A Thousand Plateaus
sterwood:
I really need to learn how to play Go. Lately it’s just been cribbage, all day, every day, but Go would be a welcome change.
amouthygirl:
They beat you to it, Autumn.
becoming-wave:
Chess sucks. Go is a far more elegant, subtle, flirtateous game, vastly more complex, yet amenable to an intuitive style of play. I feel my way around the board, seeking positions of influence responsive to they lay of the land and the style of the opponent, rather than coming in with a head full of predetermined strategic sets to deploy. I wish more people played Go so I could have Go partners. My poor board and pieces have sat idle for lack of opponents to play with.
For anyone who wants to learn, this is a great resource. And beyond that, KGS Go server is an excellent site to practice on, with plenty of opponents at all levels and lots who like to teach. And if any Toronto friends are down, I’d love to play IRL.
Do y’all know about the abstract wargame by Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho?
I’m more of the backgammon type nowadays though—I want the bluffing game in with my tactics.
Sunday night fighting werewolves at the Empress, NBD.
WEDNESDAY APRIL 18, 2012 AT 8:30 PM
MEET AT JASPER AVE AND 102 ST
BRING: A VISIBLE ARMBAND AND FRIENDS
CELEBRATE SPRING-TIME
More like the last gasp of winter.
On Sunday I am going to start an open-table game of Dungeons and Dragons (ish). At the Empress ale house, 7pm (a little late can be OK, spectators welcome as long as they are ready for me to trick them into actually playing). It is, in the words of one curious potential player, “a really really informal low key…D&D day”. It will hopefully continue on a weekly basis. There is no expectation of attendance, and if you are at all interested, dropping in occasionally is a totally good way to play.
Edmonton readers: maybe you should come? No experience preferred.
At the same time that I extend an open invitation (OK, I can handle 15 people probably, maybe even twenty, above that things get pretty tough), I want to lay a few things out. Some thoughts that I feel ready to explain for the first time. Perhaps to the kinds of people who I imagine/hope read this blog, this is an explanation for why I find D&D interesting as play and as part of my practice. But I’m also very conscious of the fact that my desire to run an open table is going to make my job hard, the part where I have to establish a safe space for play and direct the tone to allow the players to do interesting things.
Yesterday I tricked a bunch of people into rolling up characters—they were largely male gamer types to start with, some with a pretty good idea about what D&D meant to them, or even regular players. I want some of these people in my game. But I want more people who have no clue, because they have better ideas. My job is going to be preventing or managing culture clash, while still keeping the liveliness of conflicting expectations at the table. Here it is then, a warning: if you like D&D I hope you’ll think mine is better but it’s not what you expect.
D&D is fucked
Take a look—well, actually probably don’t—at this mess of a story-games thread in which “Gygaxian naturalism” (the principle, invented by one of D&D’s co-authors, that monsters should be in some way naturalistic, believable, possessing of ecosystems) leads to squicky situations like: oh yeah, of course all of these monsters live in “primitive” tribal societies as well as being inherently evil. Which is to say: Trouble with a capital T that rhymes with G that stands for Gygax.
The thread itself is an example of why these things are dangerous as much as the material it’s actually about. As it’s approaching godwin’s law, someone asks: why would Gygax write something fascist? and I have to say: because he was a disgusting fucking colonialist neo-con. Another story.
So this is an explanation of why I’m running D&D (not D&D), in a custom little rulebook that I assembled from open source documents and rewrote big sections of. Not only does it hark back to the early days when playing something someone had mimeographed was pretty normal (not that I remember such days), but because I am making a better game. I don’t think I’m being unreasonably pretentious here.
How am I escaping from the bro-world of published games, how have I dealt with this same dangerous subject, and how will I do even better in the future?
My game has a very simplified set of rules compared to currently published versions. It’s based on open designs from the “OSR”, a rough group of bloggers and players who approximate imaginary old versions of the game. Great. I’ve talked lots about this: increasing player agency by not codifying their options, exploring constructed authenticities, mixing in a little bit of modern story-game design junk, ritualizing play. What else?
The game, like its source material, is about travel and transformations. Unlike a lot of fantasy literature, we’re going to be clear about how that plays out: that literature has spent a lot of the last two hundred years erasing the fact that european folklore is as full of transgendered folk heroes, travel in other worlds, troublesome land spirits and terrible bargains as the folklores that we white people like to act all shocked about (oh my, “trickster figures”). That’s the good stuff.
I am thinking very hard about how to set up my games to enable players to challenge the narratives of “fantasy” as genre. I think I have some ideas beginning. Here are a couple of reflections:
I mentioned above, twice, that my preferred method of recruiting players is via trickery. It’s very simple: the game is based around a powerful ritual of rolling the dice to test your vision of ordered narrative against the unpredictable group. More or that test in a minute. But I start by offering the dice. Once you’ve rolled a few stats—and even more once you’re shopping for equipment, you’re in. And you get to roll again and improvise desperately as soon as you bring that character into the game.
But as I foreground this ritual I leave some parts out. I have not yet asked a player what gender their character is, despite this for some reason being a pretty common thing to see in a rulebook. Yeah, generally it results in yesterday’s situation: a bunch of people, then male, rolling up characters that are assumed to share their gender. But in Glasgow a female player was playing a dwarf of unspecified gender named Chad—and didn’t bother to even address in passing this conflict of expectation until well into the game. That’s nice. I won’t ask you to write anything down until it makes a difference, or until you chose to. This is part of why I am attracted to the simplest rules.
In the Glasgow game, the first time the players discovered otherworldly creatures—goblins—there was a stop. Because fantasy literature trained them to see them as primitive people, and they didn’t want to be playing a game about genocide, thank goodness. I will fight Gygaxian Naturalism to my last breath. Here’s how it works:
The player characters are necessarily people on the edge. Law and Chaos is necessarily trouble: the characters are neither of society nor of the wild, but are engaged in a kind of dialogue of colonialism on the edges of those two spaces, neither of which is actually very nice. That’s why they are magic. Monsters are a manifestation of this: in the rules they emerge spontaneously (“random encounters”) caused by nothing other than the player’s exploration. Unlike Gygax, I don’t see why this can’t be true in the fiction too. That’s what monsters are—the players’ characters are an aberration in the world that cause all kinds of trouble. “Heroes” in quotes like Bowie.
The big one: when tough questions come up, it’s for the players to answer them. Where do monsters come from? Ask the cleric.
And where from there? Let’s play and find out.
It’s straight out of a Don Delillo novel: A few hours after television producers set up a replica of Occupy Wall Street for the filming of a new episode of Law and Order Special Victims Unit, the real Occupy Wall Street announced plans to occupy the fake one. At 11:30 p.m. the call to occupy the set went out on Twitter. It’s located at nearby Foley Square and includes a replica of the OWS kitchen and library as well as numerous tarps and tents. “They’ve delivered us this perfectly wrapped Christmas present with a bow on top: They rebuilt our camp,” OWS organizer Jake De Groot told me shortly before the announcement went out. “How could we not go and take it?”
Amazing. This is a nice sequel to “#Occupy as Live Action Role-playing” (my take or barthel’s when it was republished).
ekstasis:
Joanne McNeil at Rhizome opened her post about #OWS with this: “On a quiet night, Zuccotti Park feels more like a LARP than a demonstration. Everyone deep in character with a specific task…” We have knowledge, but nothing to do with it; skills, but never opportunities to use them; time, energy and no way to put them to productive use. Our surplus is a virtual one, so we put it to virtual use.
…[and then some other things]
There’s maybe something about privilege exposed by this description, too, which speaks to criticism of occupy’s non-representation of certain groups. I don’t know what to say about it here, except that it’s really awesome when one post encapsulates several separate strains that I follow on tumblr that didn’t seem like they talk to each other much even when they ought to.
All the cows were whisked away. And all that was left were the little shadows where they had been standing. But the game continued to run. And, in fact, the game continues to run to this day. And there are still people clicking on the spot where a cow used to be.
intentionally ‘broken’ or otherwise incomplete game systems can help support a distinctly self-motivated and collaborative form of play. From a design perspective, the key to making these kinds of broken games work is to frame them in the right way. In this view, the practice of game design becomes less about crafting systems, and more about mood setting and instilling into the players the appropriate ‘spirit.’
…What distinguishes B.U.T.T.O.N., then, is that it is actively self-effacing. The game does invite physical and subversive play, hinting to and even telling the players that the terms of the game are up for debate. Thus, it is not just that the rules are ambiguous; it is that the game signals an acute self-awareness of this ambiguity. The game makes it clear that players are consenting to something different than when agreeing to play a more traditional digital game. It is then up to the players to negotiate what, exactly, they have consented to.
Game Studies - Brutally Unfair Tactics Totally OK Now: On Self-Effacing Games and Unachievements by Douglas Wilson
This is a very interesting essay to me. It talks about the same kinds of things I was dealing with in International Espionage, and Douglas Wilson’s term for ambiguous social rules, the “unachievement” is neat. I’m also seeing a nice simultenaity with this thread on The Forge, which entails a discussion about whether silliness and anachronism is actually a necessary element or necessary possibility in true “sandbox” play (we’re talking D&D now):
my experience as the GM of the White Sandbox is that the gonzo Acid Fantasy kitchen-sink approach…is indeed a necessary part of the method of sandbox play. When a player says “I want to be 23, a robot cleric who gets his spells from worshipping the Server, a vast computer at the center of the earth”, for me to say yes to this—the aesthetic decision that anything can potentially fit into the setting—is part and parcel of me saying yes to…the sandbox method that leaving the edges of everything undefined and having robust tools for creating what’s there procedurally provides infinite scope to handle player-driven exploration.
As a player in the Glantri campaign, when I’ve been allowed to name a cleric the Boss and have him inspire his own religion, the sandbox sings for me—even though the result is essentially silly, I enjoy taking it seriously, and the fact that it runs contrary to the tone of the game is part of the point: having GM Eric provide seriousness and drama is a necessary foil for our comic relief. When other players have been told that they can’t name a character Sosexia, this to me feels like my agency and scope of action in the sandbox is limited; there aren’t rails exactly, but now there are walls on the sandbox that will keep us from ever traveling to wherever Sosexia comes from and learning about a land where that’s a normal name.
This is the same issue: the game designer/referee deciding to step back from the enforcement of certain parts of the fiction, allowing the players to decide for themselves what is “rules” and what is simply background or shared cultural knowledge—something that a game like D&D, or International Espionage equally is built on: you know what the fantasy-medieval is, you know what spies do. Although Wilson presents the unachievement in opposition to the achievement (a digitally enforced, centrally recorded coding of “good play”) or the anti-achievement (a bizarre version of an achievement that rewards uncompetetive play), I think that this moment where the rules of the sandbox’s culture are broken is its real counterpart: the player makes a decision to not seek out the unachievement of staying within the unenforced parts of the rules—maybe even doing so in an attention-grabbing way.
On a somewhat related note I’m looking right now at putting something together for a memories-of-games-themed exhibition call, from my copious visual record of D&D at the Banff Centre. I don’t know how it looks right now, we’ll see. Galleries are weird. But I’ve got lots of unachievements and anti-unachievements to choose from.
dropouthangoutspaceout:
Panel at DiGRA on modern board games. Of special interest to you might the discussion of the inspiration and impact of the game War on Terror (which is a board game that is amazing that also includes a balaclava with the word “EVIL” on it).
Hosted by: Ben Kirman (lecturer in game design at the University of Lincoln, ben.kirman.org) and José Zagal (game designer, scholar and researcher at DePaul University, facsrv.cs.depaul.edu/~jzagal). Panelists are:
Reiner Knizia (http://knizia.de/english.htm)
Chris Bateman (http://onlyagame.typepad.com/about.html)
Andrew Sheerin (http://terrorbullgames.co.uk)
James Wallis (http://spaaace.com/spaaace-people)
Douglas Wilson (http://game.itu.dk/index.php/Douglas_Wilson)
Armand Servaes (http://spelgropphoenix.nl)
The panel brings together academics and practitioners from both sides of the digital gaming divide. They will attempt to explore what makes the modern board game interesting, and discuss the opportunities and challenges this evolving form of play presents and the impact that board games, and their study, should be having on game studies as a whole.
Finally got around to watching this, and some of the other videos from this conference. Good. Nice conversation about the social responsibility of art in the context of game design.
Of course I don’t know for certain, but today seems like a good day for seeking out the accursed swordsman in the dark wood to the Northwest (the trees have eyes there). Or the group may return to the goblin caves under the mountain, or venture into the old tunnels below the town itself.
