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 feelings 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 narrative elements 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.

I’m not an extraordinary minesweeper player. My best time to date is 168 seconds on Expert, and I lose 80% of my games. Admittedly, however, I lose most often because Minesweeper suffers from a fundamental design flaw: in almost every game there are frequently occurring positions that are logically undecideable. These are situations where there is a 50/50 chance that any one of two tiles will contain a mine, and no amount of logic or head bashing will help you. The only option for these situations is to guess. Statistically, you would thus expect my lost games to average out to 50%, but don’t forget the copious human error involved (and my general lack of skill: I frequently guess for decidable positions, simply because I haven’t mastered every logical subtlety yet; moreover, I miss-click, sometimes just plain miscalculate, or fail to notice an adjoining square, and so on. In truth, I probably only get to the endgame where most 50/50 guessing positions arise about 20% of the time, which means that a 10% win ratio sounds about right). But even in games I lose, I still manage on occasion to get into an effortless mind-space that I find deeply satisfying, and one I’ll try here to explain.

Without getting overly technical, I’ll just present a few positions from a single minesweeper game to illustrate my thinking. Minesweeper is a wonderful example of a game with a steep, but clearly noticeable and measurable learning curve. When I first sat down to play I had absolutely no idea what to do, and the game seemed impossible to me. Once I understood the fundamentals, namely that the numbers on each tile represented the quantity of mines touching that tile (either adjacently or diagonally), things began to move a lot more quickly. Now this very simple rule wasn’t in the least obvious at first, and I can even recall the first few times I played experiencing a vague sense of unease, as if the numbers represented a mysterious secret or hermetic truth that I could never actually grasp, or maybe a perverse anti-logic, as if the mines moved around or required profound analytical abilities, prayer, or alchemy to locate).

The truth is that most mines are extremely easy to find. In our game, since minesweeper is designed to give you an open area on your first click, I got this nice position:

The mine in the middle is dangling down like a cherry waiting to be plucked. There’s absolutely nothing else around and it couldn’t be more obvious. Another lesson is that corners are your friends. A great deal of the automatic play that develops later is simply perceiving corners as inherently mine-heavy. Once you start thinking that way, you start carving paths around and through them in a way that seems more instinctive than logical. The real magic starts to happen when you encounter advanced positions, and solve them quickly and spontaneously as if they were also ‘geographic’. I’ll get to that in a second, but first let me update this position with the mines I know I can detect (based on my limited logical analysis) from what’s available here already.

It only took me a couple seconds, without even clicking away any empty tiles, to locate all these mines. Once again, I’m not profoundly talented at this, but by practicing even the little I have, I now see 1s as very clear designators of emptiness when they are near corners. Now my intuition tells me that the question marked tiles contain mines, but I can’t prove it yet. But let’s clear away some of the dust and see what we’re left with.

So it seems like my intuition proved to be fairly accurate. Even the two touching question-marked tiles are now, without a doubt, mines. The other question mark is still undecided, but there’s nothing we can do about it for now. Let me fill in these mines and get to the next position.

Now we have more data and another question mark. Here both question marks point to specific patterns that I see all the time. Those ones, nestled between two twos, are often mines, but not always. I’ve lost enough games by mistakenly flagging them that I know that this pattern represents a good probability for detection, but not a logical certainty. From a psychological point of view, my desire to rush ahead and take possession of a particular pattern, committing it to memory and reflex, comes up against the painful experience of having been proven wrong again and again. I can safely say the dopamine starts flowing whenever I find a mine without effort. It is immensely gratifying to perform a skill, with ever-increasing speed and facility, that has proven to be reliable and trustworthy. Part of the satisfaction of playing minesweeper quickly (the emphasis here is essential) is that in the transition from the slow, frustrating grind of logic and probability to the instantaneous process of solving positions quickly, your mind is actually leaping from a mechanical level to another level of essentially pure abstraction. My experience of this ostensibly higher level is the unifying of different types of awareness: mechanical, rational, spatial, patterned, and others as well, into a sort of gestalt of conscious activity.

Think of this way: let’s say you’re learning guitar. Someone teaches you the open C chord with 3-fingers. It’s a basic chord and easy enough to play, but for beginners it is quite difficult to find each appropriate fret corresponding to the right string, and if you happen to be learning theory at the same time add to that knowing the notes of each string and fret position, the chord structure, its key, etc. A novice will have more than enough to think about without even getting into the right amount of pressure for each finger, the best hand position, where to place fingers inside the fret for the best sound, rhythm, how to hold a pick, how to strum, and so on. But once you’ve internalized all these mechanics, you no longer think about them. More than becoming second nature, they actually lose their mechanical quality. They become fluid, spontaneous, and effortless. The quality of the action itself changes.

The same is certainly true for logic puzzles like minesweeper. See the top leftmost flag in the last picture? I am 100% certain it is a mine, and I was able to find it quite quickly. It simply has to be a mine (the “1” can only permit a single mine in those top two squares, while the “2” needs a second mine somewhere else to fulfill its value, necessitating the red flag here). It might take a beginner a while to see this (as it did me when I first started learning). For a while this sort of scenario wasn’t even apparent to me at all, but I can see it now almost instantly. Once you get faster at the mechanical work of playing the game, or in this case crunching the logic, at a certain point something exciting and complementary happens. It coincides with gaining momentum, or warming up, and carries with it the sense of finding your rhythm. It’s a glorious feeling, and I think it actually deserves to be called an altered state of consciousness.

Now as I’m playing through this particular game, I’m deliberately exposing all the mines I can positively identify through logic before removing empty squares. I’m doing it this way for demonstrative purposes, but it is by no means the fastest way of playing. In fact, minesweeper offers a few wonderful heuristics (shortcuts) for speeding up your game. For example, if you double-click on a numbered square next to a flagged square, it’ll remove a 3×3 square of boxes for you. This isn’t cheating though: if you’ve mislabelled a flag, you’ll expose a mine somewhere, and lose. But if used properly it does greatly accelerate the game play. Another trick is to actually place all those question marks in your head, instead of wasting precious seconds double right-clicking. Most importantly, and again this comes back to the question of speed, the best tactic is to flag the easiest mines first, because doing so will reveal more information about otherwise potentially complex regions of the board. This is important because skill, and the intangible quality of finding one’s groove that I spoke about earlier, is strongly correlated with your momentum.

This might sound wishy-washy, but I can swear by it. The faster you play, and the more rapidly you accumulate successes, however minor, (e.g., little victories in the form of individual correctly marked flags and exposed empty tiles) builds up a sort of repository of good-feeling. Your brain starts coasting on the high that success gives you. Your thinking speeds up, and your accuracy improves. I’ve seen this happen to me again and again. The inverse happens as well: when I start making errors, and getting frustrated, and if I get bogged down on a particularly tricky section of the board, my play begins to disintegrate, the number of errors I make increases, and so on. One good example of a tiny victory is in the case of that “1” on the middle left of the board, sandwiched between a flag and a plain blue tile. I found that “1” tile based on logic, and then was able to uncover an entire swath of board by extending the implications of its presence even further. Sudden accomplishments like this give me a burst of energy and speed; it’s like getting a second wind after scoring in a game like soccer. It also gives you quick access to a lot of easy grist to quickly chew through, which only adds to your speed and confidence. Let me fast forward a little bit now.

At this point in the game I’ve reached an impasse where I can no longer advance by using straightforward logic. There are really two kinds of logic that can be applied to a game like minesweeper (before running into guesswork and probabilities). The first is pattern recognition and consists of “folding” sequences of logical deduction into single flashes of judgment. Logic, by and large, proceeds through conditional statements: if this is true, then the following is also true (if x then y), a rule sometimes called modus ponens (also common is the negative inversion of this, called modus tollens: if x then y; because not x, then not y). You can find logical inferences all over the place in minesweeper (e.g., whenever I see 2 1 2 in a row without any other surrounding tiles, the “1” is always a mine); one inference then usually leads to another, and then another. Group these commonly occurring sequences of logical inference into larger, but really quite subtle, patterns, and the speed of your analysis increases exponentially. In the above scenario, however, this heuristic “shorthand” form of logic will not work. All the positions are too complicated (at least, for my current level of understanding of the system).

The second kind of logic you can use is a counter-factual brute force approach. This also uses methods of deductive inference, but rather than folding commonly recurring sequences into easily identifiable patterns, it takes an uncommon section of the game and works through every possible variation until one “good” one is found. It is time consuming, laborious, and inimical to the speed of success. It is also very difficult to get quick at this mode of reasoning, without converting a painfully worked out logical sequence into a rule. That’s right: all the examples of the first series of pattern recognition logic are tricks and shortcuts I discovered by working through a whole heap of brain-freezing “if-then” counterfactual scenarios, using brute-force and trial and error. Through practice, I gradually converted these from the slow, second type of logic to the first, expedient type. By internalizing the “proof” for each of these tricks, I could eventually call them rules of the system, with 100% certainty. But that certainty had to be earned.

There is a third approach, however, and that’s just flat-out guessing. It’s unfortunate that minesweeper so often requires this, but such is life.

Rather than work through every possible if-then situation from the previous picture, I just guessed. Once. The rest of the board opened up like a boiled clam. Only now, as you can see, I’ll have to guess again at least once more to win the game. There’s no escaping it. But leading up to these two guessing-impasses, I was able to get a taste of that special state of rapid pattern recognition that makes puzzle-solving such a joy. It’s no exaggeration that you can begin to experience minesweeper as a conceptual landscape, with its own architecture and geography. I am convinced that once a certain threshold is passed in the skill of a player (reflecting both the quantity of patterns learned, and the degree to which they have been assimilated), he or she actually stops thinking. The mind shuts off; the calculating part of the brain goes from working furiously to not working at all. It is an incredible feeling, a zen state of no-mind, that nevertheless preserves (and in fact produces) a very high level of technical skill.

And sometimes, it even helps you win!

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.

Andrew, chief editor supreme of Little Bo Beep, seated on his gilded bodily evacuation receptacle and perfumed douche machine, opened yet another gaming magazine special issue devoted entirely to his blog. Yawning, he forced the magazine through an overflowing slot in the wall labelled “Celebratory Printed Materials Recycling” and deactivated the automated pedicure device and flowery scented wafting valve. He washed his hands and opened the door to the raised somatic purification facility, but not before winking slyly at the poster of John Tesh pasted on the inside of the door, and stepped down from the facility’s dais to the main floor of the Little Bo Beep headquarters.

“I’m so bored,” he said to Jack, who was idly toying with his eight-monitor display of web traffic analytics and market data.

“God, I know.” ‘God’ was Andrew’s nickname around the office. “It’s impossible to do any sort of interesting data mining. All the graphs demonstrate constant linear growth. Totally predictable.” It was true. All the monitors displayed graphs, stock figures, and charts representing Little Bo Beep’s outrageous success in the blogosphere. It was like an insane geologist had pasted a bunch of topographical maps of mountains all over the screens, but had sliced off the right halves.

“Incoming!” shouted Paul, as he swooped down from the 200-foot square skylight ceiling with retractable observatory dome on a military-grade poly-carbonate hand glider, high-fived both Andrew and Jack, and zipped past into one of the headquarters’ many underground tunnels.

An explosion of organ music erupted suddenly from an adjoining room. “Is Eric hooked up to his synaptic music engine again?”

Jack nodded, stifling a yawn, “Yeah, he’s brain-generating another improvisational 8-part fugue.”

“That’s, what, the ninth one this week?”

“Tenth, actually. But he’s simultaneously dictating his latest article to a voice transcriber. I think it’s entitled, ‘Plangent Penis Plants in Obscure Japanese Sega Genesis Titles, Redux’.”

“What is with his fascination with penises?”

“You know, I can HEAR you,” came Eric’s voice from a tentacular robot mouth appendage that protruded up from a sliding floor panel.

Andrew shrugged, “Doesn’t change the basic underlying truth of that statement.”

“Ohh the sweet, delicate textures of sound, they suffuse me!” said the Eric-mouth, which vibrated for a minute, then receded quietly into the ground, purring. Just then Jack’s diamond-studded phone began playing NSync’s “I Want You Back”.

“Man, it’s Goldman-Sachs again. They’re so desperate. Sorry, dude, I gotta take this.”

“Yeah no problem. I’m going to go check on Julian, see he’s not hurting himself or anything.”

Andrew walked over to a large red X marked on the floor nearby, sighed, and shouted, “Ladder of Impervious Knowledge and Absolute Verification, Descend!”

A deep voice echoed from high above, “Your request for access to knowledge is being evaluated for logical consistency. Please stand by.” A minute later a single sonorous BOOP reverberated through the room, “Your request has been granted. Ladder descending.” A dual-helical ladder in the shape of DNA slowly spun downwards from the ceiling to the red X. Andrew climbed up it, trying not to read the bronze plaques embedded in each rung, but he always found himself scanning at least one or two:

TRUTH IS THE COEFFICIENT OF YOUR FINITE DAYS MULTIPLIED BY THE SQUARE OF YOUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND.

and

THE ALMIGHTY LOGOS IS THE BASIS OF ALL ALEATORY PROPOSITIONS, AS SIGNIFIED BY THE STOCHASM OF PARTICLE SUPER-POSITION IN THE ENTROPIC SUBSTRATUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Pushing up the trap door into Julian’s loft, Andrew immediately ducked as a large alembic carrying a boiling green liquid whipped past his head and exploded on a bust of Sir Francis Bacon, dissolving it instantly. “Julian? What’s… oh dear.” Julian was currently riding in the glass cockpit of a steam-powered brass exoskeleton, whose tubular arms were currently grappling with an enormous baroque cube covered with numerical equations, levers, gears, and pistons, and whose parts were rapidly reassembling in the manner of a lunatic rubic’s cube. Prehensile pincers were darting out from sections of the cube, snagging objects from around the room, and hurling them in random directions. Julian’s massive chemistry workshop lay in ruins on the floor, and his four story library had large gaping holes where entire shelves had been ripped off.

“Be with you in smidge, old chap,” said Julian just as he brought down an extremely heavy-looking marble pedestal onto the box, smashing it into a thousand flopping pieces. With a gush of pressurized air, the cockpit opened and Julian, covered in black grease and wearing a leather aviator cap replete with goggles, leaped out. “Beg pardon for the mess, guv’nor. Introduced a few too many conditional statements in the moral sub-cortex.”

“Oh, was this your life-sized interactive representation of the Logico-Philosophico Tractatus?” said Andrew, picking up a throbbing metallic heart.

“The very same. Pity. I’d only reached level 6.2. What can I do for you?”

“Julian, I’m deadly bored. We’ve reached the absolute pinnacle of success; our influence over every aspect of the gaming industry is undeniable; we have more followers on Twitter than Jesus; but despite all that, the games these days just aren’t getting any better. What can we do?”

“Well. I’ve been keeping something secret from all of you, because I suspected your combined intelligences were inadequate to deal responsibly or productively with it.” Andrew nodded. “I received this parcel in the mail a few days ago, but I do now believe it is something we should take a look at.” He opened a boudoir shaped into a large chess queen, and handed Andrew a manila envelope. A big red stamp on the envelope said:

FOR LITTLE BO BEEP’S EDITORS ONLY. UNAUTHORIZED READING WILL RESULT IN SEVERE TERMINATION. YOUR FRIENDS: THE DEVELOPERS.

“Who the hell are these guys?” said Andrew, as Julian pressed a button and lowered them both down to the main room on a circular platform.

“My sources tell me they are an obscure cabbalistic design studio possibly operating in trans-dimensional space/time.”

“Figures.” Andrew opened the envelope and pulled out a non-descript DVD case. The title was simple: THE SECRET GAME. “Wow, it even has an ESRB rating. But it’s one I’ve never seen before. What does KA stand for?”

“It probably stands for Keter-Atziluth, or the upper crown. It’s the highest possible sephiroth. You’re dealing with pure metaphysical gaming here. Only suitable for the absolute pinnacle of consciousness.”

“Hey Paul,” Andrew called out to his friend, who was currently hanging upside down from a sick tufa on their indoor 5.15b climbing route. As usual, he was free-soloing.

“Yeah? What’s UP?!” he called back.

“Ready for an adventure?”

To be continued…

no
need to bait the
niggers and the spics, pimps and nips

they’ll get what’s coming, fuck yeah they’ll
get what’s due

but until that eventually i’ll keep the code, let the
heroin flow
and the coca leaves grow

no need to show my hatred
if my hatred can’t have its way with the world

i’ll just keep it inside
and not quite alive, a beautiful
beast chained to my anger
and waiting…
waiting
in quiet anticipation, dangerous
in the corners of my shadows the shadows cast
by the unforgiving wings of a
dark, dark angel

let chinatown have its wars

let night have the whores

i will have my hatred as i ride

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.

The ORIGINAL Avatar... well, that is, uhm, besides Krishna. And, I guess, arguably, Jesus.

Surely Bob Dylan never imagined his classic refrain, “How many roads must a man walk down…” being adapted to the language of video gaming, but here goes: “How many games must a man walk down, before they call him a man?” The answer is probably non-denumerably infinite, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just offer the more reasonable, and decidedly finite, 361! (factorial), which happens to be the number of possible moves extant at the beginning of a game of Go. Now rumour has it that’s a number larger than the total quantity of particles in the entire universe (a figure also exceeded by the possibilities of synaptic combinations in the brain, interestingly enough). What does this tell us?

Probably nothing. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and where better than with a modest analogue of consciousness transcribed into the language of mathematics? Sure, sure, been done. But really, there’s something going on here. Consider for example the question: What happens to us when we die in a game? I mean, we’re not really dying, but our avatar is. Again, and again, and again, at a rate inversely proportional to our decaying motor reflexes. That’s got to affect us somehow, right? Let me make the connection between numerical vastness and consciousness a little bit stronger.

Krishna, the God of Ambiguous Gender... and flutes.

When we die in a game we experience that death vicariously. Vicarious is precisely the word, too: it comes from the Latin vicarius, meaning a substitute. A vicar is likewise a person who is authorized to perform the functions of another. Our video game alter-ego is perhaps more like a vicar than an avatar (which by contrast means a deity descended into an embodied form in the world; but I won’t deny the capacity of some gamers to believe themselves gods in their limited domains – why deny them such pleasures?).

It goes without saying we are connected to our vicars. They stand in for us, assuming our duties and responsibilities within the game, and like true servants of a deity receive their instructions as if from on high. We input data into a gaming system by means of haptic (or touch-based, physical) interfaces. The game interprets the data according to various more or less complex algorithms, and in turn our characters, the vicars, react and respond with the appearance of immediacy. One of the great accomplishments of gaming is condensing an extremely complex causal sequence, beginning at the user’s end and concluding with the behaviour of the game itself, into the form of a single and direct transaction. But these transactions are anything but direct causal events.

One of the characteristics of complex systems is that they can only be fully understood by other complex systems. The mind is inordinately complex, and is therefore extremely good at understanding other examples of complexity. Doubtlessly, however, it does not require a game of extreme complexity to create an impact (whether emotional or simply informational) on the consciousness of a user. Many people have very fond memories of playing Tetris, for example, which is so simple that it is one of the very few games that can be coded entirely in the browser-endemic programming language JavaScript. But the complexity of these relatively simple earlier games is tied together inextricably with the innate and self-reflexive structures and meanings of human consciousness.

A more or less accurate representation of the imbrication of consciousness with art.

When we play a game, no matter how ornate or simple, we are automatically imbricating it with layers of personal meaning and inherited signification. The game occurs therefore in a non-linear sequence of events that extends back to the beginning of our lives, and even beyond that to the earliest inception of consciousness. As soon as the lineage of human thought began to haul itself above a basic state of necessity and ask certain fundamental questions about itself, and the world, we set in motion a system of complex, essentially self-referential, thought. Heidegger talks at length about the notion of the dasein, which translates simply to that-being, and in a very crude sense can be understood as a being for whom its existence is an issue, a point of concern or interrogation. A question.

How then do video games interface with the questioning existence of dasein? We are all that-beings, who propagate complexity by breathing and thinking, and who are ideally positioned to do so by being the inheritors of a long history of thought. The combinations of synaptic processes in a single brain can be compared in a way to a miracle of physics. That thought occurs is alone a breathtaking source of wonder. But these synapses are not merely burned into history and then discarded. They carry on, like the continuation through time of a vastly intricate and polyfurcated electric chain.

To return, and rephrase, my original question: How do games affect who we are? How does a death in a game impinge on our sense of self? When we die is our consciousness affected? What proximate values do we impart to our gaming vicars? What parts of ourselves do we transmit to them in their corrals of programming and data? Our consciousness persists when the vicar is extinguished, sure, but because we are complex and games are ever-increasingly also complex, the relationship between these two must necessarily (I argue) be complex. It seems unlikely to me (though admittedly, probably not impossible) that two complex systems in interaction would produce a simple outcome.

If we accept, at least provisionally, that the interaction between user and game is definitionally complex, does it follow that the individual events that occur within each of those systems are likewise complex? Not necessarily. It is true in a sense that the individual units of data that comprise a game system are at their most fundamental level totally simple (binary ones and zeroes). Nevertheless, the meaning produced by the interactions of those basic units will register on a higher, much more elaborate level. There are orders of complexity, ranging from the top-most level of system-wide organization, right down to the most basic and unitary substrate of raw, particulate information.

Life, consciousness and art are all gardens of forking paths. So, too, is David Bowie.

So when I paraphrase Dylan and ask how many games must I play to be a man, I am not attempting to bastardize a good song or invoke traditional gender norms, but rather trying to assert that the boundaries of consciousness are permeable and responsive to interactions with complexity beyond the protean boundaries of mind. The very presence of possibility represented by the number 361! changes how I think. To stare at a Go board is to come face to face with the incomprehensible vastness of mathematics. When we play a game we are likewise also engaging with a monumental tapestry of potential variation. The events that occur in a game may be rigidly defined and finite, but the combinations that occur between a game and the ever-changing infrastructure of my mind are essentially infinite.

The best answer I can come up with to that question is thus: An infinite number. We are who we are in the becoming of ourselves. By engaging with the world and its manifold variations we are simultaneously defining who we are. Games contribute to this definition in more ways than I can describe. Death in games is likewise only one event among many, but it has the unique and paradoxical quality of being understood by the living as the absolute cessation of consciousness. How then are we defined by an experience of death that is perpetually repeatable, almost transient and inconsequential?

I’ll continue to examine this question in a subsequent article.