Tag: Trump

Irrelevant Measures

Published by Graham on June 17, 2017

The people of the United Kingdom participated in a political game last week when they went to the polls. Of I were to characterize it as a contest between the party leaders for the title of prime minister, the pedantic purists would start yelling because that’s not how it works in the Westminster system where members are elected locally to represent their constituents. They’re not wrong about the process, but I can’t imagine that many international observers care deeply about which particular individual represents Ipswich or who represents East Dunbartonshire. The contest that I watched with interest was the one that played out indirectly in hundreds of constituencies. There are many traditions about how the “confidence of the house” is established but when it comes down to who gets to wear the biggest title, the measure that matters is which parties won how many seats.

Anyway, Corbyn’s Labour party had a much better showing than expected, but they lost. They significantly increased their seat count and proportion of the vote, which are good measures of how well the party is doing in the long term. These are, however, irrelevant measures of success in the electoral game. The ability of Labour to name a prime minister or to pass their legislative agenda isn’t much stronger now than when the Conservative party held a majority. These should be simple matter-of-fact statements, yet if you take Corbyn at his word that he can still be prime minister you’d think the result was something completely different than what it was.

So it’s clear that Labour is on an upswing and Corbyn’s critics within his own party have to eat a little bit of humble pie. That doesn’t mean he won. He’s in a good position to win the next round, but he’s most certainly not going to hold the title prime minister in a matter of days or weeks. Part of the problem is that there is no clear coalition to take down the Conservatives. It would be entirely reasonable to think that Corbyn could lead a coalition if Labour plus Liberal Democrats plus some smaller parties with similar agendas (Greens, perhaps) could form a majority. But they can’t.

*The house doesn’t have confidence in Corbyn… at least not yet.*

To form a majority Labour will need every other party in the house to help topple the Tories. Not just every major party, every party down to the smallest. This reminds me of Canada in 2008, when our Conservative party was in a similar situation (plurality of seats but no majority) but was able to persist because the Liberals and New Democrats didn’t have a majority by themselves. They also needed the support of a regional ethnic nationalist party, the Bloc Quebecois, whose agenda wasn’t really compatible with the mainstream parties. They could agree that they didn’t like Stephen Harper, but that was about it. Then, too, we had partisans boasting about the Conservatives having “lost the popular vote” but it would be another seven years of Conservative government before a different party was able to win by the measure that counts: number of seats in parliament and confidence of the house. Perhaps Corbyn is in a better position today than Dion was in 2008, but he still has to grapple with the fact that his party needs the Democratic Unionist Party to topple the Conservatives. Based on what I have read about this party so far, “willing to go to an election at this time” appears to be the only possible common ground that a party of social democrats could have with right-wing ethnic nationalists. If I was a Labour guy, the thing I would want the most right now is to give a nod to last week’s result but to spend more time building than boasting, focusing on winning the next contest rather than dwelling on the numbers that I like the best.

Likewise, if I was American, I would want to cut it out with the Corbyn shows that Bernie would have won nonsense. Clinton came much, much closer to winning the top title than Corbyn did. If she had won, she would still be at the mercy of the house and the senate. Or, if the Democrats had won congress but lost the presidency, then Trump may have been president only for a “matter of days.” Again, the relevant measures have nothing to do with “popular vote” or numbers of marchers or tweet counts. These may be somehow useful data, but the real contests will be the midterm elections and 2020. If you are an American who has a problem with the current administration, it’s time to organize rather than time to gripe. Regardless of whether or not Bernie could have won, it’s now up to you to find someone who can and will win.

So, please: let’s not remain obsessed with irrelevant measures because they suggest that a loss for the team we cheered/played for wasn’t actually a loss. Get the results that count, then build a consensus for changing the rules. Let’s support adopting some form of proportional representation or abolishing the electoral college or making whatever other change in our respective countries that makes electoral contests better and more fair. But that requires a mandate, and to build that, your party needs seats more than it needs tweets.

Except By Righteousness

Published by Graham on February 4, 2017

Back in June 2016, I found myself recalling the week following an act of evil. Today I’m there again, this time closer to home and on my side of the Canada-USA border. I was saddened by the news, then heartened by the compassionate response across my country, then angered by those who would callously exploit it to promote their conspiracy theories. As a rule, the game played by any kind of “truther” is one that should not be played.

A lot of what needs to be said has already been said, but there is one thing I’d like to be said louder and more clearly: we can’t just blame Trump for this. To do so would be inaccurate, irresponsible, and unethical. I have no doubt that the political tide that swept him into power may have encouraged this and other acts of evil, but we must not delude ourselves into thinking we are special. Canadians, we’re not better than Americans just because we’ve got a prime minister with better virtue signals and glorious hair. The roots of racist violence in this country go very deep. There is no contest among nations where Canadians can say they score higher than Americans at being less racist, less violent, less evil. And indeed, within this country, some of us seem to think that racist violence happens somewhere else – probably in Alberta. And indeed, while my home province has produced an infamous holocaust denying teacher and a sensationalist far right media network, we are not special. From the yellow peril on the west coast to the starlight tours in Saskatchewan, from the Christie Pits riot 84 years ago to the Hérouxville code of conduct 10 years ago: this is a national problem that cannot be scapegoated onto east, west, rural, or urban. It is not new; it was not invented by Stephen Harper nor Donald Trump. The antecedents to this recent attack belong to all of us.

*“For though my faith is not yours and your faith is not mine, if we are each free to light our own flame, together we can banish some of the darkness of the world.” – Rabbi Jonathan Sacks*

Can we be better than that? Absolutely. In big ways and in small ways, chipping away at the big problem has not been an even or an easy process, but I believe it’s not only worth doing, it’s worth doing right. That’s why my posts on political topics lean towards self-critique more than just calling out what I see as being the wrongs of the world: the internet provides us with a vast surplus of hot takes about how bad the bad people are. That’s low-hanging fruit. What I want to reach for, what I want to signal boost, is the more challenging ideas about how we can build the kind of society where it’s harder to imagine a man walking into a mosque and shooting people. To me, winning is not being on the right side of history or being better than that other person. It’s living in a world where this kind of evil is unheard of. One place I can start is remembering that I am not a better person because I live in 2017, in Canada, or in a city. My religion does not confer any special status upon me, nor do my political views qualify me for some kind of title. It’s easy to say that of other people, but worth asking of oneself too.

In remembering not to take false pride in my origins, I am reminded of the words that the Prophet Muhammad (peace be upon him) is quoted in the hadith as saying: “There is no virtue of an Arab over a foreigner nor a foreigner over an Arab, and neither white skin over black skin nor black skin over white skin, except by righteousness.” This I can only assume was said to declare the faith as universal, mirroring Paul’s words in Galatians 3:28 about there being neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, neither female nor male in the faith of Jesus Christ. No matter which tradition we were raised in and/or still practice, there is a wisdom in these words which transcends cultures and religions. I think we would do well to not only affirm the obvious meaning when it comes to visible differences, but also to check ourselves for other sources of misplaced pride. For there is no virtue of a Canadian over an American, nor a Torontonian over a New Sareptan, nor a Californian over an Alabaman, nor a Republican nor a Democrat; except by righteousness.

Hail To The Chief

Published by Graham on January 21, 2017

When I started this blog I knew I wanted to write about things that can be framed as “games” even though they’re not the recreational pastimes we usually think of when we hear that word. An odd choice to be sure, but one I hope sets this body of work apart from the gaming-related noise on the internet. So I knew at some point I would have to address the phenomenon that is Donald J. Trump, the unlikely prospect for the Republican nomination. At first, I thought I would wait until his primary campaign flamed out and write a retrospective. And then he became the nominee, so I planned to watch the rest of the campaign and write the post-mortem in November. Then I had to wait and see if there would be a stunning upset in the electoral college. And now, as of yesterday, he is the president of the United States of America. Whatever the founding fathers of their nation may have envisioned 240 years into the future, this one man has come to define his nation’s politics. This election result has already changes the political landscape in North America, and it’s only just beginning.

*We’d better include some measures in this constitution to prevent the rise of a demagogue…*

A lot of ink and pixels have already been devoted to gloating, weeping and gnashing of teeth, and analyzing the causes of the final score in the political game that was the USA 2016 election. I’m not going to rehash most of that here. If you have seen Almost Infinite’s Twitter and Facebook cover photos then you know how I feel. But what interests me as a writer is the remarkable scale of the dissonance between the rules of the game and what people think the rules of the game are. No matter what the game is, this disconnect can be responsible for a lot of unnecessary grief. The remedy I propose is to understand and change rules rather than shout at the world about how things should be but simply aren’t.

One thing I am tired of is hearing American liberals complain that Clinton “won the popular vote” as if achieving a simple majority is the magic threshold of legitimacy. It can be argued that in a bipartisan system this would not an unreasonable standard to adopt, but I am not taking a position in this post about how they should run their elections. I am merely observing the way they do run their elections, and that this way has nothing to do with winning the popular vote at the national level. Their rules are complicated, and seem downright Byzantine to Canadians like me. These rules, though complex, are not vague: the candidate who wins the most votes in the electoral college wins the election. They might be terrible rules, but they are the rules all the same.

*Peace, order, and good government: no simple majority required.*

This disconnect between what we think the rules and and what they actually are exists in Canadian politics as well. Every time a majority government is elected with less than 50% of the vote you will hear people shout about how ~60% of the population voted for someone other than the Conservatives/Liberals yet the Conservatives/Liberals still got a majority of the seats. “It’s not fair!” Well, maybe it isn’t; I am not taking a position on Canadian electoral reform in this post. What I am saying is that our 39% majorities are a fact of life in this country because that is what happens when the game is played by our rules. It is entirely legitimate to wish to change the rules to something better, and it is quite possible that there are better ways of electing a parliament than the first-past-the-post system we use. However, to suggest that a Canadian government lacks legitimacy without achieving a simple majority is simply absurd (and is usually coated in a strong partisan bias; Liberals seem to have no problem with 39% majorities when it’s a Liberal majority and vice versa for Conservatives). We have not had a federal government that “won the popular vote” since 1984, when the Mulroney Conservatives in a “landslide” just barely cracked the 50% mark. There are many silly things about our antiquated Westminster parliament, and several changes I would like to see, yet I love our parliament for its quirks and its ability to deliver relatively stable governments that most Canadians can live with even if they detest the governing party. Being snarky about the legitimacy of our government because you don’t like the rules is useless at best, and dangerous at worst. Working for a better alternative, changing the game itself, is entirely more worthwhile. Or, get better at the game under the current rules and defeat your opponent like Justin Trudeau did to Stephen Harper. And yes, like Donald Trump did to Hillary Clinton. Despite all his faults, despite all the faults of the system, he won the game as it was intended to be played.

So, what does liberal America do with their situation? It’s not an easy thing to figure out from here and the answer won’t be the same for everyone. But one place where I think disgruntled Democrats can start is to flush the pee jokes out of their system and get to work on improving their game under existing rules while also pursuing electoral reform. Trump is POTUS and just wishing it wasn’t so doesn’t change anything. The same rules that allowed him to win also allow for the Democrats to win back their congress and senate over the next couple years, for impeachment of the president, and failing that they have another run at him in 2020. Their victory is not guaranteed, but there is a path towards it. Americans who oppose what their president stands for have options. As an interested observer, I am hoping that the vast majority of them choose something more productive than complaining about it on social media to their friends and followers who think the same way. Protest. Get involved. Do something about it. The USA is a weird, sometimes frightening, sometimes amazing country that deserves much more than a steady stream of snark piped into a series of echo chambers about what shouldn’t have happened.

Alright, the political rant is done. Back to writing about internet spaceships next week, then more tabletop RPG goodness on February 1.

Annus Horribilis

Published by Graham on December 31, 2016

It has become cliché to bemoan this year of the calendar among liberal intellectuals with the two biggest news stories of the year being Brexit and President Trump. These losses laid bare the simple fact that history is not on a direct and inevitable march towards our own personal vision of society which will look back on us as the people “on the right side of history” and everyone who disagrees with us as awful backwards people who were always doomed to fail. Life simply does not work that way. It’s far too complex a game to “win” simply by having the right opinions on social matters. However, one who aspires towards being an infinite player seeks much more than to win titles. That means these temporary obstacles do not end play, but must be taken into play.

But even for those who aren’t disgruntled liberals, it’s hard to escape a sense of annus horribilis about the year coming to a close in twelve hours. Terrorist attacks and seemingly endless civil wars don’t discriminate based on political alignment. We must be okay with acknowledging that. But we must also avoid blaming the number on the calendar, or the alignment of the stars, or whatever other intangible scapegoat we can come up with. There are people who can make 2017 a better year. If you are looking for the nearest one, please check the nearest mirror.

*Something worth keeping in mind. (source)*

As for this blog, I intend to continue to use it as a platform to oppose toxic gaming culture, comment on various recreational games of the video or tabletop variety (because these can be an important part of who we are as people), and to continue to explore those non-recreational or “real life” topics as the games that they are. Solving the world’s problems remains out of my scope, but every little point of light goes a little way to banishing the darkness. I hope to be a small part of that. And I am quite certain that there will be many, many good things to be happy about in 2017.

The Con, Part 1

Published by Graham on October 22, 2016

I found out about IntrigueCon during the pre-game discussion leading up to that time I tried to pull some Wizard of Oz tomfoolery during a Pathfinder one-shot. In a city where the local anime convention can attract over 9000 fans and the general interest Expo attracting tens of thousands, you would think by making some not-so-wild assumptions that there are a lot of people who play tabletop roleplaying games in Edmonton. And there are. But as one of the players around the table was saying several weeks ago, it can be hard to run a convention based on this particular hobby because it is too much like monogamy: once you find the one table you want to play at, you tend to settle in and stop looking at what the market has to offer. As much as I am inclined to accept that model for my love life, I have come to find that my tabletop gaming life should be different in this way.

I don’t have a problem with my usual D&D group, but for some time now I have been open about my desire to play at other tables. It’s not that I dislike playing with them, it just gets too routine after a while and I get worried about contracting geek social fallacy #5. That is one of the reasons why I decided I needed to go to IntrigueCon, to play at tables with people I never would have met otherwise and to expand my horizons, and that I did.

Caption — Some tabletop RPGs involve pretending to be an elf and running around shooting arrows at orcs. This one involved playing a sentient wool sock on a quest for an artifact known as the “golden needle of parliament.”

The first game I got to try was one called Threadbare. It was obviously still in the development stage, but I could not help but be intrigued by the opportunity to play in a world that is a perfect mix of Toy Story and Wall-E. Each character is assembled from toys or other junk. My character was a sock puppet (a “wool sock” is a very specific archetype right there on the playbooks) aptly named Red. The rules look similar to Apocalype World, which I have not played yet, but much simpler. We relied on only three characteristics (scrounge, strongarm, and smile) rather than five (cool, hard, hot, sharp, weird). Like in Apocalypse World, the statistics are more personality traits than they are measures of physical qualities like strength or dexterity. I think this lends itself to more role play than roll play. though I found out the hard way what happens when you botch too many scrounge rolls in a row. Negative consequences take the form of having to tear a piece off your character which is both neat and distressing at the same time. So there I was, hoping to repair some minor damage, but ended up stripping it down to just the base sock as I thrashed madly in a pile of parts.

The part of Threadbare that struck me as the most profound is that in the science fantasy setting we played in, nothing was inanimate. We tend to think of hot air balloons, jet planes, etc. as things rather than friends or enemies. You really have to rethink your playing strategy when your party contains a sentient fried egg plushie who starts speaking to, and nearly going fisticuffs with, the getaway jet. I think a game like this has a lot of potential for assumption-smashing and that’s what made it fun even as I had to tear another piece off my character. The boundaries are at least as mutable as in a D&D world if not more so, since it’s not every fantasy world where your wagon (let alone your horse) might have some suggestions or objections to how to proceed with your adventure.

I think Threadbare, in its complete state, might be great to play with kids who aren’t quite old enough to introduce to D&D, World of Darkness, etc. as the rules are very easy to understand and the setting can be dark and gritty without the need for explicit violent or sexual content. At the same time, the “stitchpunk” setting is also far from being so obnoxiously saccharine that adults who are seasoned tabletop players will still be able to access it with their role playing brains rather than their caregiver brains.Once it is finished I am sure the potentials will outweigh the pitfalls in the case of Threadbare.

The next morning the second session started where I had signed up to play the Maid RPG. I knew going in, based on my experience of anime fandom culture, that there was a high risk that this would involve some elements that would be off-putting to people who actually view women as people. However, I came to try things that were different from my regular D&D (typically an ensemble cast of heroes in a high fantasy setting) and what could possibly be more different than a game based on being the best maid?

Indeed, some of the rules that came straight out of the book were pretty gross. However, the great thing about the authority of the DM (I got to run part of the session that was set in an actual dungeon, so DM is sometimes more apt in Maid than GM) is that you can exert some authorial power to take the edge off thing a bit. I know if I could do it again I would shy away from the scenario where players can gain favour by “accidentally” kissing an NPC. Or, if I am going to run something where women are seen as playthings for entitled rich men, then I would at least create a setting where boorish ribaldry could be played for laughs. If someone hasn’t created a Trump Tower themed Maid adventure yet, I know what’s going on my list of homebrew scenarios to run.

The best part of the game, though, was that it involved aggressive action without (necessarily) violence. Competition without the need to see someone die. It was a neat little mix because it didn’t dispense with any of the tension inherent in games where there is a little bit of combat simulation, yet completely avoided the concept of “hit points” et. al. In this game you simply have to prevent your stress level from getting too high. It is hardly unique to emphasize the need to do more than hit things with a sword or shooting things with a gun; what I am impressed by is how vicious Maid can get without going there. It’s certainly not a game about talking and friendships either. It is every Maid for herself in a quest to gain favour.

In our session, the random events from the book were mediated by a custom board with figurines as game pieces. In an otherwise very abstract game I thought this was a nice touch. — *In our first session, the random events from the book were represented by a custom board with figurines as game pieces. In an otherwise very abstract game I thought this was a nice touch.*

After that new experience I went to the next session for something a little bit familiar: Dungeons and Dragons. We played the introductory adventure in the new Curse of Strahd adventure book. This was a good old dungeon crawl where I finally got to stress test my halfling fighter that I am playing in another campaign that involves far more investigation and conspiracy than swordplay. However, I am running long in the word count for this post so the whole story will have to wait. To be continued…

Broken

Published by Graham on October 8, 2016

When I say a game is broken, I don’t mean that there are faults or errors in its execution. Whether it’s a chess set that ships without any bishop pieces or a video game that crashes without a series of post-release patches, the game itself as conceived by the designers is not broken. The media are faulty, but the underlying game is intact.

What I consider to be a truly broken game is one that “works” in the technical sense but where the rules are so contrary to our standards of fairness, enjoyability, or sense of the spirit of the game that we simply cannot abide with it until the rules are changed. This can often be the result of the overpowered nature (or as one of my friends once called it for short, OP-ness) of certain cards or strategies that almost certainly lead to victory over any alternative plays (where one or more alternatives are seen as having inherent legitimacy rather than just being blunders to avoid).

Earlier this week, Canadian Minister of Finance Bill Morneau announced an updated set of rules for mortgages which may alter the Canadian real estate game. I am delighted by this because I see it as a solid attempt to prevent a game that is anything but trivial or recreational from becoming broken. It’s not a good thing when people see the only way to get ahead is to load up on debt.

*Either way you look at it, something needs to be done when a runaway market breaks the game.*

In this post I won’t be making any arguments for or against the timing of a correction or a crash, nor whether it’s a good idea for any individual to be able to buy right now. I don’t have the expertise to give specific advice and I am not going to try to predict the future. What I will be talking about is risk vs. reward in a game; I am of the opinion that it’s a good idea to adopt rules which dissuade Canadians from going all-in betting on real estate, regardless of whether or not it’s a “good investment” in any individual case.

First, let us consider the possibility that what goes up must come down. Not everyone agrees that prices are unsustainably high. Some people believe for a number of reasons that house prices will continue to rise for decades to come (with only an occasional hiccup) and that it only makes sense to get onto the train as soon as one can. It would then seem unfair to millennial renters trying to get on board to have to do more to qualify for a mortgage. Some people would say we are losing while we wait. But consider for a moment that the price of a typical house blasting past the million dollar mark without a corresponding boom in wages and salaries is the sign of something very unhealthy. If it doesn’t go up forever, then the game isn’t as broken as it could be. Those who gamble will eventually lose, with the magnitude of the risk increasing as the stakes get higher and higher. However, even if the game is not broken in that sense it’s still the case that the higher prices climb, the bigger the fall. Having had front row seats to what happened in the USA ten years ago, we Canadians should know better than to keep on raising the stakes until catastrophe strikes. New rules that bring us down slowly are a welcome alternative.

Now, suppose the average millennial’s dad is right when, over Thanksgiving dinner, he channels the Lex Luthor from the 1978 film Superman and tells them to buy land because it’s the one thing that nobody is making any more of. After all, it worked for him when he bought a house in the 1970’s. But for a moment let’s put aside any skepticism and imagine for a moment a world where Canadian cities, lead by Vancouver and Toronto, never see a meaningful correction or crash. Those priced out now can never afford to buy there again and both prices and rents get launched into the stratosphere. Vancouver becomes Manhattan. This is what happens if the game is broken and it stays broken. The logical end of this scenario is a new aristocracy where the only good way to get into the market is to be born into a family that is already in the market. This is much, much worse than having a bubble burst. If such a thing was possible and it really is buy now or buy never, then it would be time to change the rules before the commoners start getting agitated.

So, one does not need to know much at all about the finer details of finance to reach the logical conclusion that regardless of what happens in the market, average people looking to make the most of what they’ve got are in for trouble when the game is broken. In order to sustain itself, any gamble (whether it is an investment or a betting game) will have to find its place in the following triangle:

A runaway market will eventually fix itself, but the human consequences might be hard to take. It’s all fine and dandy to be priced out of the market for Dutch tulips or for the returns on Beanie Babies to crater, but when we are talking about places to live and life savings it becomes necessary to try and mitigate the extreme consequences. And so we come back to the new rules. They transfer more risk onto the lenders and less onto the taxpayer, reducing the moral hazard of banks being able to lend out increasingly outrageous amounts of money to people whose ability to repay is dubious if anything goes wrong. They crack down on people hoping to get around paying taxes on rental income by misusing principal residence exceptions, putting them on a more even field with other kinds of investments/income streams. They ensures that people take on less risk when they sign up for 20+ years of debt. Are the new rules enough? Will they yield the desired outcomes? I don’t know. But I find it encouraging that we have a government that is making an attempt and signalling that there may be more to come.

It’s bad news if your finite game involved becoming rich by jumping on the train at just the right time and laughing at people like me when we still have to pay rent when we are old. Good news, however, if your infinite game involves changing the rules mid-stream to allow as many players into the game as possible. In changing the rules to not favour real estate over other kinds of investment as much, we are not just encouraging the market to calm down to the point where people aren’t priced out of the market just because they can’t get a small loan of a million dollars from the bank of mom and dad. We are also creating the conditions where a young person can get ahead by investing in other things. Boomers may have coveted the garage and the yard and encouraged their children to do the same, but the post-millennial generations may instead choose a future that involves participation in the sharing economy rather than owning cars, investing in companies that create and implement the technologies of the future rather than counting on real estate equity for economic security, and retaining flexibility by living in a housing co-op rather than having to spend previous time mowing the lawn. The economic game of the future needs rules that don’t unfairly advantage the holders of the homeowner title, as that boomer dream may not last forever.

So whatever strategy we employ to invest in our future prosperity, let it not depend on the game being broken in a way that gives us an unfair advantage over our peers. Let us seek to play by rules which allow as many players as possible to be a part of the game. If the history of wealth inequality is any indication, our survival as a nation may very well depend on changing the rules when the game is broken.

White People Talking

Published by Graham on September 24, 2016

In this post I’m going more game-of-life, philosophical, and political than usual. A few things have happened in the past few days: my local university had another case of deplorable posters. Twitter user @jaythenerdkid posted an excellent sequence of tweets on how social justice work isn’t always just. Another man in the USA was executed by police for the crime of being black. About all of these things, white people will be talking. We will be talking about racism in the media, about policing, about political correctness, about what makes “us” good white people as opposed to those “bad” ones for whom making America great again is making it white again. Last week I wrote about when it is better to not play than it is to win or lose. This week I will talk about what that means in some very serious games.

Full disclosure: I am white/cis male/straight/middle income/no specific disabilities. When I speak of “white people” I am not talking about someone else. I’m talking about myself, most of my friends and family, and others who make up the majority in Anglo-North America.

*Yep, this is basically what all my dinner parties look like while we discuss the world’s problems.*

One bad habit white people have is to to criticize “political correctness” as a failing. It may be true that there is something there to criticize if you use a very specific definition of it, but the way the term is thrown around generally doesn’t refer to a nuanced critique of insincere theatrical performance of opposition to bigotry. In general, being opposed to “political correctness” equates to the deliberate normalization of dehumanizing terms and false assertions against anyone who doesn’t fit that demographic I belong to. It requires a person to believe that life is a finite, zero-sum game in which the winners rightfully exploit the losers, and it’s right to put winning before any other ethical principle. If it wasn’t white people doing the winning, then we’d be doing the losing according to this wildly defective way of thinking. When talking to someone who rants about “political correctness” it is not worth trying to win arguments with then because the facts won’t matter when fundamental principles clash. I implore my fellow white people to choose better principles, and to “win” against those who choose the zero-sum game by depriving them of an audience rather than pummelling them into submission. Agreeing to and playing by their rules will not lead to anything good.

But what about those people, often white self-styled “progressives” who seem to have appointed themselves the language police? The ones who delight in the gotcha moments of showing how good they are at finding and denouncing bad white people for using the wrong words and phrases. They aren’t interested in the messy work of improving our society and our culture. Their concern is about burnishing their personal reputations and those of the institutions they manage. This is what I think @jaythenerdkid was calling out in that series of tweets. Criticism and discussion should be about understanding and improving the societal and cultural environments in which we live together, not about sorting out the good people from the bad. The winners from the losers. Being an even better racist prover than Señor Chang. This is a game we should not play.

I agree with her that it is particularly odious for a white person to seek the mantle of the saviour, as if it is possible for us to be so liberal, so progressive, so free of the “problematic” that we can solve all the others’problems without having to actually make any room for the people for whom we presume to speak. That’s just not the way it works. Sure, I’m white and I here I am saying anti-racist things, but I claim only to speak for myself and not for the people who suffer from systemic prejudice. They can speak for themselves. They don’t need me to speak for them. My responsibility is to speak for myself and into the spaces which they do not have access. I am concerned with keeping my own house in order, not in winning titles.

So, what does that have to do with white people talking about acts of evil, both small and large? I think we can reasonably come to two conclusions:

White people must accept that there are some ugly realities about our society and culture and that it is our responsibility to do our part in making things better. A failure to do so, and seeking to debate the problem out of existence, doesn’t just perpetuate the unjustified termination of life. It ensures that such happens in unheard silence, and that is evil.
Doing our part to make things better doesn’t mean getting into a pissing contest to see who is the wokest white guy there ever was. In fact, that is counter-productive. Don’t even try. People of colour don’t owe you a stamp of approval for proving yourself worthy. You don’t even need one in order to work on making things better, so just keep making it awkward anyway. If you have the chance to do good without getting an award for doing so, just do it.

So, that’s me, a white person talking about racism. Take from it what you will, feel free to criticize me all you like, but whatever you do please don’t stay silent while this kind of thing keeps on happening. The problems large and small are all getting much harder to ignore. If we keep going the way we are going, allowing people to be dehumanized and killed in silence, we’re gonna have a bad time.

The Difference Between Not Losing and Not Playing

Published by Graham on September 17, 2016

If you are losing at a finite game, there are two ways you can win within the rules:

Change your opponent: defeat them by circumventing their advantages, coerce them into make fatal mistakes, or overpower them by whatever means are allowable within the game. For example, in a political contest, you change your opponent when you are able to stick a label on them like lyin’ or crooked or racist. In a war, you change your opponent’s resolve by killing their forces. This doesn’t always work because some games are pretty tight with the rules; I don’t know of many things one can do within a chess match to change the opponent aside from dubious methods of “psyching out” the opponent.
Change yourself: this is the generally accepted method of defeating your competition in future instances of the game you are either losing or have already lost. You change your own tactics, practice your own skills, train harder, and so on. Become better somehow.

The third way is to change the rules of the game. Whether or not this is successful depends entirely on the consent of the other players in the game. This happens all the time in online multiplayer games where an update “nerfs” some aspect of the game to improve balance or when you are playing a friendly game and need to improvise a little bit to keep the game going. Either the players agree to the rule changes, or they stop playing. More likely, the game is played to its end and then the rules are changed for the next iteration to prevent the same strategy from winning again. When participants in a political contest talk about campaign finance reform, it’s always for the next election rather than the one taking place right now.

When one tries to change the rules in the middle of the game and does not receive consent from the other players, that is cheating. However, if you see that your opponent is breaking the rules and consent to keep on playing (perhaps the rules provide for some kind of penalty), then the opponent is not cheating and you are still in play. A professional hockey player who drops his gloves and starts punching an opposing player is not breaking the rules of the game. The rules allow for that. Of course, he’s going to receive a penalty or other sanction. But if hockey fights were truly against the rules, then the moment one breaks out, the game would stop and the local police would be called and the assailant would be facing criminal charges. Although this can happen in extreme circumstances, it’s not a common outcome of a hockey fight.

*That this will result in a trip to the penalty box does not mean it is against the rules of hockey; it means that the rules of hockey allow for this to happen.*

Not playing is the fourth way to go, and it should be distinguished from accepting a loss. Not playing is walking away from the table without conceding a loss, even if the other player(s) yell “forfeit!” as loud as they can. It’s also the hardest thing to do in many serious games. It’s easy in recreational games. I barely have a handle on the rules of Go. I’m not going to play in a highly competitive game of Go. Isn’t that easy? But what happens when it’s a political contest? A war? Isn’t political apathy a bad thing? Doesn’t pacifism mean the fascists/communists/fundamentalists win? Hey buddy, my human rights are on the line here. The only requirement for evil to triumph is for good men to do nothing.

How, then, can we ever listen to the Buddhist monk telling us to let go of suffering when the struggle is real? How then can we respect Ghandi when his commitment to pacifism is strong enough for him to tell the British to let the Nazis slaughter them?

“I do not want Britain to be defeated, nor do I want her to be victorious in a trial of brute strength, whether expressed through the muscle or the brain.’ Your muscular bravery is an established fact. Need you demonstrate that your brain is also as unrivaled in destructive power as your muscle? I hope you do not wish to enter into such an undignified competition with the Nazis. I venture to present you with a nobler and a braver way, worthy of the bravest soldier. I want you to fight Nazism without arms, or, if I am to retain the military terminology, with non-violent arms. I would like you to lay down the arms you have as being useless for saving you or humanity. You will invite Herr Hitler and Signor Mussolini to take what they want of the countries you call your possessions. Let them take possession of your beautiful island, with your many beautiful buildings. You will give all these, but neither your souls, nor your minds. If these gentlemen choose to occupy your homes, you will vacate them. ‘If they do not give you free passage out, you will allow yourself, man, woman and child, to be slaughtered, but you will refuse to owe allegiance to them.”
― Mohandas Ghandi, 1940

How can a good progressive liberal not participate in a shouting match on the internet with a proud Brexiter or Trump supporter? It’s difficult. I am still working on wrapping my head around this. But I know there is value in taking this fourth option, and I can understand it in the context of one of my favourite games being referenced on one of my favourite television shows. In the Community episode “Advanced Dungeons and Dragons,” the party does not defeat Pierce through changing him, themselves, or the game. It’s when they stop playing. Pierce is defeated not by dice rolls in the AD&D game or by an out-of-game display of superior charisma, but when he loses his audience.

It is one thing for a person or faction to lose a contest according to accepted rules, but true defeat comes not with infamy but with irrelevancy. It’s difficult to understand and even more difficult to practice, but the art of not playing is perhaps one of the most important to master.

Evil, and Why I Blog

Published by Graham on June 18, 2016

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.

Good Times With Bad Games

Published by Graham on May 28, 2016

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.