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Almost Infinite Posts

Diversions and Doorkeys

I don’t know what I would say about Undertale if I was a video game reviewer. I have mixed feelings about the procedure of playing the game, as many of the puzzles aren’t very interesting and there are an awful lot of long walks with nothing happening through faux-retro 8-bit scenery. As a fun little diversion, the crunch of this game served its purpose but wasn’t any more exciting than Hook. I picked up that game for what I expect is the same reason most of its users did: I was browsing the free section of Steam, not finding anything interesting, then decided to see if there was anything they had that was available for almost free. It is a lovely minimalist puzzle game that took me about three hours from start to finish (including breaks). It’s a fun diversion, but makes no pretence about having a plot or making any commentary. If you’re into puzzle games and low prices, Hook may be a good buy for you. If you act within the next two days (until July 4, 2016), it is 10% off on Steam. That will save you the princely sum of $0.11 CAD. Get to it before that hot deal is gone!

Press the buttons (black circles) to retract the pins (thick lines), but do it in the right order so that you don't snag any parts.
Hook: press the buttons (black circles) to retract the pins (thick lines), but do it in the right order so that you don’t snag any parts. 

Back to Undertale: after starting the game with a bizarre interaction with a flower who turns out to be a supreme asshole, I was introduced to Toriel. She is the NPC who goes out of her way to tell the protagonist to not to go on an adventure instead of delivering the standard but thou must speech. It was at this early stage that I could see for myself that Undertale wasn’t going to be a standard dungeon crawl. Whatever was to come in terms of combat encounters and puzzle games to reward me with the key to the next room, I knew that Undertale was created for reasons other than passing the time with challenges and rewards. It’s not just a matter of overcoming the enemies, solving the puzzle, advancing the plot, and winning a title (with or without a “score” number) at the end.

The value of the education the player receives from Toriel isn't obvious at first, but it reveals a lot about what Undertale is all about.
The value of the education the player receives from Toriel isn’t obvious at first, but it reveals what Undertale is really all about.

Undertale is, in addition to being a game, social commentary about gaming and that’s why I find it interesting and worthwhile. Undertale’s visual style reminds us of the games of the 80’s and 90’s that usually railroaded the player into combat. For example, Konami’s 1991 arcade brawler The Simpsons puts the player into a setting that does not lend itself to wanton violence and then steers the player into fighting a mass mob of goons as an archetypal suburban American family from a TV sitcom. This might have made more sense if it was a Treehouse of Horror game, but the Springfield that most people know outside of the Halloween episodes is a generally peaceful place. Why fight there? Because The Simpsons was a massively popular TV series, video games were an emerging market, and so it made sense to make a Simpsons video game. And in 1991, making a video game meant either making a sports game or making a fighting game. A game set in Springfield where nobody had to be beaten in a contest or in a fight would have been inconceivable at the time, but turning The Simpsons into a fighting game was par for the course.

So, in Undertale we are quickly introduced to an 8-bit underground dungeon full of monsters. Anyone who has played a video game that looks like this is going to be expecting some hack and slash if nothing else. When faced with an enemy the character is presented the expected options of attacking with a weapon, using items, and trying to run away. This is very normal for a game about escaping from the spooky underground ruins. But Undertale also offers the player the act and mercy buttons. The one action almost always available during a fight is check, which hopefully reveals something about which of the other actions might have a desirable effect. The other actions are entirely context-dependent based on the target. For example, Froggit is the only enemy that can be complimented or threatened.

Thankfully, checking Froggit gives you a useful hint about how to proceed without killing it or running away from it.
Thankfully, checking Froggit gives you a useful hint about how to proceed without killing it or running away from it. “Check” isn’t always this helpful.

There is usually some kind of hint that can be gleaned from checking an enemy as to which actions will affect it the most. Many enemies can be rendered uninterested in continuing the fight, which opens up an option when you hit the mercy button. There are only two things available in Mercy: flee, and spare. The latter usually only works after sufficiently pacifying the enemy through some combination of low hit points (from attacking it) or lack of willingness to fight (choosing the right type of action). You can try it at any time, but that may just earn your enemy a free attack. Even if you are determined not to hurt anything, you can’t get through the game by doing nothing but fleeing. Unlike games where dialogue and non-combat actions are secondary to the play of the game itself, Undertale puts them front and centre.

Games can be used for social good and to understand ourselves. Not all games are very good at that, whether they are a peaceful and serene recreational experience (Hook) or a logic-defying rampage (The Simpsons). Undertale is amazing at this because both violence and pacifism are available options, and the choices the player makes are important. By the end of the game, the player is explicitly asked to evaluate their own choices they made with respect to violence. In general, we are socialized to reject violence and murder as methods of solving problems and getting our way except where all other options have been exhausted and it becomes a matter of preserving life. We expect armies and police forces to make room for diplomacy or talk down a gunman if they can, and social unrest ensues if there is even the perception that they didn’t do enough to prevent violence. In games, especially dungeon crawling video games where you encounter monsters, the expectation is to kill things and be rewarded for that killing with experience points and in-game goods and/or money. There is a dissonance there, and Undertale boldly shoves it right into the player’s face. It proves that games can be made to challenge us to see gaming in a different way, and to examine how that affects our lives. That’s what I hope to be able to do in any game-related creative pursuits I engage in. Playing through Undertale for the first time did involve some tedious puzzles and corny dialogue, but it also made me think and filled me with determination.

Roles, Titles, Names, and Fatherhood

In Finite and Infinite Games, James Carse defines some dichotomies other than finite vs. infinite in order to speak more clearly to real life situations, particularly things that fall outside of what we normally call a game (recreational, relatively inconsequential pastimes) but can still be understood with a broad enough definition.  Things like war and romance. I find that thinking of these aspects of life in terms of games is not a purely intellectual exercise. It helps me make sense of real-life things and events, provides a neat way to discuss ideas with others, and I think that how we live life influences the kind of smaller games we play and those in turn loop back and influence how we live.

One of these dichotomies he draws is between the theatrical and the dramatic. Like finite and infinite, one of these is not better or more important than the other. We are both of these things in everyday life. Theatre is analogous to the finite: there is a beginning, a sequence of events, and an outcome. Drama, in this context, is analogous to the infinite: it is not confined to specific points in time or specific outcomes. Theatre is dramatic while you are experiencing it, because the outcome is not yet known. Once the actions have been taken and can be fixed into a narrative or a script it becomes theatre. In order to play theatrically, a person assumes a role. In order to play dramatically, a person does or becomes the role.

For example, last Sunday was Father’s Day in Canada. In order for the designated celebration day to be about more than increasing sales figures for greeting cards, fashion accessories, and hardware store gift certificates it is necessary for us to wonder what a father is and why we should celebrate that. It is abundantly clear that siring offspring does not qualify a man as a father. The men we celebrate are often stepfathers, adoptive fathers, or other father figures. To be celebrated as a “real” or “true” father a man must assume the role of father and all that entails. When a man has, as a matter of record, met the expectations and obligations associated with the role this is theatre. The fathers and stepfathers who do this well are winning in finite play. They receive the title of father, while those who fail to meet the standard are said to be undeserving of the title. A title is only as good as it is recognized and deferred to by other people. Our society ensures this by attaching powers to and celebrating that title. That is what we did on Sunday the 19th. We, as a society, reinforced a theatrical role. I don’t think there is anything wrong with this at all, as long as we are aware of what we are doing. Perhaps it was most appropriate then, that my brother and I celebrated this with our father by attending a movie at a theatre.

Mother and father are titles; mom and dad are names.

In section 25 of Finite and Infinite Games, Carse introduced the infinite and dramatic counterpart to the title: the name. When you address a man as dad that is not a title, it is a name. It is not something that can be won or lost. It does not matter than you may be the only human being in existence who refers to a particular man by that name. It carries no inherent power, as any power that man may have in your life depends entirely on the level at which you recognize his title of father. We don’t celebrate the name of dad on Father’s Day, we celebrate the title of father. That makes sense because the sort of things we do on those designated celebration days are often more theatrical than dramatic. To celebrate someone’s name is not to have a specific day, it is to use that name in everyday life. I celebrate the name of dad simply by calling him that and engaging in the drama (the word drama itself derived from the Greek word for action) of being his son. That can mean different things to different people, but again I think we do well to recognize how we honour our dads in the dramatic as well as the theatrical. The drama and the theatre are linked, but distinct.

So, that’s how I see fatherhood in terms of playing games. It’s not something that is normally thought of as a game, but the celebration of fatherhood becomes more meaningful to me to recognize the limitations of our societal recognition of a title and to see that there is much more to it than that. We can look at many other roles and aspects of life in a similar way, and discover more about what we’re really doing when we use a name or recognize and defer to a title.

Evil, and Why I Blog

A few hours less than a week ago, a man committed the atrocity that defined the news for the past six days. Although I made a deliberate choice for this blog to have a particular focus rather than being an independent news source or a constant stream of random things I have to say about anything that seems interesting at the time, I find myself unable to avoid addressing this. It is simply too big in my world to ignore. I can, however, approach this topic from the perspective of games and philosophy. I am not doing this to be glib, nor do I think of myself as being one-dimensional in my obsession. It’s because lots of smart people have already covered that ground, and I will express my feelings about this in different facets of my life. It’s also a bit too late in the news cycle for it to seem appropriate for me to tear my robe and shave my head in this space. I am now in the stage of figuring out how to live in the world where it happened, and I believe my hobby and creative pursuits can play an important role.

So how does a person go about making sense of the world we live in? We adopt philosophies and religions to help us sort out what is good, what is evil, and how we can be as good as possible and minimize evil. There is a great deal of diversity in how we define good and evil, and what the appropriate responses are. The reason I added philosophy to the mandate of this blog rather than sticking to reviews, rants, and fun tales from my table is that reading Finite and Infinite Games gave me the idea that the gaming hobby and the desire to create content for and about games can, and should, be a part of something bigger than entertainment and passing the time. They can be tools of good, against evil. And that is how I relate blogging about games to the Orlando atrocity: we can talk all day about racism, cultures glorifying violence, and the politics of gun control but all of these are merely trees growing in the soil of evil. There was a body count before Sunday. The count will continue to increase long after this incident in Orlando is just another datum on the great big chart of atrocities. In moving forward from and with our grief, we must take hold of the tools needed to dismantle evil: our ballots, our online outlets, our donations, our voices, our pulpits, and I would argue our games as well.

Grief

In Finite and Infinite Games, Carse defines evil as “the termination of infinite play… in unheard silence.”  In this context, infinite play means life in general rather than any specific person’s life. Evil is therefore not defined by death, but rather by the lack of listeners for the voices grieving the fallen and objecting to the evil that caused the loss. Evil did not win when bullets killed and injured people. It won when others made the decision to ignore it. Or if they did not ignore it with their words, ignoring it with their actions. It’s easy to get outraged when people say outrageous things, but evil’s greatest triumph comes not in incendiary declarations but in the silence of business as usual. In some ways, quietly musing about how to protect the USA (or Canada, or the UK, or the EU) from “Islamic extremism” in the wake of an atrocity that is anything but Islamist terrorism (while erasing the identity of the victims) is much more evil than waving one of Westboro Baptist’s tacky signs. They’re one of the top two whipping posts when it comes to Anglo-North Americans talking about evil without mentioning the Nazis, and they certainly get people talking in absurd disproportion to their numbers. Evil loses when the opposite happens, when the atrocity does not fall into unheard silence. The overwhelming response in the news and social media has shown me that evil is strong but has not yet triumphed.

How, then, do we get to the gaming table? In stories like The Courage of Being Queer, by Alexander Chee, we get a glimpse of how games can be a part of the solution. Where evil thrives on silence, a game gave two young boys a new way to have a voice and be heard. I want to be a part of that. I want my hobbies and creative pursuits to destroy boundaries and break silences. I want to be a part of the larger culture that has been anything but silent in the face of this evil. I might also have specific ways in which I would want to influence government policies or specific cultural narratives, and I will get more political in political spaces and righteously indignant in religious spaces and so on. But in my gaming spaces, I seek to use the finite games we play to support infinite play. That is to challenge toxic notions such as the one that history and the progress of civilization inexorably leads to the inherent righteousness of my nation-state exercising lethal power to obtain and retain dominance over all others, or that mine are the chosen people whose privileges are unquestionable. Finite games can do that in little doses that prevent the silence from taking over when we’re not actively mourning the dead or criticising others. When I engage in creating stories, I will be very intentional in opposing fundamental evil. If there is something I can learn from this event, something I can change, it will be to do this with gusto and no apologies. It’s easy to refrain from the crass display of aligning oneself with evil, but even more important to do it when there might be a cost and/or a risk associated with causing an argument or a social rift. That, I think, is better than making a big show of my grief over one incident and then moving on with business as usual. I will do it in every space I have access to, including this one.

A Tale of Three Castles

It’s hard to discuss Dungeons and Dragons as a game without hearing the name Tolkien. It’s like a special case of Godwin’s Law, except that Tolkien is generally well-regarded by the people making the comparisons. Worlds full of wizards, dragons, dwarves, and elves tend to be given the label Tolkienesque. It’s not wrong, but it doesn’t tell the whole story. The elven alphabet in the illustrations in your official D&D rule books might look like it comes from Middle Earth, but the game certainly did not start there. It started in two castles: Greyhawk and Blackmoor.

These two castles were the settings for the first fantasy roleplaying games that lead to the development of the first edition of Dungeons and Dragons. David M. Ewalt, whose book Of Dice and Men I mentioned last week, tells us the history of how two wargaming enthusiasts created the first settings for fantasy story-driven roleplaying games. This was a radical departure from the traditional wargaming settings, which tended to focus on American military history from the revolutionary war, to Civil War conflicts between the union and the confederacy, to World War 2 battles between allies and the axis. And there we have it, a reference to the Nazis. Thanks, Godwin.

The third castle I allude to is one that never inspired thousands upon thousands of games. Castle Stirling is the one I cobbled together for the second campaign I ran in 4th edition Dungeons and Dragons. As I read the histories of Greyhawk and Blackmoor in Of Dice and Men, I smiled and felt proud of myself. It’s not often I feel like I can compare myself to the legendary fathers of D&D, but in a small way, I can here. These settings, unlike Middle Earth, were not created for the sake of a linear plot. They were designed for play. That is what Stirling has in common with Greyhawk and Blackmoor. I didn’t start with a place and make a game of it; I did some research so that the outline of the castle would make sense, then designed a series of encounters (combat and otherwise), then detailed the castle to accommodate the game.

The process for outlining Castle Stirling was deliberately anachronistic: I got on a bicycle, rode to a public library with a notebook, looked up some books on castles, and drew some rough diagrams by hand. This might not sound novel to people who have been doing this since they were teenagers in the 1980s or 1990s, but I was a twenty-something working in the late 2000s it was already in the age of Wikipedia and vast repositories of professionally designed D&D modules, and I could have driven my own vehicle if I wanted to. But I wanted to see if I could tap into the excitement with which men of my dad’s generation recall their AD&D adventures. That meant I needed a memorable setting in which legends can be forged, itself born of creativity rather than consumption. While I did do a little bit of homebrew in my first campaign, Castle Stirling was part of my first attempt to create a truly engaging setting rather that linking published modules together into a longer campaign.

Tales of adventure may start in taverns, but sooner or later, they lead to castles. 

Once I had a castle in mind, I started thinking about how I could capture the excitement evoked by the phrase “dungeon crawl” without making it a procedural check for traps, kill the monster, get the treasure sort of thing that would bore the roleplayers in my group to tears. None of the rooms in my castle were empty save for cobwebs and a single pressure plate that triggers a hidden blowgun, because that doesn’t leave a lot of room for players to push any limits. Allowing the players to negotiate with sentient Yuan-Ti henchmen is not innovative in the fantasy roleplaying world anymore, but some of the players had never been involved in the sort of game where sarcastically mocking the enemy’s hissing speech could actually have an impact on how the game proceeds. Further into the castle, the players came across a massive iron golem acting as an automated gatekeeper, demanding a blood sacrifice as the price of admission. I knew there were some obvious solutions (refuse and fight the iron golem, give a small amount of one’s own blood to an evil demon god, or go find one of the hapless henchmen outside the door to sacrifice) but fully expected that someone could try and circumvent the whole setup, at which point I would have to improvise and bend the rules to keep the game going. What ended up happening followed one of the standard solutions, which I expected from the black sheep assassin in the party of otherwise pious characters. What I didn’t expect was for a priest of Pelor to help harvest the bodies. Our group still fondly refers to him as the best cleric ever.

So, like the fountain of snakes in Greyhawk, I had a bunch of nifty things that at face value did not seem to add up to something grandiose. A long hall which contained an invisible maze that starts filling up with water (and then sharks) when the players make it halfway through just doesn’t evoke the same majesty as a rich description of Rivendell or a long legend of how the old gods delivered the dwarves to salvation from the fire giants. The reason I focused on the little things is that they were all things that players could interact with in many ways including ones I could not possibly control. In some ways, within the walls of the castle, there were fewer boundaries than being outside in a majestic world where the plot proceeds inexorably to a predetermined end.

Of the various highs and lows in my campaigns, I think the design of Castle Stirling was one of the high points. Of course, having only used it once in a home campaign, about six people at the time of publishing this post have ever heard of Castle Stirling. But the magic of the fantasy tabletop roleplaying game isn’t in the rules or the famous settings or the particular one I made for my friends. There are thousands of other castles, pyramids, palaces, towns, forest groves, ad infinitum imagined by the game runners (dungeon masters, game masters, storytellers, whatever they’re called in your rule set) for their own campaigns. What other type of game offers such a wealth of opportunities to engage players in new and interesting ways? That’s not entirely rhetorical. If a game other than a tabletop RPG offers that kind of potential, I really do want to play it.

Potentials and Pitfalls

Of all the kinds of games I am aware of, there is one type that stands way out front in terms of potential to be used for social good and to understand ourselves. That is the dice-based tabletop RPG. Or, for those who aren’t already well-versed in the lingo, Dungeons and Dragons should ring a bell. I am talking about that, as well as the widely varied alternatives that are directly or indirectly derived from D&D. As recently illustrated by Josh Kramer in the Washington Post, it is now firmly established as a bona fide cultural phenomenon. I don’t need to spend a lot of time explaining this to you, as David M. Ewalt does this quite well in his book Of Dice and Men (I would recommend it especially if you are one of those people who only subscribe to one or two geek fandoms and find yourself curious but unfamiliar with this thing your other friends are raving about).

Instead, I’m going to tell you the story of how I got into it and why I think it has such great potential and also why I think it could also be monumentally disappointing. My first experience with D&D didn’t involve a basement room full of teenage boys with dice and character sheets. Although my social circle certainly qualified as “nerd” or “geek” or whatever label you might apply to a boy in grade 7 who skips school not during classes but during the school dance to go play Starcraft, nobody I knew owned a rulebook or had the idea to put something together. And then in 1998, my parents bought me a game called Baldur’s Gate. Never before did I get to play a game with such an intricate character options. It was loosely based on the third edition of D&D (with a few elements of 3.5 folded into the sequels and expansions), but Baldur’s Gate wasn’t quite the same as D&D. It was good, but then Baldur’s Gate 2 was amazing. It was largely more of the same in terms of game mechanics, but the quality of the writing, the visuals, the dialog, everything was given a huge upgrade. I had sunk 200+ hours into that game by the end of high school. Yet for all of its splendor, it was very limited: there were several distinct plot branches, but there were only so many areas to explore and specific conditions for winning or losing. After playing through every possible path, I briefly visited the modding community. I downloaded and played through a few, and enjoyed them, and toyed with the modding tools in the hope I could create my own adventure. I lacked the skills and commitment at the time that would have been required to create something that works, but it was certain that I wanted more. I wanted to be able to keep going to other places and seek other stories limited only by the imagination of creators (myself or otherwise). I had boundaries, and wished for horizons. During the time I spent on the modding forums, the regulars spoke of “PnP” (pen and paper) as an ideal rather than an alternative. I learned on an intellectual level why a lot of people found the video games to be neat but no substitute for the real thing. Almost two decades after Baldur’s Gate, I eventually came to understand this concept for myself.

Most tales of adventure from the D&D table hinge on the effects of throwing chaos orbs at a flat surface.
Most tales of adventure from the D&D table hinge on the effects of throwing chaos orbs at a flat surface.

By the time I finally got to play true D&D, I had completed an academic degree and wasn’t living with my parents anymore. 4th edition had just come out, so that is what our DM (dungeon master, person who organizes and runs the game) wanted to run. Arguing about editions is a very strange blood sport that only makes sense to a few particular subsets of D&D enthusiasts, so I am not taking a position here. The only reason why I mention it is because I don’t come at this from the perspective of someone who has been playing since the 1980’s or 1990’s. I’m not part of the newest cohort, but I’m newer to it than people might assume. It wasn’t until the late 2000’s that I had, in a game, played a character who could try and break, jump over, or seduce anything that wasn’t intended originally to be interacted with in such a way. No door was sealed shut, no waist-high bush could contain me. I don’t love BG2 any less, but getting to play in a potentially infinite fictional universe was freedom rather than a newer, nicer, bigger cage.

And I loved it. I got to try different things, and run a few campaigns. Games started and ended based entirely on the group’s desire to play, not on any externally defined plots and stages of gameplay. We could go anywhere the DM was able to come up with a narrative space for. Characters had objectives and end goals, but the only thing that ever ended a campaign was a satisfying end to a story arc combined with the desire of the players to do something else with their time or move on to the next campaign. And move on we did, despite several comings and goings, the core group is into its ninth campaign (of which I have been involved in seven). We also played games in World of Darkness and other rule sets geared more towards modern and horror settings rather than swords and sorcery. The appeal of the game wasn’t just in one setting or iteration of the rules, it was in the fact that the game could go anywhere we wanted it to go.

So, when does D&D become a terrible disappointment? Aside from malicious dungeon mastering, it also becomes rather anemic when people try to win the game. There are many ways this can occur, but the thing they all have in common is that they limit the game right down to one individual’s desire to be seen as a winner. Whether it is a DM forcing characters through a story without giving them any agency, a rules lawyer determined to mathematically prove how much better his character is than anyone else’s, or a player character seeking adoration by proxy of a character, everything that imports unnecessary limitations takes away from what makes the tabletop RPG special.

That's not how it works. That's not how any of this works.
That’s not how it works. That’s not how any of this works.

That’s simply not how D&D became the phenomenon it is today. It is because it has more characteristics of a game than sitting around a campfire taking turns doing collaborative storytelling, but is so much more than finite dice games. It is a dice game, but one that runs on its own time and establishes its own boundaries during play. It can, at the discretion of the participants, keep on being played with the rules changing in order to allow the continuation of play. Every boundary is mutable (according to rule zero of every tabletop RPG). That’s why I characterize it as almost infinite. It isn’t quite, but the tabletop RPG is much closer than anything else I know, and that’s why I continue to play and continue to dream up the next campaign.

Good Times With Bad Games

Last week, to celebrate the conclusion of kitchen renovations, I had a dinner party featuring a game I had never played before. Seeing that the name of the game is “Top Trumps” and the theme is Marvel heroes, I came to the conclusion that it was time to make Captain America great again. As you should know by now, the Trump name means quality. So I had some people over. Smart people, who like to play card games. Nobody hosts a dinner party better than me, OK?

Top Trumps Tournament

Here is the gist of the game: you spin the wheel in the centre, and do one of three things: receive pegs, steal a peg, or play one of the “mini-games” named on the wheel. The game comes with an ambiguously worded reference sheet that provides some of the rules for each game. In general, the player whose turn it is chooses which “stat” is being played from four listed on each card, and (presumably) the highest number wins. The differences between the four mini-games are in how many players will participate and how many cards each will receive. The main game involved receiving enough pegs for the first player to fill the score board with nine, with the relative amount of pegs each player has determining how many cards they receive for the final battle (which plays out much like the “My Pack” mini-game but with more cards in play).

I said the rule sheet contains some of the rules because it does not address some common game states. Can a player keep calling the same victory condition and playing the same card, knowing it will keep on winning? The player is instructed to call the next stat from their “next card” but does not specify if cards can be played more than once in the same mini-game. Other things are also left unclear in the written rules: in a contest, does the debut year count up (newest wins), count down (oldest wins), or can it go either way at the discretion of the player calling the stat? What happens when players tie on a stat when playing with only one card left (the rules talk about how to resolve a draw with the next card). We ended up making up house rules left and right just to keep the game going. That’s not something you usually do in a finite game, but we did it because the alternative was to declare the game a failure and stop playing. That just wouldn’t do.

While it seems possible that there is a method to the madness when selecting which set of numbers will be used to determine the winner, the whole thing seems fairly arbitrary unless we completely missed something. If there is such thing as a winning strategy, it’s not clear unless one knows each deck of cards backwards and forwards and can therefore tell whether 46 is the highest possible number or if it is pathetic compared to other cards in the same deck.

Iron Fist and Galactus

There were several other design decisions that left my party baffled. For one thing, each deck has a different set of statistics that can be drawn from, such as the Avengers deck which included strength, ancient power, size, and technology. While each card featured nice artwork and neat little write-ups on each character, the numbers didn’t seem to correspond with any sort of logic based on what we know about the characters. I’m not knocking the Iron Fist, but the fact that he outclasses the devourer of worlds in every stat raises some questions such as “do these numbers actually mean anything?” If one tries to apply reasoning based on the character descriptions and/or portrayals in various media, it would be logical to assume that Galactus, whose biography reads more like that of an elder god than an ordinary person with extraordinary abilities, would be a fairly powerful adversary. Yet here he is, losing in every single category to a martial arts master. Captain America has the same strength rating as The Hulk. And then there is the Heroines deck:

Marvel Heroines

Debut year, OK. Intelligence, sure, but why does it only seem to go up to ten while the other ratings have much higher numbers? Oh, then we can explore their mysterious “dark side” of those weird and exotic creatures known as women(!) And then we have outfit. Yeah, while Marvel Knights contend with each other based on bravery and fighting skills we have contests between the heroines based on outfits. Which, as we can see, follow a distinct pattern. Squirrel Girl’s decidedly unsexy fursuit comes in at the lowest rating, far outclassed by a naked Storm whose “outfit” is entirely comprised by a conveniently placed cloud in the foreground. Sad.

Does any of this make me disappointed that I built a dinner party around this game? Absolutely not! From a game design perspective, the game was mediocre at best. It’s War with a few bells and whistles. But there is more to enjoying a game than balancing random chance with strategy. Getting a good group together, sharing good food, then playing a game we’re not the least bit shy about making fun of while we play it made all the difference. I will certainly play this game again, perhaps in the dying hours of this year’s Extra Life marathon when nobody is awake enough to take a game seriously if they tried. I had a lot of fun with this game, and what else could I have expected or asked for other than that?

By playing this game I learned that to be the Top Trumps Tournament Champion, one needs to be lucky on spins of the wheel and draws from the decks, exploit knowledge of a game that seems to defy all logic and reason, then know how to make the best judgement calls on what the heroines are wearing. Facts don’t matter, only having the winning numbers. I guess it does live up to the yuge expectations the name of the game set up for me.

OASIS

There are at least two things that you could have learned from my last two posts: I spend way too much time playing Civilization, and I like cheap/free stuff. The latter of which brings me to my next post, about another book that I didn’t pay for. If you identify as a geek who likes geek stuff, there is a reasonably good chance you have a copy of Ready Player One by Ernest Cline somewhere in your home even if you have never even opened it. This is because you might have subscribed to, or like me received a Loot Crate subscription as a gift, and there was a copy of that book included back in February 2015. The cover raves that it’s a “new Harry Potter” and “revolutionary.” Well, it’s not. At least not in my opinion. I read it as a standard hero’s journey of teenage male wish fulfilment. The writing itself is executed competently, but the writing itself didn’t have any special powers for grabbing my attention. There was no point to be made or lesson to be learned in the plot. So why, then, did I enjoy the book and find it interesting enough to write about? Because I loved OASIS (Ontologically Anthropocentric Sensory Immersive Simulation). In the book it is the vast MMO game that seems to comprise all of video gaming and the internet in general in the novel’s dystopian near-future. It is both a game-within-the-game and a setting for much of the story. It’s a cool idea. It’s not a new or unique idea, but I think OASIS is an interesting iteration because:

  1. Culturally, it seems to flow from what we have now. The Matrix, or Star Trek’s holodecks/holosuites are virtual reality environments in science fiction, but introduce a few elements of science fantasy. A lot of the pop culture Ready Player One based on is dated, but there is a good in-universe explanation. The creator of OASIS grew up in the 80’s and 90’s and was pathologically obsessed with the pop culture of that time, not as much that of the new millennium. So despite being a near-future setting, there are more references to D&D and Rush than there are to Reddit memes or Harry Potter or anything else more solidly embraced by millennial than by GenX. It works because the reason for this is explained, and the characters are aware of how dated the pop culture references are. Still, it pushed a lot of the right buttons to entertain me as an older millennial and felt more genuine than the other fictional VR environments I mentioned.
  2. Despite having a beginning as a system, each player logging in for the first time enters a game already in progress. For most young people in the novel, OASIS didn’t really have a beginning for them.
  3. The big bad evil empire corporation pushes the boundaries of the players consenting to play, because the other players never consented to a game involving real-world violence and harassment, but it mostly holds true. Not everyone has to be an egg hunter (participate in the contest that is the centre of the whole plot), not everyone has to play OASIS (which is perhaps reasonable if one is rich enough that the real world isn’t a complete nightmare all the time). As far as most players were concerned, OASIS was not played to reach an end; the end of making money was to be able to stay in OASIS longer or with better in-game advantages.
  4. It is implied that unlike the video game worlds we know where extreme slopes, waist-high bushes, or invisible barriers all provide a limit to the space, there are actually no boundaries in OASIS, as even specific locations can have hundreds of cloned copies.
  5. With the possible exception of the egg hunters, nobody else seems to be playing the game with a particular win condition in mind. Some people do it for work, some for escape from the awful corporate dystopia outside, but very few to “win” because for most people there is no specific victory condition.
  6. There is no end. The game-within-the-game, finding the easter egg and winning the prize, provides an end to the novel, but not to the game-within-the-book of OASIS. All of the surviving main characters still have OASIS accounts at the end of the book.
  7. The rules of the game can be changed within the game to ensure that play continues. This is where huge games like EVE are still finite in many ways. While space may be vast, somewhere outside of the game itself, there is a CCP employee working on new content at a computer. Even The Matrix appeared to require externally defined boundaries as long as you’re not Jesus The One. OASIS appears to be programmable from within OASIS.

Points 2-7 on my list all make OASIS look more like an infinite game than a finite game. And, while Carse (the philosopher who defined the terms I am using) asserts that only real life can be an infinite game, I am not sure something as robust and believable as OASIS would have crossed his mind back in 1987 when Tron defined what most people thought of when imagining a virtual world inside a computer.

As much as my praise for the novel overall is equivocal, I have to admit that it was entertaining and has been well received. I was at a book store on Sunday and saw that it was still a “staff pick” which tells me that there are a significant amount of fans if it gets pride of place and a sticker instead of being buried in the discount bin. Although it’s hardly a life-changing experience, I enjoyed the book and wouldn’t hesitate to recommend it as long as the expectations are correctly set. It was yet another stroke of the ego for the stereotypical gamer and didn’t push our social boundaries in ways that were not entirely predictable, though OASIS pushed those boundaries within the society of the setting. The book was also good entertainment and explained a neat idea without being boring. So when I think of my decision to keep reading this book through to the end I won’t look back in anger, at least not today.

One More Turn

Fourty-thousand nine hundred and twenty minutes, that’s how you measure my life playing Civ.

Although I have been able to stay off many of the hard drugs in the world of video games (WoW, Everquest, LoL, EVE), one game I have invested a ludicrous number of hours into is Civilization. The sixth instalment in the series was announced three days ago, so I will take a few moments to explain why this is significant to me. I don’t have a tally for Civilization 2, 3, or 4, but I currently have 682 hours and counting in Civ 5 (that is since October 2012). There is a reason for this, and it’s not just too much time on my hands. It’s because the game does such a wonderful job of keeping its boundaries just out of sight while providing new experience each time.

The core rules never change: there are movement rules for each unit, building costs, cultural and economic points to collect, victory conditions, a defined beginning and end to the game, all those characteristics of finite games I talked about last week. Unlike many games, Civ 5 allows a great deal of customization during game setup to tweak those rules, while others are fixed unless you are playing an explicitly modified game (for which there are many, many, options too). There is nothing infinite about it, as the number of permutations and combinations is vast but limited. Throw in a randomly generated world map, and the possibilities seem endless (even though they’re not). There are just too many possibilities for a human to be able to “solve” the game.

That is what distinguishes Civilization from the games where I can clearly see the boundaries. Another game I picked up recently is called Antenna. I was casually browsing Steam’s free-to-play section for something that isn’t a pay-to-win online multiplayer grindfest. Antenna was really good. I have 41 minutes logged in that game, and that is all I will ever have. Even that is a little bit longer than it needed to be, since I had to quit and restart the game in the middle due to a technical glitch (the sound cut out, and if you go play this game, you will find that is a fatal error). I had to start out from the beginning. But hey, I’m not going to complain about a single hiccup when the game was made available to me for the same price as a typical Canadian is willing to pay to watch HBO’s Game of Thrones.

Antenna has very clear boundaries, and one way to win. Each puzzle is solved by matching sounds and pressing the right buttons at the right time. You solve the puzzles, you win the game. I had a fair amount of fun playing it, and loved the feel of the atmosphere, but I won’t be playing it again because there is nothing more I can get from it. It’s perhaps a better example of a finite game than a game like Skyrim, which is every bit as limited, but is big enough that it’s harder to see from inside the game. Civ, on the other hand, always offers a new possibility: even with the same game settings and intended strategy, what kind of world am I going to explore? Am I on a huge continent or an island? Will my neighbors be Mahatma Ghandi and Haile Selassie, or will they be Genghis Khan and Attila the Hun? Will I be able to finish my world wonder before some undiscovered nation on the opposite side of the world builds it first, causing my fine workers to bust the whole thing up for scrap? (No hint of familiar frustration in my voice on that last point.)

+2 faith, +5 gold, +25% gold from city connections... Machu Picchu is a pretty good deal if you have a city close enough to a mountain.
+2 faith, +5 gold, +25% gold from city connections… Machu Picchu is a pretty good deal in Civ 5 if you have a city close enough to a mountain; especially if you’ve got Gustave Eiffel on standby to rush it.

So it’s that measured uncertainty that keeps the game fresh and replayable. The rules are limited, but with so many possible ways to play and win the game, the boundaries seem obscured by the same fog that covers unexplored tiles. That is what keeps me coming back to Civ 5 over newer games. As big as Skyrim is, I find it really easy to fall back into doing the same things in the same places on each playthrough, and it starts to feel the same. That just isn’t the case with Civilization, where the game is always just a little bit different. Beyond Earth, the “in space!” offshoot of the franchise missed the mark because despite the beautiful terrain and similar mechanics, it just did not have the same feel. Each game I played seemed to become routine more quickly (explore, run from aliens, develop tech, build improvements, choose affinity, kill aliens, never worry about other players), so I lost interest in it and went back to Civ 5. I just can’t seem to leave that game alone.

While I was writing this post, I had a friend ask me if I wanted to play a multiplayer game. Given that it is often hard to find people to commit to getting very far in a game of Civ 5, I accepted. We started a game. And then it was 4:00 AM. It was then I was reminded that across all of its iterations, Civilization is still the game built to stand the test of time.

 

Thesis Statement

“There are at least two kinds of games. Once could be called finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing the play.” – James Carse

I want to write about games and philosophy, but before I really get into it, I want to try and explain the rationale. Let’s start by looking at how Mr. Carse distinguishes between finite games and infinite games:

Finite Games Infinite Games
Have a precise beginning, which is important to finite players. Have no clear beginning, and infinite players don’t care about this fact.
Requires players to consent to play within pre-defined rules which should not change during play. Requires players to consent to play, but the rules must change during play to prevent anyone from “winning” and therefore ending the game.
Rules are externally defined and available to all players before play begins. Rules are internally defined as the game is played.
Played within boundaries and with limitations (such as temporal, spatial, and numerical limits). Have horizons rather than boundaries. Play is not bounded by limited by things such as time, space, etc. Boundaries are eliminated through play, and it runs on its own time.
The purpose of playing the game is to win. The purpose of playing the game is to continue play.
The game ends when someone wins (this may include a ranking system). The game doesn’t have a defined end.
Table 1: Characteristics of games, as defined in an obscure philosophy text I found in my house and decided to use as a philosophical basis for writing about my ideas related to games. It’s worth reading if you are a strange enough person to be into this sort of thing.

So, why do I want to create a body of writing about games? The idea to do this was conceived when I was looking for one of my books about writing (if there is one thing writers enjoy writing about, it’s writing) and stumbled upon an old philosophy text. I don’t know how or why this book made it into my collection, as the edition I have is about one year younger than myself. Perhaps the title caught my eye several years ago when I was moving out of my parents’ house. Finite and Infinite Games by James Carse: it must be a book about games, right? Hey, I like games, why not give this a try? It took me by surprise how broadly it defined games because we usually don’t think of World War II as a game, but that’s because it was my first introduction to taking a philosophical look at game theory (the academic and philosophical kind, not the silly hat and sexual frustration kind).

As I read and reread the book, I found that looking at games in this way actually helps to explain a lot about why I like the (finite) games that I do, and how to understand things that are happening in the world, like the Trump candidacy.

This is my central idea: games, as we understand the term in plain language, can be used for social good and to understand ourselves. Games can also be used to reinforce injustice and as a glorified form of mental and emotional masturbation. This is true whether we are talking something serious, like an election, or recreational, like a card game. Infinite games, including finite phases that support infinite play, are bigger and worthier pursuits than finite games. For example, the infinite game of life itself (which Carse asserts is the only infinite game) is much greater and more rewarding than a game of chess. It doesn’t mean chess is necessarily bad or useless, it just needs to be kept in its place alongside other finite endeavours.

chess-140340_960_720
Although there are more game states of chess than there are particles in the observable universe, chess is a finite game.

The outcome of a single chess match is unimportant, but a person teaching that game to a child who is gaining knowledge about fair play and logic does matter a little bit. And when you look at the game of chess as a whole, it becomes more and more relevant to the larger picture. My goal, in writing about other games or designing my own, is to see finite games used to promote a mindset of infinite play.

Infinite play, being an infinite player, why do I speak of these as being “good” things? Well, as I said above, it is not necessarily a good vs. bad distinction, but I think there are distinct virtues in infinite play. Who doesn’t aspire to be the kind of person whose view of life embraces horizons rather than boundaries, continuation of play over competing to win, and trying to keep as many people in play as possible? There are people who are obsessively finite, but most of us tend to think they’re jerks (or at least acting like one out of ignorance and/or immaturity). The guys in The Big Short who brag about scamming immigrants because it makes them a lot of money, the egotistical football player who pushes the boundaries of showboating upon scoring a goal, the six year old who just flipped over the checkers board because it became clear he is losing. These are not people I would want to be identified with. I may play football, or checkers, or financial investment, but in all of those I hope I can be the kind of person who supports infinite play.

This post allowed me to get a lot of heavy stuff out of the way so that my reader(s) can understand where I am coming from. I promise more levity and snark in upcoming weeks, but rest assured there is a point in all of it. If this sounds like a good deal to you, come back Saturdays at noon, mountain time. Follow me on Twitter or like my Facebook page to receive regular updates.