When I first heard about the Battlestar Galactica board game I dismissed it as a shameless cash-in; might as well buy a Battlestar themed happy meal at McDonald’s (or, I suppose, a Starbuck themed coffee at Starbucks).  I’m a big fan of the show.  It was fresh and gutsy and the writing and acting were good enough that the characters managed to transcend the stereotypes that they undeniably were.  The plot was slow-moving and complex, with long plot arcs.  Unlike in Star Trek, unexpected things could and did actually happen, things that irreversibly altered the universe.  There was no requirement for things to return to the status quo at the end of the episode, and so there was real uncertainty in the decisions the crew had to face.  Despite its flaws I believe it stands as one of the truly great sci fi TV shows.

How could a board game capture all that?  A board game must necessarily reduce its subject matter to a few simple principles.  When they are representational, board games deal in stereotypes and stock characters.  The representations must be easily understood.  With the exception of RPGs and the like, games do not generally allow for elaborate background stories or sophisticated character development.  So the best I was hoping for was something akin to a Battlestar themed chess set, or a quake mod where you get to fight cylons: a skin thrown over an otherwise unrelated set of game mechanics.

But the Battlestar board game is so much more that that.  It is unbelievably successful at evoking the spirit of the series through the gameplay itself.  The events of the show do not just give flavour to the game, they form the game mechanics.  For example, the game is cooperative, with each player having to make decisions about how best to protect Galactica from the cylon onslaught, but there is a mechanic similar to that of mafia (aka vampire, aka werewolf) that is central to the game. Some players are secretly cylons and try to work against the rest of the crew without revealing their identities.  Others players are cylons but don’t know it themselves until half way through the game.  This is a simple mechanic, and certainly not an original one, but it succeeds in evoking the feeling of suspicion and paranoia that were so powerful in the show.  One could be a cylon oneself without knowing it.  The “crisis cards” that dictate the major events of the game sometimes necessitate a mad scramble into the vipers to shoot down approaching raiders, but during those times when the crises aren’t that bad, when the characters are basically just hanging out, the game is equally intense.  The lack of obvious things to do has a way of provoking accusations.  Each player’s decisions are analyzed in minute detail for any telltale sign that they might secretly be working against the rest of the crew.

Rather than being a skin, the Battlestar game is more like a translation or an adaptation.

Some of the mechanics seem a little forced or throwaway (for example, Helo starts the game down on a planet, and doesn’t make it back to Galactica until turn two), but the vast majority of them make sense from the perspective of the narrative world of Battlestar and work well with the game mechanics.  They add variety to the gameplay even as they provide satisfaction and recognition to fans of the show.

Rather than being a skin, the Battlestar game is more like a translation or an adaptation.  But here’s the thing: it’s not an adaptation of the narrative of the show, it’s an adaptation of what the narrative does.  The board game adapts the waxing and waning tensions of the show, the feelings of paranoia and suspicion, the stress and desperation and the sudden, unexpected bursts of hope.  It recreates all these things through gameplay instead of through narrative.

Of course we already knew that adaptation is not restricted to narrative works; just look at the Pirates of the Caribbean movies (adapted from a fairground ride) or the Lego Star Wars video games.  Play (with lego or board games) is not the same as narrative, and narrative is not the same as a rollercoaster, but they all do something similar; they deal in the creation and resolution of tension.  The board game could never have replicated the show’s narrative, but the designers of the game realized that the essence of the show lay in the ebb and flow of tension, the accumulation of crises upon crises, the frantic search for solutions—all of that stuff a board game can replicate very well indeed.

Go England!

Just a quick post today on a recent revelation I had about Monopoly. In one of my earliest posts I wrote about Monopoly as a Parasite-Zombie-Hydra-Vampire-Cannibal and ended that post with the claim that Monopoly is “a shitty game”. Well now I’m not so sure. I may owe a big apology to Charles Darrow and the good folk at Hasbro.

You see, there’s been a YouTube video doing the rounds lately of what is (allegedly) “The World’s Shortest Game of Monopoly,” but several of my friends have been pointing out that they are not playing according to the rules. Here’s an excerpt from the blog post that accompanies the video:

Player 1, Turn 1:
Roll: 6-6, Lands on: Electric Company
Action: None, Doubles therefore roll again

Roll: 6-6, Lands on: Illinois Avenue
Action: None, Doubles therefore roll again

Roll: 4-5, Lands on: Community Chest “Bank error in your favor, Collect $200″
Action: Collects $200 (now has $1700)

According to the official rules if you land on a property and decline to purchase it, it is put up for auction among the players. So the 21 seconds it takes them to complete the game would really take much longer. You cannot simply take no action and move on.  You have to hold an auction.

I have played Monopoly many times over the course of my life and I have never, ever played according to this rule, despite the fact that it is printed right there in black & white in the rulebook (I checked).  Apparently, the rule is a closely guarded secret, known only to an exclusive elite of Monopoly players (i.e. the ones who read the fucking rules).  It is a rule so secret that it is hidden in plain sight.

The upshot of all this is that the shortest possible Monopoly game is not only a fiction; it is an alternate reality fantasy fiction set in a world in which Monopoly is played in a totally different way. But here’s the thing: one of the most common complaints about Monopoly is that games last too long, but this secret (official) rule would certainly make games much shorter. Every time someone lands on a property it is going to be purchased by someone, so all the properties would be owned much sooner than in the Monopoly-like-game that I have always played.

So I have never played Monopoly. I’m curious to give it a try. I’ve heard a lot about it.

Apple markets its iPad as “The best way to experience the web, photos and video. Hands down.” But we can do all those things just fine on a laptop, so what’s the iPad’s real raison d’être? The answer, of course, is board games. The iPad seems custom designed to lie flat on a table and be sat around, to be interacted with manually. It is a literal gaming platform, a board upon which to play.

The iPad seems custom designed to lie flat on a table and be sat around, to be interacted with manually.  It is a literal gaming platform, a board upon which to play.

CheckMates in action

My friend Neale has designed a gorgeous chess app to be played on the iPad, called CheckMates, just released yesterday via the app store. Pushing the pieces around with your fingers feels so natural that it really feels like this is what the iPad was born to do. Computerized versions of board games are like computerized versions of pinball or computerized versions of sex—they simulate the superficial experience, but lack the physical, tactile engagement that is so important to the activity. Part of the magic of board games lies in being face-to-face with the other players and few digital games facilitate that kind of interaction.

The iPad changes that. Instead of trying to bring the board to the screen it transforms the screen into a board. The board game is not being brought into the digital era, the computer is being brought into the (millennia old, ongoing) board game era. The iPad version of Scrabble, in which players can use their iPhones as “racks” to display their letters, has been much-mocked, but what a perfect use for the form factors involved! Once they had come up with the idea, how could they resist it? The technology itself demands this use. I say CheckMates should have gone all the way and made use of the iPads accelerometers to allow players to tip over the board, scattering the pieces; then they could have released a deluxe travel version with a “magnetic” board, on which this feature is disabled.

from Virtual Shackles

One of my favourite childhood games was The aMAZEing Labyrinth, in which the board changes as you play. That game was elegantly designed and (like Scrabble or chess) would certainly not be improved through being played on an iPad (part of the pleasure is sliding the physical pieces around), but imagine how you could extend the concept of the ever-changing board using the iPad. The device is a tactile game board imbued with the infinite malleability of the digital age. I think it’s only a matter of time before someone designs a game that uses real pieces that are physically placed on top of a dynamically changing board generated by the iPad, pieces that the iPad can sense and react to. I think this could make for awesome real-time strategy board games.

Computerized versions of board games are like computerized versions of pinball or computerized versions of sex—they simulate the superficial experience, but lack the physical, tactile engagement that is so important to the activity

The key to getting board games right is recognizing the physicality of the iPad, because physicality is what makes board games what they are. We shouldn’t think about the iPad as a web reader, or a photo viewer, or a video player, or an oversized smartphone, or an eccentric gaming console. We should think about it as a flat board that can rest easily on a table, around which players can gather, and go from there.

Doesn't Thomas More's Utopia look at lot like a game of Settlers of Catan?

Imagine a utopia in which all human needs are met and all interpersonal problems solved. In such a world, what would we do to pass the time? Three things immediately spring to mind: 1) Sex 2) Art 3) Play

Three things immediately spring to mind: 1) Sex 2) Art 3) Play

In his 1978 book The Grasshopper Bernard Suits addresses this very question, but he dismisses my first two answers. He claims that “without the repression, guilt, naughtiness, domination and submission, liberation, rebellion, sadism and masochism, romance, and theology” that are “part and parcel” of sex, the act of sex would be reduced to a mere “pleasant sensation in the loins” and would lose its appeal. Similarly, he argues that art is an expression of “human aspirations and frustrations, hopes and fears, triumphs and tragedies, […] flaws of character, moral dillemmas, joy and sorrow,” none of which would exist in Utopia. The only art that would be possible, he argues, would be a hypothetical art of “pure forms,” lacking any humanity, the creation of which could easily be turned over to machines. So that only leaves play:

[In Utopia] there is nothing to strive for precisely because everything has been achieved. What we need, therefore, is some activity in which what is instrumental is inseparably combined with what is intrinsically valuable, and where the activity is not itself an instrument for some further end. Games meet this requirement perfectly. For in games we must have obstacles which we can strive to overcome just so that we can possess the activity as a whole, namely, playing the game. Game playing makes it possible to retain enough effort in Utopia to make life worth living.

Suits makes the excellent point that we like to solve problems, we like to struggle and strive and overcome, we like to have the experience of resolving tension and uncertainty, and if life doesn’t provide us with any problems or struggles or tension or uncertainty we have to create these things. Games are our primary mechanism for doing this. Gambling games are probably the most straightforward example of the creation of tension in order to resolve it. The thrill at winning is not the thrill of suddenly having more money (although that’s nice) it is the thrill of resolving all that uncertainty and tension and stress that the wager created.

Is this a diagram of a short story or of sex?

I believe that Suits is too quick to dismiss both sex and art. In music, for instance, there is an entire technical vocabulary that deals with creating and resolving tension. The reason the big tonic chords at the end of a symphony are so satisfying is because they resolve all the tensions that have been built up over the course of the piece. Out of context they would sound totally boring and unremarkable. Similarly, every high school student knows that a good short story has rising action, a climax and resolution.

Some also know that sex has these same elements. At the beginning of A Midsummer Night’s Dream, Theseus tells Hippolyta of his mounting frustration as he waits for their wedding night. Hippolyta tells him that the time will pass quickly and compares his desire to the moon, which, in turn, “[…] like a silver bow / [New] bent in heaven, shall behold the night / Of our solemnities.” The image of a drawn-back bow is a beautiful image to illustrate sexual desire, but it also illustrates how that initial build of tension is necessary for ultimate satisfaction. If that tension did not exist, the arrow would remain in the slack (or flaccid) bow, but the more tension is created in the bow, the more energy the arrow will have when it is finally released, and the further it will fly beyond the bow. The resolution of tension does not just return us to a state of contentment; it overshoots into pleasure. All Theseus’s frustration will make his wedding night so much better.

The resolution of tension does not just return us to a state of contentment; it overshoots into pleasure.

A sexy moon, taut with unresolved tension

Much of our technology is designed to get rid of problems, to get rid of tension, risk, uncertainty and frustration, to make it so we don’t have to struggle and strive any more, but in so doing it also deprives us of a tremendous source of satisfaction—the catharsis that results from the resolution of all those tensions—and so a parallel branch of technology has developed to artificially create and resolve those tensions: games. I’m currently playing Eve Online, and am frustrated by the slow progress I am making. The tasks I have to do to improve my character in the game (mining asteroids, couriering goods between space stations, manufacturing items) feel a lot like work; but really I should be glad that I’m frustrated—that frustration is like potential energy, ready to be transformed into satisfaction down the road, when I can finally afford that battlecruiser.

I would like to see a technical vocabulary develop to describe this process of creating and resolving tension within games, of the sort that exists within music theory. Maybe such a vocabulary already exists among game designers, who must think about these issues all the time. Maybe one day there will be a unified theory of things-that-create-and-resolve-tension, that will encompass games, music, stories and sex. Maybe that theory will itself fall under the umbrella of things-that-are-worth-doing-in-utopia studies.

Derrida’s essay on the subject (titled “Différance”) is a tour de force of post-modern nonsense.  Here’s a fairly representative passage:

Now if différance is (and I also cross out the is) what makes possible the presentation of the being-present, it is never presented as such. It is never offered to the present. Or to anyone. Reserving itself, not exposing itself, in regular fashion it exceeds the order of truth at a certain precise point, but without dissimulating itself as something, as a mysterious being, in the occult of a nonknowledge or in a hole with indeterminable borders (for example, in a topology of castration). In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing.

I have almost no idea what he’s going on about here, but I think it is possible to understand the concept of différance by thinking about it in terms of board games…because board games explain everything.

In every exposition it would be exposed to disappearing as disappearance. It would risk appearing: disappearing.

Two weeks ago I described how Saussure’s structural linguistics can be understood as a system of formal, logical relationships, much like a game of chess, and how his methods offered the possibility to getting at logical truths in humanities research.  Last week I described how Derrida undermined those claims to truth by pointing out that our structuring principles are themselves conventional and arbitrary and ungrounded in reality.  The goal is not to arrive at truth, according to Derrida, the goal is interpretation or play for its own sake.  Différance might best be understood as an example of this kind of play—a “play of the world without truth, without origin.”

Sooner or later all our games turn into Calvinball

As I have discussed previously, absolute mastery of a game tends to ruin play.  Adults no longer play tic-tac-toe precisely because they have mastered it.  Even in a complex game like chess too much mastery can be antithetical to play.  The late World Chess Champion (and racist lunatic) Bobby Fisher felt that the memorization of set-piece openings had ruined the early portion of the game, and so he advocated a version of chess in which the initial setup of the pieces is randomized so that players are forced to start from unfamiliar positions and actually think about their moves.  To put it another way, using a different set of structuring principles defers mastery of the game, and reactivates creative thinking and play.  As I have argued before, there is nothing objective or logically necessary about the rules and structure of the game; the rules are there to facilitate to play.  Derrida’s characterization of différance precisely describes how play function in relation to the structure of a game:

In the delineation of différance everything is strategic and adventurous. Strategic because no transcendent truth present outside the field of writing can govern theologically the totality of the field.  Adventurous because this strategy is not a simple strategy in the sense that strategy orients tactics according to a final goal, a telos or theme of domination, a mastery and ultimate reappropriation of the development of the field. Finally, a strategy without finality, what might be called blind tactics or empirical wandering if the value of empiricism did not itself acquire its entire meaning in its opposition to philosophical responsibility. If there is a certain wandering in the tracing of différance, it no more follows the lines of philosophical-logical discourse than that of its symmetrical and integral inverse, empirical-logical discourse. The concept of play keeps itself beyond this opposition, announcing, on the eve of philosophy and beyond it, the unity of chance and necessity in calculations without end.

Derrida reminds us that arriving at truth is no more the goal of research than arriving at total understanding is the goal of playing chess; the goal is the play itself.  He does not suggest we abandon logic or empiricism (without the rules we could not play the game), only that we remember that they do not give us access to truth.  He reminds us that the rules could very well be different, that they can and will change, and that the endless deferral of complete understanding that will result from these changes is fundamental to the whole process.

In this sense, Derrida sees academic research as something very similar to Calvinball.

The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can't play it the same way twice

In this sense, Derrida sees academic research as something very similar to Calvinball.  It is easy to think of Calvinball as a sort of pure, abstract, freeform, “anything goes” play, but this would be to completely misunderstand the game.  Complex, exacting rules are absolutely essential to Calvinball—they are what precisely what facilitate the play—but Calvin and Hobbes realize that total understanding and mastery of the rules would ruin the game.  The rules have to be different every time in order to forever defer the end of play.  When Derrida says that différance “unceasingly dislocates itself in a chain of differing and deferring substitutions” he could be paraphrasing Calvin when he says, “The only permanent rule in Calvinball is that you can’t play it the same way twice” (but it is important to remember that changing the rules every time is not an end in itself either, it is merely a cause and result of play).  It is also entirely appropriate to Derrida’s thinking when Calvin says “Sooner or later, all our games turn into Calvinball.”

It’s not a board game, but perhaps Calvinball is the best possible explanation of différance.

Jacques Derrida

Last week I discussed how Saussurean structural analysis can be understood in terms of games, and how game strategy can be understood as structural analysis. This week I would like to introduce one of the most influential and controversial philosophers of the twentieth century, Jacques Derrida, and suggest how his notoriously difficult theories can be understood through board games…because board games explain everything.

By the 1960s, Saussure’s structuralist methods had been hugely influential throughout the humanities. They seemed to offer a way of using the sorts of objective, logical truths of mathematics to arrive at truth in the “human sciences”. But there was trouble brewing. In 1966 at Johns Hopkins University, French philosopher Jacques Derrida gave a talk entitled “Structure, Sign and Play in the Discourse of the Human Sciences” (later published in Writing and Difference) criticizing structuralism and arguing that the structuring principles identified by Saussure and others do not provide anything like a firm foundation for true knowledge. He gives examples from the work of Claude Lévi-Strauss (an anthropologist who was highly influenced by Saussure’s ideas) and points out that the structuring principles that underlie his research are, in fact, arbitrary and artificial—a point that Lévi-Strauss himself acknowledges.

For example, Lévi-Strauss uses the fundamental, binary opposition between nature and culture to structure much of his analysis, but he also points out that the incest-taboo seems to be both natural and cultural at the same time, invalidating this binary. He simultaneously recognizes that we need structuring principles in order to understand anything about anything (i.e. we can’t think in a totally unstructured way), and that we cannot take those structuring principles as unshakable foundations on which to build knowledge. There will always be exceptions and things that fall between the cracks of the explanatory structures we create, precisely because they are created and artificial. But that does not mean we must abandon them and give up on research entirely, only that we must disassociate them from objective truth. Derrida says that Lévi-Strauss’s method,

consists in conserving in the field of empirical discovery all these old concepts, while at the same time exposing here and there their limits, treating them as tools which can still be of use. No longer is any truth-value attributed to them; there is a readiness to abandon them if necessary if other instruments should appear more useful. In the meantime, their relative efficacy is exploited, and they are employed to destroy the old machinery to which they belong and of which they themselves are pieces.

To put it another way, Derrida claims (via Lévi-Strauss) that the goal of humanities research is not to discover truths, but to offer different ways of understanding or interpreting reality. To put it into the terms of anthropology, we might say that we can understand a foreign culture in a variety of different ways, using tools, concepts and structures from our own culture. One of the tools at our disposal is the nature/culture divide (a concept that has been centrally important in the history of Western thought), but if our culture had developed differently, (if we had never made the nature/culture distinction, or made it long different lines) then we would lack that tool for understanding that foreign culture. We might have a completely different set of tools that would offer different ways of understanding that same foreign culture. But none of these different ways of understanding have any bearing on objective truth.

To put it another way, Derrida claims (via Lévi-Strauss) that the goal of humanities research is not to discover truths, but to offer different ways of understanding or interpreting reality.

Claude Lévi-Strauss

So where do games fit into all of this? Games and play are absolutely central to Derrida’s conception of humanities research. As I discussed last week, structuralism offers the possibility of total understanding, or logical truth, without possibility for error. All you have to do is understand every possible relationship between the different parts of a system and you will arrive at a complete description of everything you can ever know about that system. Saussure saw language as something like chess, where a full description of the logical relationships was (in theory) possible. Research in language becomes like chess strategy, a vastly complex problem, but a problem with a solution. Every new innovation or insight gets us a little closer to that solution, and to a perfect, complete understanding of the game as a whole (of the sort that was recently achieved by the unbeatable checkers program, Chinook).

Derrida calls this concept “centered structure”:

The concept of centered structure is in fact the concept of play based on a fundamental ground, a play which is constituted upon a fundamental immobility and a reassuring certitude, which is itself beyond the reach of the play. With this certitude anxiety can be mastered, for anxiety is invariably the result of a certain mode of being implicated in the game, of being caught by the game, of being as it were from the very beginning at stake in the game.

Derrida’s critique of Saussure essentially points out that the rules of chess are arbitrary and culturally constructed and not natural in any way. It is only by accepting the structuring principles a priori that total understanding becomes possible, but if we change any of those rules, or play by an entirely different set of rules, that total understanding becomes irrelevant and meaningless. And what are those rules there for except to allow us to play? If there is a fundamental principle in all this it is not truth or a total solution or a centered structure—it is play. The rules and structure of chess are one set of cultural tools that facilitate play, just as Lévi-Strauss uses the nature/culture opposition as one tool to facilitate his research.

Derrida’s second interpreter, the post-structuralist interpreter, “affirms play” and “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation.”

Derrida claims there are two different ways of understanding research in the humanities, two different “interpretations of interpretation.” The first, he says, “seeks to decipher, dreams of deciphering, a truth or an origin which is free from play and from the order of the sign” and “[dreams] of full presence, the reassuring foundation, the origin and the end of the game.” This first interpreter can be understood as the Saussurean structuralist researcher looking for absolute truth, or the game-player looking for a full solution to the game she plays. The process of interpretation, or of play, is just a means to an end, a process that brings us towards an ultimate goal: true knowledge of our subject. But Derrida claims this interpreter is deluding herself, and ignoring the fact that no foundation exists.

Derrida’s second interpreter, the post-structuralist interpreter, “affirms play” and “the joyous affirmation of the play of the world without truth, without origin, offered to an active interpretation.” This second interpreter can be understood as the researcher who offers new interpretations for their own sake, to supplement and enrich the variety of possible interpretations rather than bring our understanding closer to truth. This second interpreter is the game player who simply plays for the sake of play (as most of us do when we play games), who delights in new possibilities and never wants to spoil the game with a solution. This second interpreter is not afraid to invent house rules or cheat if it is in the interest of play. The rules are arbitrary and conventional, they are there for our benefit as players and researchers. They have no bearing on absolute truth and thus are not absolutely binding. They are there to facilitate the process of interpretation and play. They are themselves subject to play; if changing the rules invalidates previous conclusions or strategies then so much the better. When we solve tic-tac-toe we move on to different games, with different rules and structures, that offer different ways of playing. The richness of our gaming culture is at least partly a function of the variety of different games we have at our disposal, and the richness of humanities research is at least partially a function of the variety of different interpretive structures we have at our disposal.

Next week in “How Board Games Explain Everything”: More Derrida, différance and Calvinball.

He is the father of modern linguistics and the founder of the structuralist and semiotic approaches to humanities research. And in his most important work he uses a board game as an analogy to explain his key concepts…because board games explain everything.

Saussure’s great insight was that linguistic signs are arbitrary and have no necessary relation to objects in the real world. This approach allows him to describe the structure of language without getting muddled up with all the messiness of ontology and metaphysics that you might think are required to understand language. In order to understand how the word “tree” function, for instance, you do not need to know anything about botany or biology—you don’t even need to have ever seen a tree—you just need to know the relationship between that word and all the other words in our language. In the Course Saussure gives us a vocabulary and methodology for describing and analyzing the relationships between words within language. He uses the word langue, for instance, to refer to the total sum of all the words and relationships that make up a language, and the word parole to refer to any string of words used to communicate (such as this post, a novel, or a conversation).

A syntagm

Two of his key concepts are the syntagm and the paradigm (paradigms are sometimes called systems or associations). A syntagm is a linear string of words or signs that create meaning by being present in one another’s company, often placed one after another (in space when written, in time when spoken). This sentence is a syntagm (as all sentences are). A paradigm, on the other hand, cuts along the other axis. A paradigm is the set of words or signs that could have been. They create meaning through their absence. In the sentence “The cat sat on the mat” there are any number of other words I could have used. I could have written “The cat slept on the mat” or I could have written “The cat shat on the mat”. That set of absent words also help give the sentence meaning. Part of how we understand what “sat” means relies on our ability to distinguish it from all those other words that it is not.

A paradigm

These terms don’t just apply to language, but to any number of signifying systems. In his slim volume, Elements of Semiology, Roland Barthes uses the garment system as an example: He describes a paradigm as a “set of pieces, parts or details which cannot be worn at the same time on the same part of the body, and whose variation corresponds to a change in the meaning of the clothing: toque – bonnet – hood, etc.” and, by contrast, a syntagm consists of the “juxtaposition in the same type of dress of different elements: skirt – blouse – jacket”. So the skirt-blouse-jacket combo might create quite a formal look, but the fact that you’re not wearing a t-shirt, and are therefore not dressed casually, is part of what makes it formal.

A syntagm

So how do games help explain all this? Despite Saussure’s instance that chess offers the best possible analogy he does not explain the relationship in detail, but a bit of reflection reveals that chess is tailor made for this kind of analysis. Any given series of moves can be understood as a syntagm—meaningful in relation to all the other moves that were actually made—and all the different possible moves that could have been made at a given point can be understood as a paradigm: your decision to take my pawn was meaningful because it meant not taking my queen. The totality of all the possible relationships implied by the structure of chess is the langue of the game, and any actual session of play is an example of parole. I’ve talked before about “solving” games—well, this is precisely what it means to come to a complete description of the langue of the game. In fact, these terms seem even more apt for describing games than language. Unlike with language, it is theoretically possible to exhaustively describe every possible relationship within chess. We can understand precisely what sort of a thing the langue of a game is. You can map it out yourself for a simple game like tic-tac-toe. Furthermore, in games it is easy to avoid the temptation to drag the “real world” into it (something that Saussure wanted to get away from with his approach to linguistics). Everyone understands that the pieces in a chess game get their meaning from the internal logic of the game, not from real-world knights and kings and bishops.

A paradigm

Chess strategy guides (or newspaper chess columns) are nothing more nor less than structuralist analyses of the game, in precisely Saussure’s sense.

As I mentioned, Saussure has been vastly influential in academia, and his methods are used in the study of language, literature, film, anthropology and many other subjects. So if his ideas are so applicable to chess, you might ask, why isn’t there an academic field devoted to the structuralist analysis of games? Well, the answer is that there is such a field—it’s just not an academic discipline. Chess strategy guides (or newspaper chess columns) are nothing more nor less than structuralist analyses of the game, in precisely Saussure’s sense. Any discussion of strategy is necessarily about how moves relate to other moves—either the moves that came before or after, or the moves that could have been, the absent moves from which the present moves derive their meaning. These kinds of analyses go back millennia, of course. Far from inventing these techniques of structuralist analysis, Saussure stole them from an extremely well-established field. And that’s why chess was the most fruitful analogy that could be imagined.

Next week in “How Board Games Explain Everything”: Derrida and post-structuralism.

The Inkspots: greatest video-game musicians of all time?

I recently started playing Eve Online and I am in awe of the vast amounts of effort that have obviously gone into creating that universe. The graphics, in particular, are breathtaking (I love the sense of vertigo you get, zooming out-and-out-and-out from your ship until you can finally see the space station you are approaching in its entirety). There are lots of little flaws with the game, however, including a clunky interface and badly designed tutorials, but the one that annoys me most is the music. You can load your own mp3s into your ship’s ‘jukebox’, but the playlist that comes built into the game is truly horrendous. Most of the tracks sound like a child messing around with the spacey-sounding tones on a synthesizer (in their defense, all “ambient” music sounds kind of like this—I guess the entire genre is just objectively terrible). At its best, it’s innocuous throwaway music, a background hum that lets you know you’re in a spaceship; at it’s worst it actively interferes with the gameplay. There’s one track that includes a rhythmic beeping that sounds diegetic. I keep thinking I’m picking up something on my scanner, or my engine is about to explode before I realize the jukebox has just cycled round to that track again. They even have terrible titles, like “Hidden Mementos”, “Opinions of the Misinformed”, and “Surplus of Rare Artifacts”.

It would have been easy for the designers to slap on some heavy strings to connote despair and suffering, but instead they went for something daring and surprising, a sentimental love song: The Inkspots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.”

It’s easy to treat background music in games as…well, as mere background, but there are a few games in which the background music has transcended that function and added something really special to the game. The Fallout series is a perfect example of this. In the opening sequence of Fallout 3 the camera pans through the burnt carcass of a bus and pulls back to reveal a desolate, ruined cityscape—a world destroyed by nuclear war. It would have been easy for the designers to slap on strings playing something in a minor key to connote despair and suffering (and yes, I mean Samuel Barber’s “Adagio for Strings“), but instead they went for something daring and surprising, a sentimental love song: The Inkspots’ “I Don’t Want to Set the World on Fire.” The sequence cleverly juxtaposes the schmaltzy melancholy of the song with the image of a world that has literally been set on fire by nuclear war, but the real genius lies in how right the mood of the song is for the game. Fallout’s whole aesthetic evokes the cheery paranoia of the early atomic age and the song (recorded in 1941) plays to this beautifully. It is a song of yearning for simple companionship: “I’ve lost all ambition for worldy acclaim / I just want to be the one you love.” In a post-apocalyptic world destroyed, presumably, by a quest for world domination this sentiment becomes heart-rending. The singer realizes that simple human affection is the only truly valuable thing, but it’s too late. Chances are the one he’s singing about perished in the nuclear holocaust. Now all he has left is his melancholy and regret.

This opening sequence builds on a tradition established in the original Fallout, which uses “Maybe” (also by the Inkspots) as the opening soundtrack as a television plays black & white footage of American soldiers shooting people while annexing Canada. Again, the camera pulls out to reveal a ruined cityscape while the Inkspots sing: “Maybe you’ll think of me when you are all alone.” The music evokes a powerful feeling of nostalgia that works in several different ways: we feel nostalgia for the early cold-war aesthetic of the game, we feel the character’s nostalgia for the time before the apocalypse and for the love he has lost and we feel the temptation to retreat into nostalgia and fantasy when we are alone and everything is bleak (such as the nostalgia and fantasy created by the game itself).

In both Fallout and Civilization the music acts in surprising way. It is not the obvious choice for the context in either case, but it ends up being so much better than the obvious choice would have been.

Another example of excellent game music is Civilzation IV. As you progress through the game, the soundtrack progresses with you. It starts out (less that promisingly) with faux-tribal drums and flutes during the Ancient and Classical periods. But from the Medieval era on the soundtrack takes you through a survey of the history of (Western) classical music, starting with the likes of Palestrina and Josquin and going right up to John Adams for the modern era. It’s not quite historically accurate, as they have to shift things backwards a bit in order for things to align with the pace of the game (most of the music that plays during the Medieval period is, in fact, Renaissance music; most of the music that plays during the Renaissance period is, in fact, Baroque and Classical). But the concept is well-executed and the pieces are well-chosen. It really does give a different historical mood to each era.

How Doctor Atomic really ended

All of this would simply be a neat idea if not for the Modern era, which raises it to the level of pure genius. The easy, safe, obvious choice would be to use rock and roll or jazz as the soundtrack to the modern era—Rock and Roll is even one of the World Wonders that you can build in the game (and when you discover it Leonard Nemoy quotes a Velvet Underground song!)—but instead they stuck with classical music. All of the music during this phase of the game is by American minimalist composer John Adams. This might simply represent a musical crush on the part of Jeff Briggs, but for me Adams’s tense, repetitive music has a transformative effect on the gameplay. Instead of experiencing the Modern era with a sense of triumph, as my civilization marches bravely into the future, I feel a growing sense of existential angst inspired by Adams’s music. I am no longer fighting for the survival of my people and moral decisions no longer seem clear-cut. Should I go to space? Should I conquer the world? Should I go for a cultural victory? All these decisions seem inconsequential compared to the initial life-or-death decisions in the earlier stages of the game. My civilization seems to be running away with itself. I am building just for the sake of building, going to war for the sake of going to war and I don’t know what I’m playing for any more. All the while a chorus from John Adam’s Nixon in China plays in the background: “The people are the heroes now / Behemoth pulls the peasant’s plow.” Often I don’t play through to the end at all. The Modern era in Civilization is simultaneously the most boring and the most amazing for that (post?)modern sense of ennui and alienation that it so accurately captures, and a large part of that is John Adams’s music. I can’t wait to listen to extracts from Doctor Atomic on the Civ V soundtrack as I ponder whether or not to build the Manhattan Project.

In both Fallout and Civilization the music acts in a surprising way. It is not the obvious choice for the context in either case, but it ends up being so much better than the obvious choice would have been. In both cases it gives an entirely different mood and feel to the game, but it also feeds back and lets us listen to the music in a new way. Now, listening to the Inkspots I feel the nostalgic melancholy of the post-apocalyptic world of Fallout. As for John Adams, I now experience the anxiety and doubt of that the leaders of global superpowers must feel, their decisions both trivial and world-altering at the same time. This is a theme John Adams repeated in many of his works, and I think I appreciate them all the more after playing Civilization. In both cases, both the music and the games are richer as a result of the soundtrack.

Clockwise from top right: Grid Wars, Citadel, Taskmaker, Beyond Dark Castle

For the last 6 weeks I’ve been posting about games I played as a child on our first family computer, the Mac Plus. Revisiting these games (using the Mini vMac emulator) has been full of tremendous joy, frustration and nostalgia. I’ve been struck by several things over the course of my adventures:

1) Just how playable these games are: I had expected to be bored to tears by these games or to find them trivial and primitive. In fact they exhibited remarkable depth and sophistication. Citadel and Taskmaker in particular are genuinely immersive RPGs with fully-developed worlds with a good dozen hours of gameplay (and who really wants to dedicate the hundreds of hours promised by Dragon Age anyway?).

2) The astonishing difficulty of some of these games: Given that I successfully played these games as a kid, I had assumed they would be a breeze with my adult intelligence and hand-eye coordination. Boy was I wrong! I have all kinds of new respect for my 7-year-old self. Even on ‘Easy’, Beyond Dark Castle is a platformer that requires immense patience and precision. I still maintain that the human is impossible to beat in Grid Wars. Don’t get me started on Citadel, in which you can lose hours of progress with one wrong step and you have to discover the game-changing pseudo-cheats before you even stand a chance of completing the game. Taskmaker was the only game that felt modern in terms of difficulty. There were some obscenely tough monsters to kill, but it was always possible to escape and return later having loaded up on healing potions and magic wands. Unlike all the other games, there was never a point in Taskmaker at which I felt stuck. As a puzzle game, 3 in Three is in a different category, of course. It’s hard, but the difficulty feels like an intellectual challenge rather than a frustration to overcome.

The computer RPG, in particular, was coming into its own and many genre conventions and mechanics were becoming established. It was interesting to see which ones made it, which ones evolved into something else, and which were abandoned.

3) The excellent graphics: I say this without the slightest hint of irony. Considering what they had to work with, the graphics on these games are fantastic. On a 512×342 monochrome screen every pixel counts, and you can tell that the artists on these games paid close attention to every single one. This kind of thing is a dying art. Beyond Dark Castle in particular managed to achieve a cohesive, stylized, cartoony aesthetic that still looks fresh beside any modern platformer. Grid Wars also deserves high praise for its depiction of a seedy space bar fully populated by an amazing diversity of aliens, all rendered in sinister chiaroscuro.

A spider monk alien creature in Grid Wars

4) Signs of things to come (and not): The 80s and early 90s were formative years for many genres of computer game. The computer RPG, in particular, was coming into its own and many genre conventions and mechanics were becoming established. It was interesting to see which ones made it, which ones evolved into something else, and which were abandoned. Citadel, for instance, featured a sophisticated character creation mechanism in which your upbringing and activites as an adolescent affect your stats. With a bit of prettying up, this system would be right at home in any modern RPG. Quarterstaff’s attempt at natural language parsing, however, feels totally unfamiliar to a modern gamer. Just imagine how different RPGs might be if developers had continued down this path.

Old timers

5) Laughable copy protection: In Citadel the copy protection code consisted of a single letter of the alphabet. It takes about 15 seconds to crack it. Quarterstaff had the opposite problem. Although not strictly necessary to complete the game it was very useful to figure out the function of a wooden coin and parchment that were packaged with the game. They were essential in order to use the Identify Wand in the game, which could be used to identify potions, wands, keys and rings. Unfortunately the cryptic clues that were supposed to explain how the coin and scroll worked were so cryptic that it was almost impossible to figure out. Still, I like the idea of packaging cool physical objects with games that let you interact with games in a new way. I think there should be more of that these days. They can be used to make copy protection a fun, integral part of the game instead of an annoying hassle.

Will today’s games still be fun in 20 years? Will the graphics hold up? Will they be considered unbelievably quick and easy to complete? Only time will tell.

In conclusion [high school essay mode activated] my return to the Mac Plus after more than a decade was a rewarding and illuminating experience. It allowed me new insight into modern games and revealed just how far games have come, but it also revealed how little things have changed in some regards. I wonder which conventions and mechanics that are popular today will still be around in a decade or two and which will be forgotten. Will today’s games still be fun in 20 years? Will the graphics hold up? Will they be considered unbelievably quick and easy to complete? Only time will tell.

Of all the classic games I’ve featured in this series, 3 in Three is the one that holds up the best. It is hard to imagine how modern technology could improve this delightful little puzzle game one iota. Each puzzle is clever and satisfying; each little cut scene is snappy and smart. Even the graphics are perfect: the game takes us inside a computer, and so it is right that the images be simple and symbolic, using the computer’s own signifiers as characters and scenery.

You play a sassy, smart-mouthed number 3 who, after a power surge, is ejected from her spreadsheet and becomes lost in the innards of the computer. The other characters are a motley crew of numbers, letters, punctuation and symbols (I was having a conversation with an @ symbol long before they got all popular and mainstream). The 3 is just trying to find her way back to her home spreadsheet, but along the way she has to repair the computer by solving various puzzles and problems. Most of the other symbols are too self-absorbed to help her, or misunderstand her based on cultural differences. Numbers and letters just don’t speak the same language sometimes.

In one gag the 3 is hanging out with an A, I, O, U and Y. “Who’s missing?” asks the A. “That’s easy,” replies the 3. Then E and z enter from stage left. This sort of pun also structures some of the puzzles. In one puzzle, sets of letters form homophones for the correct answer when read phonetically (e.g. IC is the clue for “icy”; XS becomes “excess”). It is a game of jumping the gap between pure symbols, with no semantic value, and meaningful words and ideas. Arguably, all culture derives from this sort of play: playing around with symbols and fitting them together in new ways until meanings pop out from the chaos of non-meaning.

Of course, A, E, I, O, U and Y form a members only club, and z has to leave. In another gag, the 3 meets a bunch of Roman numerals and calls the “old-timers”. Numbers and letters have cultures, have social groupings, have histories. It’s surprising how natural and appropriate the different personalities seem.

The implication of all this is that the smallest units of meaning, the building blocks from which we construct all the meanings of modern culture, themselves experience entire worlds of meaning. This is an awesome and dizzying concept (which raises the question of whether these symbols are using an even lower level set of symbols to express meaning, or are they using themselves, self-referentially?).

After playing 3 in Three you can never again use numbers and letters as pure, innocent symbols. They always have a back-story, a personality, opinions and preferences. What those symbols look like matter (font designers matter). 3 in Three becomes an intertext for the alphabet and the set of integers.