June 16, 2022 • 46 mins
We talk with Kyle Flannery from Strange Matters about the implicit and sometimes explicit politics hidden in board games like Settlers of Catan.
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Speaker 1 (00:06):
Here we go, it could happen. Here's the podcast where
our intros get increasingly more segmented as you've realized we
have no idea who was going to do the intro. Yeah,
we've never, at no point during the existence of this
show or its growth, have we have we planned a
(00:28):
single thing or talked about how to do our jobs.
I've never. I don't even know who we who we are?
Um we are all meeting for the first time. UM.
I have that disease that Adam Sandler has or what's
her name has in that Adam Sandler movie where he
forgets she forgets everything every day. That's me. But Drew Barrymore,
is that that's right? That's right, Cherie, Drew Barrymore, So
(00:48):
I forgot, I forgot. I can just is it the
same thing as a Memento, because that's all I can
think of. Yes, Adam Sandler and Memento. Yes, Adam Sandler's
Memento favorite movie. Well, we should probably introduce the episode today. Yeah,
so it's me. It's good for long and today we're
doing an episode that is uh you know, okay, we
(01:12):
we we've we've we've we've been forced feeding you really
grim stuff for a long time. So today we working
to an episode about southern colonialism and politics and board
games because that's also extremely cool and it does not
I mean, it is kind of depressing, but it involves
less doom than normal. And yeah, and with me talk
(01:32):
about this. That it is is Sharine or our wonderful
producer who also writes for us and is great and
we love thanks. I'm here. Yeah, and Robert who we
we tolerate. H Oh, that's nice to you. You shouldn't,
but we we do. Kyle, it's nice to meet you. Yeah.
(01:53):
And also we have a Kyle from Strange Matters. Yes, yes,
I'm Kyle Flannery. I'm my editor and co owner of
Strange Matters magazine. A. I guess we technically have now launched,
even with the print issues are not in people's hands,
a new leftist culture and politics magazine here to be
uh the consulting super nerd uh awesome. Yeah, I am
(02:18):
very sad. I mean, well, okay, I feel like weirdly
for a group of people that I'm in, I have
probably played the least board games of anyone here, which
is man. Yeah. So when when I was a kid,
my my board game was risk. Yeah, I did a
bunch of others. I played like he re Quest and
obviously Access and I'll say I say I played Access
(02:40):
and Allies. I set up Access and Allies boards many
a time and then gave up after like fifteen minutes
of playing it. I mean, that's that's how That's how
I played here. Request, Yeah, because I was request rule
book and I was like, I have no idea what's
going on here? But um no, specifically my fucking thing.
We would speech and debate eight tournaments, you know, because
(03:02):
when you do it, you're basically out for a whole weekend,
sometimes three days, sometimes like four, um, and you're basically
living in this school. But but you have like maybe
one or two hours of stuff per day and the
rest of the time you're just hanging around hearing how
your friends are doing. Is like, the competition goes on
and we would play epic specifically Lord of the Rings Risk.
We would have these massive risk games. Oh I have Yeah,
(03:24):
I have very good memories playing Lord of the Rings
risk with my friends. Yeah. I just had the normal
vanilla risk woll I was really missing out. I just
thinctly remember being at a bachelor party where h After
we finished all the normal bachelor party stuff, we crawled
back to the place where everybody's gonna camp out for
the night, and so we managed to convince one of
the other groomsmen that a game of risk when it
(03:47):
takes about an hour. I did, like, like it was
like three in the morning. Yeah, that's the wedding that day. Yeah,
it was like three on the day of the wedding.
It was an act of extraordinary cruelty. Anyway, didn't get married,
but he didn't take Comchotka, which is really key to
(04:07):
his his plans to assault North America. We we, we
shockingly did all make it to the wedding, which was
very much a risk, very much a risk. Yeah, very
much a risk. Uh yeah, that's why it's called that. Yeah,
I was I was smart enough to just go, no,
I'm going to bed. I'm not doing three a m risk.
(04:27):
That's not happy. But yeah, I guess to kind of
back up in front a little bit of context about
why I kind of thought this was so worth talking about,
because I'm guessing that there's some readers at home who
are having a very common thought, which is, why why
are you talking about board games? Like who cares um.
And you know, I reminded a little bit of the
(04:48):
little tweet joke from a while ago of a couple
of years ago. Whm I talking about a little while
ago of on Star Trek they have the uh you know,
we've got there. What do they call that? The Holi Deck? Uh?
They about the Holida Deck. And but for some reason,
every week everybody's into some weird new board game. What
the hell's going on with that? Uh? And for the
people who aren't aware of this kind of sector of nerddom,
(05:13):
board games are actually massively more popular than they were
when I was a child, when osmlenules were young. And
a large part of that posh has actually been from
game developers themselves. The people who make your video games
absolutely fucking love board games. Uh. And it's for a
pretty simple reason, which is that you know, all of
the rules to the game. Board games are naked before
(05:34):
your eyes. You have you have stripped them down to
their their atomic components before you have done anything. And
that means that if you are interested in the art
of how a game works, uh, they're actually wonderful case
studies because you can see very quickly the way that
you move from what the mechanic is doing to like
what it means, Whereas in a video game that can
be a lot more obscure, it can be a lot
(05:55):
more complicated, uh, and it requires it can require a
lot of digging. You don't have to, you know, I
am enough of a turb owner that I have broken
into the game's files for video Verius video games, I've
played and ripped out the code and looked at it
and been like, so that's the drop rate Because again
I'm a consulting turb owner here. But with the board game,
(06:16):
you don't have to do that. You just know all
of the rules up front. Uh, and so you know
if you're uh. And so that that's you know, reveal.
I can reveal a lot about what the designer's intentions are,
what they're communicating, and how that communication all works. So
that's that was kind of my start point here. Should
I just keep on going and explain what the hell
is going on with this article that I'm about? Yeah,
(06:36):
I mean, I was going to note that the primary
board game played in Star Trek T and G was
was was Stratagema in the uh, the classic episode in
which data has to get really good at what is
basically holographic chess. Um. Yes, anyway, you talked about Star
(06:57):
Trek the Next Generation, So now that's that's all. It's good.
It's good that we didn't get into the awful board
games from d S nine. Oh god, yeah, there's I mean,
Strategy a M is pretty ridiculous and the episode is
very silly, but it's it's one of the more fun
data episodes episode from DS nine. I think it's really
considered the worst episode in all of d S nine. Yeah, yeah,
(07:20):
I mean there's I think the worst episode of Star
Trek the Next Generation is not the board game, but
it's the one where Riker and his dad fight in
what's basically American gladiator jud where they have to have
the bandit sticks that they have to fight the ultimate
martial art. Anyone, please continue? So so talk. So I
wrote this article that has is upcoming in publication. It's
(07:41):
going to be in our first issue, uh, And it's
about a particular trend that I noticed in board games
that there were a lot of board games that were
in terms of what was actually going on on the board,
they were incredibly violent, but they managed to make it
look like there was no violence going on. And so
(08:02):
I actually I am grateful for Robert for talking about
the games that you talked about, you know, access and
Allies and risk. Uh, even like Monopoly. These are games
that are in was generally known as the American tradition,
where the goal is to eliminate all the opposing players
to be the last last one standing. Yes, like everything
in American it is like one person wins by using
(08:22):
either violence or capitalism on the You you survive, you
outsurvive all of your opponents. Uh. Because that is what
we do in America. We just survive. We just pray
to God that there is somehow a tomorrow and by God,
they're going to take Comchatka. Political stance as an American
is that we will take the Comchatka Peninsula and we're
(08:42):
going to take Australia for those three extra armies that
Australia strategies. Uh. I feel like half the risk strategy,
half their experience I saw, were just waste to nerve
the Australia strategy. Uh. But um, in any event that
there's a European tradition uh. And one of the things
that has been a lot that's been very popular, has
made an absolute shitload of money over the last several years,
(09:04):
shipload being very relative because again, board games are pretty
small field compared to video games or gambling or booze
or something like that. Um, but even kind of the
dominant name in the game. And uh, one of the
kind of major conceits of this style game is you
don't elimit other players. All players. Any player who starts
the game at the table is going to end the
game at the table. You you never limited anybody, and
(09:26):
this is I think an admillable enough goal. Yeah, that's
one of the things that's annoying about a lot of
games is like if you're trying to do a party
thing and people are getting eliminated. Although it can be fun,
if everyone is drinking at the same time and while
you play the game, people get eliminated and then get
drunker and heckle everyone else at the table. That's actually
not bad. That's actually not bad. I remember it being
like middle school in high school, where you just have
(09:46):
somebody sitting there bitterly four hours. Well, you try to
clean up a risk game. Um. Anyway, the one that
most people are probably the one that is the most famous,
infamous is sellers of kat Um, and that's kind of
what's my start point. Sellers of katan Is is a
board game where you play as European colonizers to a
(10:07):
almost uninhabited islands and almost uninhabited island, and you cannot
damage the other players directly. There is no mechanism for
doing this. You can block them off from building things,
you can never send him. I always go hard on
the roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can block people with roads.
It's a very like it's kind of like like about
(10:29):
like a rivalry between developers almost. But one of the
things that that is kind of outstanding about this is that, uh,
it's not a technically on inhabit island. There is a
quote robber that starts out on the island, uh, and
the robbert is capable of inflicting violence on the players
and it can be sort of controlled by the players.
(10:51):
And so the part that was again striking to me
about this is you can't directly you know, this would
actually be the right number players of me. Chris, Sherene,
and Robert were all sitting at a table will playing
out of katan I could not eliminate any of them.
None of them could eliminate me. We could not harm
each other directly. We can just negotiate with each other,
we can trade with each other, but there's still ultimately
a winner. And uh, you know this is if you
(11:13):
are willing to make some some kind of specific historical
amnesia about how colonials am actually operated, where you know,
like wars of colonial aggression also included like wars in
Germany like the Seven Years War, or you know, the
wars of Spanish succession. We're all happening at the same time,
but you can, you know, it can be viewed as
similar to that. And again it has this explicit theming,
(11:36):
and that is I do think that those things, those
things are dealvetailing together, right that the only people who
are real people are the colonizers. The colonized are non agentic.
They're just set. They're they're they're setting um. And the
more you think about it, it's just it's just kind
(11:56):
of messed up. It's it's just kind of it's kind
of messed up. And I do think it's kind of
interesting that, h the game doesn't really say this very explicitly, right, um.
And I know, I know there's going to be somebody's
going to say, oh, you know the game says rob
or it doesn't say Native American. How can you know?
It's like, come on, man, if you watched a movie
(12:18):
where there was some there was a group of people
in the movie who were portrayed as violent and incapable
of acting on their own, and all of these racist tropes,
even if they were not played by Native American actor,
even if they didn't use an explicit Native American references.
If all of the good guys are people who dispossessed
this person, you know what's going on. People don't look
(12:41):
at the tempest and see Caliban and go this person
has nothing to do with the Americans that yeah, yeah,
uncivilized like civility or like civilians in general. They come
from somewhere else and they inhabit the place. But yeah,
you're right, like just like Columbus discovered America, the natives
are based like it's it's it's a blank slate as
(13:03):
far as white settlers are concerned, and like the positionality,
like like the game is very explicit about who is
a settler and who is not. Right, the settlers are
you and everyone else playing the game, and then you
have the other person who's on the island who got
here before you? And it's like, yeah, I mean the
name is pretty blunt, like you are, like you know,
(13:26):
there's no I don't know. It's it's very it's very
hard to evade. And you know, like you can see
the art from the game, like it's all white people. Uh,
and it's it's it's kind of interesting cause in the
first edition printing they're all kind of medieval, but in
later editions they're like colonial America. Like it's I don't
think it's like it requires some very deliberate uptuseness to
miss that this is what's going on. Um. And uh
(13:50):
So anyway that that has um that was that was
released like twenty something years ago. Uh. I find it
very funny that settlers of Katan managed to win games
with the Year awards in both two thousand and five.
Like it hasn't changed, mud, I don't know. Yeah, those
those are different years, Like what's going on? Definitely? Yeah,
(14:13):
they did add boats. They did add boats. That's true.
You're not you're not wrong about you don't. You don't
you don't have boats? Come on, that's true. Actually, it's funny.
My neighbors have a boat. I do not have a
boat because I'm a regular person who doesn't have lived
next to a lake. M Oh yeah, yeah, I also
do not have a boat. So yeah, I briefly had
(14:37):
a commute to work that I could have kayaked, but
I don't know to kayak. That's New York baby. I
developed a desire to have a boat last year because yeah,
I was in Spain and I met a Spanish guy
with a boat, and that does seem like the life.
But that's neither you're You're You're horrible descend into turning
into some sort of Hemmingway adjacent character. Yeah, just just
(15:00):
I mean it is. It is nice to be drunk
on about. It's also very expensive to have about, So
maybe I'll get drunk on an inflatable raft instead. I
just get a sunfish and just flip it over every
thirty seconds. Um, the working man's boat. Yeah, the working
man's boat. Um. But yeah, and uh so so from there,
I kind of what has happened is unsurprisingly that, you know,
(15:23):
board games are actually kind of a summit demographic art
form compared to video games, because all you really needed
some paper, Like really, that's all you need? You need
some paper? Uh, and you can make a board game. Uh,
if you have tabletop simulator, do you just need tabletop simulator,
You're already done, like uh, and then you just need
to be able to bully people into play testing your game.
And that's really the hard part. Uh. But you know,
(15:45):
so this means that, you know, people will iterate on
things pretty quickly. You know, so very like fan fiction environment,
people will will iterate rather quickly on your ideas and
develop them further. Um. And so I looked through some
of the other games that I've played and liked, and uh,
you know, I actually tend to like pretty much all
the games that I studied. Splendor is the one that
(16:07):
is very fun, very casual, very easy, and it just
says this art that bugs me, this art that really
bugs me where it's about being a gem trader. And
it's very much seems to be based on Renaissance Italy
or like renaissance on TWERP you know this and m
for some reason, like you don't see people in minds.
(16:30):
It's very weird. All of the there will be pictures
of minds. It's like, okay, you bought this emerald mind
and there's like nobody there, which is very weird because
I have seen pictures of pre industrial I've seen pictures
of minds from the nineteen eighties, which is firmly industrial,
where there are thousands of people you can barely see
the ground, you know, thousands of people everywhere. You know,
(16:51):
mining is very labor intensive. Um, you only start seeing
mining become kind of like capital intensive, like very recently,
and even then only really in the United States and
a couple of other countries. Germany obviously uses very capital
intensive mining. Everywhere else it's very very labor intensive, but splendor.
They won't show you the people doing the mining, but
they will show you the people short sorting the gems,
(17:14):
which is just skipping the slavery part exactly, exactly the
part they're skipping. Yeah, it's even today, like you ignore
what your how your cell phone is made, right, You're
just like you're glossing over the unflattering parts and going
straight to making a gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're you're
going straight to you know, I've I've you know, I've
got my my pretty purple cell phone, you know, and
(17:37):
the the part where you know, there was yeah, pretty
much of war in the Congo fought over it, and
then they had to install suicide nets in China gets
completely glossed over and all that stuff goes into this phone.
But uh, you know, to me, it's just kind of
a necessary hunk of plastic and metal for surviving in America. Um,
(18:00):
And I you know, I'm not entirely I don't want
to be too hard on the designers here. It's very
like there's a part of me that wants to be
and there's a part of me that wants to be
kind of forgiving and being like do you really want
to be playing this like fun casual game and like
be confronted with slavery. Uh, But at the same time,
like but yeah, you you really try to have it
(18:23):
both ways here, Like this is like I don't make
the game about something actually fun, not yeah, not something
that well. I mean there are there and there are
people who do that. You know, It's like not that
hard to find people like making games about like theme
parks or like haunted houses or utopian or like like
weird like utopian arcologies and stuff like that. Like people
(18:44):
make these things. But like so this, uh, this colonialism
keeps on like coming back, and part of that, you know,
part of that is I guess like all sci fi
is kind of colonialist. But wait before we go, do
you know what else keeps coming back? You know what?
Tell me what? Sure? You capitalism? It's time for an
(19:05):
ad break and there's still more capitalism. But that's true,
that's true different capitalism. Yeah, right now we're we're in
like more early capitalism. And uh so the the game
(19:29):
that like really stuck in my cra all the weirdest
and uh, I might end up reading a quote out
from here. I'm sorry for being an incredibly irritating person
and doing that as a game called Mombassa. Um, and uh,
Mombassa is so aggressive about how colonialist it is. It
is so so aggressive. The premise of the game is
(19:49):
that you are adventurers in the Scramble for Africa, and
the goal is to be the player who retires the richest. Uh.
And the ways in which the mechanics of this game
are messed up, uh, the part of the mechanics that
I will say is genuinely clever. And if they hadn't
(20:11):
made it about the Scramble for Africa, I would have
like no, I would just be like, yeah, cool. So
I still have to admit that this is this as
cool is that you start out working for a different
joint stock company. But anybody can buy shares in anybody
else's joint stock company. So the best strategy is to
buy somebody else's company and then they make the company
valuable and you contribute as little as possible. Free rider problem.
(20:33):
You know, the classic of game theory that the liberal
economists fucking love talking about. Uh. Great thing to do
with the game. But the way you make your company
valuable is like it's it's pillaging Africa. Like like it's
pillaging Africa, and it's it's very very weird, Like there's
you have this map of Africa in front of you,
and the map of Africa has valuable things in it has,
(20:56):
you know, diamonds that you can pick up. It has
like there are books, which is unclear if that represents
Like you write an adventure novel like King Solomon's Minds,
or you write a naturalist guide, or you write an ethnography,
but you're writing some sort of book that is based
on how you despoiled the African continent. Uh. And what
(21:17):
what always struck me is so weird is that the
territory is just when you enter the territory. You just
take everything, you just you just pillage it. It's not
like territory that you hold and really make more productive.
You don't develop it. There's at least it's honest about
that to a certain extent. At least it's honest that
like the Europeans were lying about any of that development,
(21:37):
civilizingnition ship like that they were there to steal um
and But what is so so weird to me about
it is that like there's there's no resistance, there's no
risk to expanding across the continent, there's no negotiation. The
only other characters at all are the other players, the
(21:58):
other Europeans. Uh. You know this continent that at the
time had hundreds of millions of people, uh, many of
whom had legitimate kingdoms that in some parts of Africa
where you know, had full gunpowder militaries just totally glossed over,
just totally not not mechanically represented at all. Um. Well,
(22:19):
it's like they're only there, they're portraying the only future
that that is possible. Like you know what I mean,
this is how you become a civilization. There's no other
that there's one path um I mean, is there is
one path to being a civilization, and it does involve
a lot of taking other people ship. To be fair, No,
(22:42):
I said that ironically, Robert, I know, I said in
their mind there is one path, yes, but I do
feel like I've got to read this out from the
rule book because it was like so hypopic to me.
This is this is from the rule book. This is
the start of the rule book, the opening quote. In
one Bassa players are choir shares of chartered companies based
in Mombasa, Cape Town St. Louis and Cairo and spread
(23:04):
their tailing pasts throughout the African continent in order to
earn the most money. Chartered companies were associations formed for
the purpose of exploration, trade, and colonization, which links them
inextricably to a very dark shafter in human history, global colonialism.
This period rough lasted roughly from the fifteenth century to
the middle of twentieth century and is associated with exploitation
and slavery. Although Mombasa is loosely set within this timeframe,
(23:26):
it is not a historical simulation is a strategy game
with an economic focus that roughly refers to historical categories
and places them in a fictional setting. The exploitation of
the African continent and its people is not explicitly depicted
within the gameplay. If you want to learn more about
the underlying history, we recommend the following read History of
Modern Africa Each hundred Depressent by Richard J. Reid uh
(23:48):
end quote. So they fucking new, but like they fucking
knew that there is some evil, evil ship that they
have made into a game, and they want you to
know that they knew that you that you were going
to call them. It's like making like a candy Land
version set in the Congo where you have to collect
hands or rubber and being like, yeah, you can read
(24:11):
a book about this if you want. Yeah, this is
like it's such a cop out. It's like it's so bizarre,
Like it's so bizarry not how many people even read
this stuff, like like generously. One person I've ever before
reads the rule book when you're wearing a board game,
like like very generously. Like I'm just a huge nerd
who likes reading this stuff, and I would just like
(24:33):
read this in my jaw was just like holy shit,
I think you could try. It might even be wisdom
and trying to like make a board game about the
Scramble for Africa that's like framed in like a kid
friendly way, but is also like very blatantly horrific. It's
just like the kind of thing that if you think
(24:54):
about it ten seconds, I was like, oh, we're just
like subjugating and massacreing people. But it's also like the
the art style is like themed off of candy Land
or some sort of ship like maybe, but even then
you're probably more likely to just get people enjoying it
on ironically than you are to actually convince anybody to
read about the Scramble for Africa. Well yeah, yeah, I mean,
(25:15):
and well it's actually kind of interesting because there's a
there's like a good tradition of like making like kid
friendly appearing things that are actually quite horrifying if you
think about them for more than two seconds. And yeah,
well Monopoly for example. And I mean, I was going
to take a slight turn away from board games. I
grew up with red the Red Wall books. Yes, yeah,
the Red Wall books. Like even though like stoats are
(25:39):
not a race of people in real life, they are
a type of weasel, uh holy ship, those books managed
to be incredibly racist. It really is racist against like
different types of weasel. But uh, you know they portrayed
this is this very cute see world of you know, animals,
you know, noise and badgers and stuff, and they're just
committing genocide left and right. It's just portray is like
(26:02):
totally okay, it's just like someone who has no idea
what you're talking about. This is crazy. Yeah, popular children's
series and like the eighties and nineties, you know, I
read this book. It was like, yeah, it's like you
flipped back and forth between like, yeah, here is Martin
the mouse and he's the hero, and also he's eating
all of this really nice food and then also we
must exterminate like entire species. It's buck wild. It is insane. Uh.
(26:29):
The Red Wall Feast spot, by the way, it's like
a really good Twitter follow. We're just post excerpts from
the food descriptions. Those are incredible. Um. But the reason
why I kind of made that turn is that one
of the games I considered that I actually really liked
is uh something of a post something of an anti
colonial game called root uh. And this was part of
the part of what I was kind of witnessing over
(26:50):
as I was studying these is that there is a
bit of a discourse, a bit of a development over time.
Uh and uh. Two of the games that I highlighted,
Roots and Spirit Island are kind of are are fairly
anti clonial and Root is a kind of horrifying game
but with very cute see appearances. You know, you play
as like mice and cats and and birds. Uh. And
(27:13):
the birds are like like horrifying aristocrats. Uh, like like
you're like a feudal military dictatorship. The cats are like
trying to turn the entire force into like a giant
woodcutting factory and like subjugate everybody else under the boot
heel of like industrial capitalism. And you can play as
just like the concept of revolution, I guess, like like
(27:41):
there's a woodlanda lions who win the game by like
provoking revolts of the civilian population to overthrow the other two. Uh.
It's it's very weird. It's a very very violent game
by by comparison, it's very hard to lonato player in it.
But it was kind of interesting to me to see
that like you can do it's kind of almost the
the exact opposite, where it is like a lot of
(28:02):
like it doesn't have it has this very obviously horrifying
and graphically violent mechanics, uh, you know, revolutions and subjugation,
but with like the characters look cute, like all the
all the character art is very cute. Um. You know,
you've got like a little mice like making pungee traps
(28:25):
and stuff in the It's very odd. Yeah, I kinda
I kind of jumped a little bit ahead here, but
I don't know that we need to go through the
everything I did in this in this paper that's a
little bit boring, and also we need to leave things
for the readers. And actually Root is uh a little
bit based on a game series that I think would
be particularly appealing to uh, to Robert uh and possibly
(28:49):
the listeners. There's a company called GMT Games. Anybody else
heard of them? These guys are interesting continue tea games
make games like Kuba Libre, a four player asymmetric warfare
about the Cuban Revolution. UM and of ways, yes yes
(29:12):
multiple I one once as the Mafia, which was an
interesting side to play in the UM an interesting and
interesting series of interest to have. Uh. You know, I
could not build an army for ship. I just had
to count on the fact that other people didn't think
it was worth destroying casinos because they're too busy trying
to stamp out revolutionaries um and or their revolutionaries trying
(29:34):
to stamp out fascists. And it was a they're a
very the reason why I think they're very weird companies
that you know, I think they're They are games like
Kuba Libre, Twilight Struggle, A Distant Plane, which is about
the war in Afghanistan. But they also are like these
guys are like Quantico psychos. Uh, they actually they are
(29:55):
the guys who make the actual four real war games
that the Pentagon you yeah, yeah, Quantico if you're not
up on things, is like the part of the Virginia
area kind of a suburb of d C where all
of the all of like the Fed FEDS live. Like
I'm not talking about like border patrol FEDS or ship
(30:15):
I'm talking like, uh, fucking CIA, motherfucker's Capital f Feds. Yeah.
Isn't the CIA is like training facility there? Yes, they have,
and I think at the FBI also has a facility
in quantity the Capital f Feds. All the agents are there. Yeah. Yeah,
don't think of like like your inspectors here. Yeah, I
(30:40):
mean look well. And also just like we're not primarily
talking about like the door kickers, We're talking about the
people who are like the doing the really scary ship.
You know. I will say, though, if if we gave
Osha like CIA powers, the world would be in an
obviously better place. I think we hand them the nukes.
I think we hand them the nukes and a mandate
to use them. If purity procedures aren't followed. Not cleaning
(31:03):
your counter after using chicken, that's the end of Detroit.
You know, there goes San Francisco. Uh, you didn't clean
your food cart well enough? You know, pretty soon collective
of punishment, but just for workplace violations. Yeah, collective punishment
for like basic sanitation violations. I mean, in a way,
not following sanitation does lead to collective punishment, whether or
(31:25):
not you have a federal enforcement for it or not.
That's right. He's the deployment of our nation's nuclear assets. Uh.
Do you know what else is collective punishment? Capitalism? Yes,
listening to ads? Yeah, so let's all endure it together.
(31:53):
We've been collectively punished. Solidarity all all all of us
who must endure advertising. Yes, um, yes, I have been
I've been rambling a lot, and UM, yeah, like I said,
I find this this question of who gets to be
an agent to be very important. Who who gets to
(32:16):
be a player? Who is even given the choice of winning?
You know if if you're not a player, you're completely
written off from the possibility of ever winning. Um. And
you know this is something that like in in video games,
we've seen recurring debates around this, you know, like civilization
is an infamous one for this. You know, who even
gets to be a civilization? Um? Why are some civilization
civilizations and some city states and some barbarians? Um? And
(32:42):
you know it does uh, you know, it does shape
your thinking, you know. And there's there's games are very
valuable for how they create empathy. You know, a game
that can really immerse you can really teach you a
lot of very free, even powerful empathy for groups of
people that you might never have the chance to interact with. Ah.
(33:05):
And then when you keep on creating games that ask
you to empathize with the colonizers, mm hmm. Yeah, you
think it's just the normal way of things. This is
what this is what happens. This is the succession of
events that leads to humans yeah, this session of events
leads the humans. Those who do not participate simply die out.
Uh this is brainwashing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It
(33:28):
is And I mean it's it's you know, you can
the same could be said of all culture. But you know,
I think it's worth being um informed in critical consumers UM.
And I mean I actually do you know? I actually
you know, I know that you wanted this to be
an uplifting episode. And I'm going to be optimistic here.
I I you know, it's not just that we're talking
(33:48):
about stuftware. The stakes are not literal death. The stakes
are you know, getting mad at your friends overboard game.
But also I do think that, uh, we have seen
positive development of people take king of people looking at
these games. You know, there's a game developer who said
about some of the games who was playing, Uh, what
do the locals think about these colonizers, Like, it's pretty
(34:11):
rude that nobody's asking them and tried to design starting
from there. And I have some criticisms of how he
executed that, how well he executed on that vision. But
the fact of the matter is is that even just
through the sheer iteration of somebody looking at a game
like Settlers of Katan and going well, how can I
do this different? You know, I can't just release the
(34:34):
same game every single year. I need to do something new,
and even just a simple one of just reversing who
is the players simple enough, even that has been creating
some iteration in some some additional complexity, which and and
has caused people. I have seen people, you know, go
back and re examine. Even if they're not people who
have any sort of like education, any sort of formal
(34:54):
education in anthropology of post colonial theory, they will they'll
look at like, oh, yeah, I was playing this game
same where you're the colonize, and I played this other
game where they reverse the roles, and I was like,
that was the bad guys earlier. Yeah, I mean I
think portray the other side and maybe winning means you
(35:15):
kick them out or or destroy them. I would like
to see that play out versus that is Spirit Island.
That is what Spirit Island is, that the players cooperate
to destroy the colonizers or to terrorize them into abandoning
the island. Uh, weird game, weird game. I have some
I think there's some good execution in there. Some critics
and I've got some criticisms of it is my favorite,
(35:36):
but it does do some things a little bit well patronizing.
But um but yeah, like yeah, like that's that's something
I think is worth seeing and uh and I think
it's something that um Admittedly, maybe I just really enjoyed
this the space of the world because you know, if
you look at very mainstream video games, for example, kind
(35:56):
of bored of the same, like five feeling the same
five games get released every here, you know, there's some texture,
give me something new. But um, also, I think that
I think that the I think there's some cost for
optimism for people like critically examining the art that they're building,
the art that they're consuming, in the art that they're creating.
And I don't know that counting on that kind of stochastic,
(36:20):
bouncy ball randomness of people just kind of spontaneously going
what if we what if we uh played what if
we reverse the roles in Call of Duty? You know
what if we played the people living in the Fafollo, Well,
call of Duty is happening on in the background. Just
kind of on the randomness of that happening. Uh, might
not be as fast as people want. I wish, I wish. Oh. Yeah,
(36:43):
there was a game called I think it was I
think it was called This Is War. Maybe it's called
This War of Mine. That's what it was. That's a
good game. That's a really well done game. Yeah. Yeah,
and there's I'm I'm I don't know. I'm I did
to see the future of all this stuff, and I'm
excited to see where people go with this. Well, Chris,
(37:05):
I have a question, why did you decide to even
bring on Kyle, Like what do you what what is
it about this topic that you think is prevalent today? What?
What what can we take away from this? Well? I
think I don't know. I think one of the things
that I got was reading the article is about like
(37:25):
one of the ways, like one of the things you
see in how set colonialism gets perpetuated, And I think, um,
why am I now forgetting the name of the Yeah,
declonization is not a metaphor talks about this a lot,
which Yeah, I'll talk about that another time someday. But
(37:48):
like one of the things that you get like immediately
is the sort of is that the settler move to innocence,
And that strikes me as like the sort of it's
the kind of like it's it's, it's the kind of
perspective that you see, I think running across all of
these board games, and I think it it is actually
(38:09):
really helpful to sort of you know, like the way
you break that and then the way you start to
get actually that actually looks like the colonization. It has
to start with people like actually like realizing what they're
doing and not being able to sort of like retreat
to this position of innocence and being sort of confronted
by it. And I think that like that that is
a place where media can actually like be very helpful
(38:31):
because you know, like most and most mostly like it's it's, it's,
it's almost always working in the opposite direction, right, But
it's something where you can actually have this sort of
I don't know, it's it's a part of the cultural
spirit where you could like very like very easily put
someone into a role that is not the one that
(38:51):
they're normally doing and get them to like realize that
like what they're doing is like fucked. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean I could say the first when I was
in high school and played playing sellers in for the
first time, I didn't realize the like it took me
a while to understand that, like, oh, I'm a colonial
(39:11):
list yeah, territory. Uh. And well because they yeah, they
present it as default innocence and also just like exciting too.
There's no there's no backstory to how you get the
wood or the ore or or anything else. You just
like somehow build a road, you somehow have a town.
There is no backstory as to who you're destroying in
(39:33):
the process. And I think it infiltrates in your mind
to the point where you subconsciously just deemed that as normal.
And it's it's definitely not unique, you know, it's definitely
like it's only just another tendril of reinforcing stuff that
we hear from the rest of our culture so broadly
you know that that it's it's just this is just
one aspect, one expression, I should say, of how many
(39:57):
millions of different ways we get colonialism reinforced to us
as a normal, natural part of the world. And uh.
And you know, from cowboy movies to uh to just
like the way the New York Times will write about
who owns land and who's who has a who has
(40:18):
a viable claim on owning a piece of land. Uh.
All of that we get reinforced us in our fiction
are nonfiction every day. Um. I guess again that's part
of I guess why I was drawn to board games
in particular for this, because it's so transparent. You know,
it's so transparent, how all how the all the propaganda
works like it's not there's no movie magic. Yeah, yeah,
(40:42):
the rules are all there. It's it's pretty much. I
don't know, but yeah, but you you sympathized with and
I didn't call you, you empathize with the colonizer because
there who you're who you are. Yeah, you want to win,
you want to win, you want to win. I'm very competative. Uh.
Um and and uh and you know, and they get
(41:04):
to and the people who may get to have this
kind of like discourse that this kind of badge of
like oh yeah, we made like the friendly board game.
You know, they're comparing themselves to you know, making Monopoly,
where like there's like a chance of a divorce happening
every time somebody finishes the game of Monopoly. Uh. And
you know, they get to porture themselves as the nice ones,
and it's like, yeah, we're the nice ones because all
the people who were being mean to don't get a
(41:26):
vorce at all. I just can't believe we made a
game about paying rent, Like, I really cannot believe that.
I history of it because it's very funny. I skimmed
in your in your articles like about it a little bit.
But it was called something that was much more to
the point. What was it called the Landlord's Game? Excuse me, yeah,
(41:48):
the landlords Game by Elizabeth Maggie. She was a Georgiast
activist in the like early twentieth century. Close my mind,
fucking George just a whole well, I mean this monopoly,
Monopoly being the most relevant contribution of Georgism to world
history is somehow incredibly fitting. Let's all look away from it,
(42:14):
brutal the number one selling economics book of American history.
Because you're used to a very bad board game, I
can't say it's unfair, and I guess that that's really
what I've got is that like it's I think it's
still I think it's very valuable to um be a
critical consumer um and um one. Bosston maybe went over
(42:37):
the line, but for the most part, these games haven't
like ruined my ability to enjoy them. If my friends
want to play a game slan, they might just get
an annoying lecture from me. But they're going to get
annoying lecture from me anyway, it just would be about
something else. I mean, it's like any media. It's like
phil and TV or whatever. You're going to realize eventually
that you should be conscious of what you're consuming. So yeah,
I'll still get into arguments about all those things, except
(42:59):
for except for podcasts. People should blindly consume our podcast well,
I mean, I mean, yes, podcasts are the only true
proletarian art form. That's right. That's right. As Karl Mark said,
listen to this podcast like can the subscribe share us
on Facebook? And then and then eventually one day podcast
will wither away into bolish itself. Yeah, that's right, that's right,
(43:22):
classic Marxist podcast theory. That's right, that's right. M is
that the episode? Well, Kyle, where can people find you? Yes?
I I personally am notoriously hard to find on the internet,
being a person who doesn't have any social media whatsoever.
Absolutely the right call. I I have been off of
(43:45):
Twitter for a couple of days. I'm taking a break.
And the best best decision you could make get away
from all our Our publication is at Strange Matters dot
co op. We worked hard to get that dot co
op registry. Uh. We just published on Thurs a couple
of days ago. Uh, love as a verb in article
(44:07):
reviewing uh and um extrand expanding the possibilities of bell
Hooks All About Love two thousand books All about Love,
which is worth reading both the both the review and
the book. Yeah. I actually just finished it um four
hours ago. Yeah, I arned up for the first time
during the pandemic. It wash it in lightning. Read It's
in lightning read. Uh. We we tend to have a
(44:30):
lot of really insane economics stuff if you want to
like read some truly insane ship about money, about where
money comes from and what money is and what we
can do about money. Uh. We've oh boy, we've got
you covered. Uh we have. We have a profile of
(44:50):
Roberts where we have rendered him as a Baron Munchausen
very flatteringly. Uh. A really wonderful review of three different
cyberpunk works by the wonderful anti fascist author Elizabeth sanderfor UM. Yeah,
so please come come check us out at Strange Matters
dot co op. If for we are. We are taking
(45:12):
new writers all the time. Uh, and we've got submission
guidelines on there. And uh, if you want to personally
send me hate mail for besmirching the good honor of
settlers of Katan, I can be reached at Kyle at
Strange Matters dot co op. Oh, and we do have
a Twitter for the for the company. Yeah, what's your
what's the Twitter for the company? It is Strange Underscore
(45:35):
Matters perfectly, Thanks Kyle. Check out Strange Matters contribute to
their fundraiser. I can't I can't recommend doing anything on Twitter,
so I simply uh and thank you, thank you for
having me on again. It's a it was a lovely time. Yeah,
absolutely all right again, as as as with every episode,
(45:58):
go with christ Kay. It could Happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
cool zone Media dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.
Here we go, it could happen. Here's the podcast where
our intros get increasingly more segmented as you've realized we
have no idea who was going to do the intro. Yeah,
we've never, at no point during the existence of this
show or its growth, have we have we planned a
(00:28):
single thing or talked about how to do our jobs.
I've never. I don't even know who we who we are?
Um we are all meeting for the first time. UM.
I have that disease that Adam Sandler has or what's
her name has in that Adam Sandler movie where he
forgets she forgets everything every day. That's me. But Drew Barrymore,
is that that's right? That's right, Cherie, Drew Barrymore, So
(00:48):
I forgot, I forgot. I can just is it the
same thing as a Memento, because that's all I can
think of. Yes, Adam Sandler and Memento. Yes, Adam Sandler's
Memento favorite movie. Well, we should probably introduce the episode today. Yeah,
so it's me. It's good for long and today we're
doing an episode that is uh you know, okay, we
(01:12):
we we've we've we've we've been forced feeding you really
grim stuff for a long time. So today we working
to an episode about southern colonialism and politics and board
games because that's also extremely cool and it does not
I mean, it is kind of depressing, but it involves
less doom than normal. And yeah, and with me talk
(01:32):
about this. That it is is Sharine or our wonderful
producer who also writes for us and is great and
we love thanks. I'm here. Yeah, and Robert who we
we tolerate. H Oh, that's nice to you. You shouldn't,
but we we do. Kyle, it's nice to meet you. Yeah.
(01:53):
And also we have a Kyle from Strange Matters. Yes, yes,
I'm Kyle Flannery. I'm my editor and co owner of
Strange Matters magazine. A. I guess we technically have now launched,
even with the print issues are not in people's hands,
a new leftist culture and politics magazine here to be
uh the consulting super nerd uh awesome. Yeah, I am
(02:18):
very sad. I mean, well, okay, I feel like weirdly
for a group of people that I'm in, I have
probably played the least board games of anyone here, which
is man. Yeah. So when when I was a kid,
my my board game was risk. Yeah, I did a
bunch of others. I played like he re Quest and
obviously Access and I'll say I say I played Access
(02:40):
and Allies. I set up Access and Allies boards many
a time and then gave up after like fifteen minutes
of playing it. I mean, that's that's how That's how
I played here. Request, Yeah, because I was request rule
book and I was like, I have no idea what's
going on here? But um no, specifically my fucking thing.
We would speech and debate eight tournaments, you know, because
(03:02):
when you do it, you're basically out for a whole weekend,
sometimes three days, sometimes like four, um, and you're basically
living in this school. But but you have like maybe
one or two hours of stuff per day and the
rest of the time you're just hanging around hearing how
your friends are doing. Is like, the competition goes on
and we would play epic specifically Lord of the Rings Risk.
We would have these massive risk games. Oh I have Yeah,
(03:24):
I have very good memories playing Lord of the Rings
risk with my friends. Yeah. I just had the normal
vanilla risk woll I was really missing out. I just
thinctly remember being at a bachelor party where h After
we finished all the normal bachelor party stuff, we crawled
back to the place where everybody's gonna camp out for
the night, and so we managed to convince one of
the other groomsmen that a game of risk when it
(03:47):
takes about an hour. I did, like, like it was
like three in the morning. Yeah, that's the wedding that day. Yeah,
it was like three on the day of the wedding.
It was an act of extraordinary cruelty. Anyway, didn't get married,
but he didn't take Comchotka, which is really key to
(04:07):
his his plans to assault North America. We we, we
shockingly did all make it to the wedding, which was
very much a risk, very much a risk. Yeah, very
much a risk. Uh yeah, that's why it's called that. Yeah,
I was I was smart enough to just go, no,
I'm going to bed. I'm not doing three a m risk.
(04:27):
That's not happy. But yeah, I guess to kind of
back up in front a little bit of context about
why I kind of thought this was so worth talking about,
because I'm guessing that there's some readers at home who
are having a very common thought, which is, why why
are you talking about board games? Like who cares um.
And you know, I reminded a little bit of the
(04:48):
little tweet joke from a while ago of a couple
of years ago. Whm I talking about a little while
ago of on Star Trek they have the uh you know,
we've got there. What do they call that? The Holi Deck? Uh?
They about the Holida Deck. And but for some reason,
every week everybody's into some weird new board game. What
the hell's going on with that? Uh? And for the
people who aren't aware of this kind of sector of nerddom,
(05:13):
board games are actually massively more popular than they were
when I was a child, when osmlenules were young. And
a large part of that posh has actually been from
game developers themselves. The people who make your video games
absolutely fucking love board games. Uh. And it's for a
pretty simple reason, which is that you know, all of
the rules to the game. Board games are naked before
(05:34):
your eyes. You have you have stripped them down to
their their atomic components before you have done anything. And
that means that if you are interested in the art
of how a game works, uh, they're actually wonderful case
studies because you can see very quickly the way that
you move from what the mechanic is doing to like
what it means, Whereas in a video game that can
be a lot more obscure, it can be a lot
(05:55):
more complicated, uh, and it requires it can require a
lot of digging. You don't have to, you know, I
am enough of a turb owner that I have broken
into the game's files for video Verius video games, I've
played and ripped out the code and looked at it
and been like, so that's the drop rate Because again
I'm a consulting turb owner here. But with the board game,
(06:16):
you don't have to do that. You just know all
of the rules up front. Uh, and so you know
if you're uh. And so that that's you know, reveal.
I can reveal a lot about what the designer's intentions are,
what they're communicating, and how that communication all works. So
that's that was kind of my start point here. Should
I just keep on going and explain what the hell
is going on with this article that I'm about? Yeah,
(06:36):
I mean, I was going to note that the primary
board game played in Star Trek T and G was
was was Stratagema in the uh, the classic episode in
which data has to get really good at what is
basically holographic chess. Um. Yes, anyway, you talked about Star
(06:57):
Trek the Next Generation, So now that's that's all. It's good.
It's good that we didn't get into the awful board
games from d S nine. Oh god, yeah, there's I mean,
Strategy a M is pretty ridiculous and the episode is
very silly, but it's it's one of the more fun
data episodes episode from DS nine. I think it's really
considered the worst episode in all of d S nine. Yeah, yeah,
(07:20):
I mean there's I think the worst episode of Star
Trek the Next Generation is not the board game, but
it's the one where Riker and his dad fight in
what's basically American gladiator jud where they have to have
the bandit sticks that they have to fight the ultimate
martial art. Anyone, please continue? So so talk. So I
wrote this article that has is upcoming in publication. It's
(07:41):
going to be in our first issue, uh, And it's
about a particular trend that I noticed in board games
that there were a lot of board games that were
in terms of what was actually going on on the board,
they were incredibly violent, but they managed to make it
look like there was no violence going on. And so
(08:02):
I actually I am grateful for Robert for talking about
the games that you talked about, you know, access and
Allies and risk. Uh, even like Monopoly. These are games
that are in was generally known as the American tradition,
where the goal is to eliminate all the opposing players
to be the last last one standing. Yes, like everything
in American it is like one person wins by using
(08:22):
either violence or capitalism on the You you survive, you
outsurvive all of your opponents. Uh. Because that is what
we do in America. We just survive. We just pray
to God that there is somehow a tomorrow and by God,
they're going to take Comchatka. Political stance as an American
is that we will take the Comchatka Peninsula and we're
(08:42):
going to take Australia for those three extra armies that
Australia strategies. Uh. I feel like half the risk strategy,
half their experience I saw, were just waste to nerve
the Australia strategy. Uh. But um, in any event that
there's a European tradition uh. And one of the things
that has been a lot that's been very popular, has
made an absolute shitload of money over the last several years,
(09:04):
shipload being very relative because again, board games are pretty
small field compared to video games or gambling or booze
or something like that. Um, but even kind of the
dominant name in the game. And uh, one of the
kind of major conceits of this style game is you
don't elimit other players. All players. Any player who starts
the game at the table is going to end the
game at the table. You you never limited anybody, and
(09:26):
this is I think an admillable enough goal. Yeah, that's
one of the things that's annoying about a lot of
games is like if you're trying to do a party
thing and people are getting eliminated. Although it can be fun,
if everyone is drinking at the same time and while
you play the game, people get eliminated and then get
drunker and heckle everyone else at the table. That's actually
not bad. That's actually not bad. I remember it being
like middle school in high school, where you just have
(09:46):
somebody sitting there bitterly four hours. Well, you try to
clean up a risk game. Um. Anyway, the one that
most people are probably the one that is the most famous,
infamous is sellers of kat Um, and that's kind of
what's my start point. Sellers of katan Is is a
board game where you play as European colonizers to a
(10:07):
almost uninhabited islands and almost uninhabited island, and you cannot
damage the other players directly. There is no mechanism for
doing this. You can block them off from building things,
you can never send him. I always go hard on
the roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can block people with roads.
It's a very like it's kind of like like about
(10:29):
like a rivalry between developers almost. But one of the
things that that is kind of outstanding about this is that, uh,
it's not a technically on inhabit island. There is a
quote robber that starts out on the island, uh, and
the robbert is capable of inflicting violence on the players
and it can be sort of controlled by the players.
(10:51):
And so the part that was again striking to me
about this is you can't directly you know, this would
actually be the right number players of me. Chris, Sherene,
and Robert were all sitting at a table will playing
out of katan I could not eliminate any of them.
None of them could eliminate me. We could not harm
each other directly. We can just negotiate with each other,
we can trade with each other, but there's still ultimately
a winner. And uh, you know this is if you
(11:13):
are willing to make some some kind of specific historical
amnesia about how colonials am actually operated, where you know,
like wars of colonial aggression also included like wars in
Germany like the Seven Years War, or you know, the
wars of Spanish succession. We're all happening at the same time,
but you can, you know, it can be viewed as
similar to that. And again it has this explicit theming,
(11:36):
and that is I do think that those things, those
things are dealvetailing together, right that the only people who
are real people are the colonizers. The colonized are non agentic.
They're just set. They're they're they're setting um. And the
more you think about it, it's just it's just kind
(11:56):
of messed up. It's it's just kind of it's kind
of messed up. And I do think it's kind of
interesting that, h the game doesn't really say this very explicitly, right, um.
And I know, I know there's going to be somebody's
going to say, oh, you know the game says rob
or it doesn't say Native American. How can you know?
It's like, come on, man, if you watched a movie
(12:18):
where there was some there was a group of people
in the movie who were portrayed as violent and incapable
of acting on their own, and all of these racist tropes,
even if they were not played by Native American actor,
even if they didn't use an explicit Native American references.
If all of the good guys are people who dispossessed
this person, you know what's going on. People don't look
(12:41):
at the tempest and see Caliban and go this person
has nothing to do with the Americans that yeah, yeah,
uncivilized like civility or like civilians in general. They come
from somewhere else and they inhabit the place. But yeah,
you're right, like just like Columbus discovered America, the natives
are based like it's it's it's a blank slate as
(13:03):
far as white settlers are concerned, and like the positionality,
like like the game is very explicit about who is
a settler and who is not. Right, the settlers are
you and everyone else playing the game, and then you
have the other person who's on the island who got
here before you? And it's like, yeah, I mean the
name is pretty blunt, like you are, like you know,
(13:26):
there's no I don't know. It's it's very it's very
hard to evade. And you know, like you can see
the art from the game, like it's all white people. Uh,
and it's it's it's kind of interesting cause in the
first edition printing they're all kind of medieval, but in
later editions they're like colonial America. Like it's I don't
think it's like it requires some very deliberate uptuseness to
miss that this is what's going on. Um. And uh
(13:50):
So anyway that that has um that was that was
released like twenty something years ago. Uh. I find it
very funny that settlers of Katan managed to win games
with the Year awards in both two thousand and five.
Like it hasn't changed, mud, I don't know. Yeah, those
those are different years, Like what's going on? Definitely? Yeah,
(14:13):
they did add boats. They did add boats. That's true.
You're not you're not wrong about you don't. You don't
you don't have boats? Come on, that's true. Actually, it's funny.
My neighbors have a boat. I do not have a
boat because I'm a regular person who doesn't have lived
next to a lake. M Oh yeah, yeah, I also
do not have a boat. So yeah, I briefly had
(14:37):
a commute to work that I could have kayaked, but
I don't know to kayak. That's New York baby. I
developed a desire to have a boat last year because yeah,
I was in Spain and I met a Spanish guy
with a boat, and that does seem like the life.
But that's neither you're You're You're horrible descend into turning
into some sort of Hemmingway adjacent character. Yeah, just just
(15:00):
I mean it is. It is nice to be drunk
on about. It's also very expensive to have about, So
maybe I'll get drunk on an inflatable raft instead. I
just get a sunfish and just flip it over every
thirty seconds. Um, the working man's boat. Yeah, the working
man's boat. Um. But yeah, and uh so so from there,
I kind of what has happened is unsurprisingly that, you know,
(15:23):
board games are actually kind of a summit demographic art
form compared to video games, because all you really needed
some paper, Like really, that's all you need? You need
some paper? Uh, and you can make a board game. Uh,
if you have tabletop simulator, do you just need tabletop simulator,
You're already done, like uh, and then you just need
to be able to bully people into play testing your game.
And that's really the hard part. Uh. But you know,
(15:45):
so this means that, you know, people will iterate on
things pretty quickly. You know, so very like fan fiction environment,
people will will iterate rather quickly on your ideas and
develop them further. Um. And so I looked through some
of the other games that I've played and liked, and uh,
you know, I actually tend to like pretty much all
the games that I studied. Splendor is the one that
(16:07):
is very fun, very casual, very easy, and it just
says this art that bugs me, this art that really
bugs me where it's about being a gem trader. And
it's very much seems to be based on Renaissance Italy
or like renaissance on TWERP you know this and m
for some reason, like you don't see people in minds.
(16:30):
It's very weird. All of the there will be pictures
of minds. It's like, okay, you bought this emerald mind
and there's like nobody there, which is very weird because
I have seen pictures of pre industrial I've seen pictures
of minds from the nineteen eighties, which is firmly industrial,
where there are thousands of people you can barely see
the ground, you know, thousands of people everywhere. You know,
(16:51):
mining is very labor intensive. Um, you only start seeing
mining become kind of like capital intensive, like very recently,
and even then only really in the United States and
a couple of other countries. Germany obviously uses very capital
intensive mining. Everywhere else it's very very labor intensive, but splendor.
They won't show you the people doing the mining, but
they will show you the people short sorting the gems,
(17:14):
which is just skipping the slavery part exactly, exactly the
part they're skipping. Yeah, it's even today, like you ignore
what your how your cell phone is made, right, You're
just like you're glossing over the unflattering parts and going
straight to making a gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're you're
going straight to you know, I've I've you know, I've
got my my pretty purple cell phone, you know, and
(17:37):
the the part where you know, there was yeah, pretty
much of war in the Congo fought over it, and
then they had to install suicide nets in China gets
completely glossed over and all that stuff goes into this phone.
But uh, you know, to me, it's just kind of
a necessary hunk of plastic and metal for surviving in America. Um,
(18:00):
And I you know, I'm not entirely I don't want
to be too hard on the designers here. It's very
like there's a part of me that wants to be
and there's a part of me that wants to be
kind of forgiving and being like do you really want
to be playing this like fun casual game and like
be confronted with slavery. Uh, But at the same time,
like but yeah, you you really try to have it
(18:23):
both ways here, Like this is like I don't make
the game about something actually fun, not yeah, not something
that well. I mean there are there and there are
people who do that. You know, It's like not that
hard to find people like making games about like theme
parks or like haunted houses or utopian or like like
weird like utopian arcologies and stuff like that. Like people
(18:44):
make these things. But like so this, uh, this colonialism
keeps on like coming back, and part of that, you know,
part of that is I guess like all sci fi
is kind of colonialist. But wait before we go, do
you know what else keeps coming back? You know what?
Tell me what? Sure? You capitalism? It's time for an
(19:05):
ad break and there's still more capitalism. But that's true,
that's true different capitalism. Yeah, right now we're we're in
like more early capitalism. And uh so the the game
(19:29):
that like really stuck in my cra all the weirdest
and uh, I might end up reading a quote out
from here. I'm sorry for being an incredibly irritating person
and doing that as a game called Mombassa. Um, and uh,
Mombassa is so aggressive about how colonialist it is. It
is so so aggressive. The premise of the game is
(19:49):
that you are adventurers in the Scramble for Africa, and
the goal is to be the player who retires the richest. Uh.
And the ways in which the mechanics of this game
are messed up, uh, the part of the mechanics that
I will say is genuinely clever. And if they hadn't
(20:11):
made it about the Scramble for Africa, I would have
like no, I would just be like, yeah, cool. So
I still have to admit that this is this as
cool is that you start out working for a different
joint stock company. But anybody can buy shares in anybody
else's joint stock company. So the best strategy is to
buy somebody else's company and then they make the company
valuable and you contribute as little as possible. Free rider problem.
(20:33):
You know, the classic of game theory that the liberal
economists fucking love talking about. Uh. Great thing to do
with the game. But the way you make your company
valuable is like it's it's pillaging Africa. Like like it's
pillaging Africa, and it's it's very very weird, Like there's
you have this map of Africa in front of you,
and the map of Africa has valuable things in it has,
(20:56):
you know, diamonds that you can pick up. It has
like there are books, which is unclear if that represents
Like you write an adventure novel like King Solomon's Minds,
or you write a naturalist guide, or you write an ethnography,
but you're writing some sort of book that is based
on how you despoiled the African continent. Uh. And what
(21:17):
what always struck me is so weird is that the
territory is just when you enter the territory. You just
take everything, you just you just pillage it. It's not
like territory that you hold and really make more productive.
You don't develop it. There's at least it's honest about
that to a certain extent. At least it's honest that
like the Europeans were lying about any of that development,
(21:37):
civilizingnition ship like that they were there to steal um
and But what is so so weird to me about
it is that like there's there's no resistance, there's no
risk to expanding across the continent, there's no negotiation. The
only other characters at all are the other players, the
(21:58):
other Europeans. Uh. You know this continent that at the
time had hundreds of millions of people, uh, many of
whom had legitimate kingdoms that in some parts of Africa
where you know, had full gunpowder militaries just totally glossed over,
just totally not not mechanically represented at all. Um. Well,
(22:19):
it's like they're only there, they're portraying the only future
that that is possible. Like you know what I mean,
this is how you become a civilization. There's no other
that there's one path um I mean, is there is
one path to being a civilization, and it does involve
a lot of taking other people ship. To be fair, No,
(22:42):
I said that ironically, Robert, I know, I said in
their mind there is one path, yes, but I do
feel like I've got to read this out from the
rule book because it was like so hypopic to me.
This is this is from the rule book. This is
the start of the rule book, the opening quote. In
one Bassa players are choir shares of chartered companies based
in Mombasa, Cape Town St. Louis and Cairo and spread
(23:04):
their tailing pasts throughout the African continent in order to
earn the most money. Chartered companies were associations formed for
the purpose of exploration, trade, and colonization, which links them
inextricably to a very dark shafter in human history, global colonialism.
This period rough lasted roughly from the fifteenth century to
the middle of twentieth century and is associated with exploitation
and slavery. Although Mombasa is loosely set within this timeframe,
(23:26):
it is not a historical simulation is a strategy game
with an economic focus that roughly refers to historical categories
and places them in a fictional setting. The exploitation of
the African continent and its people is not explicitly depicted
within the gameplay. If you want to learn more about
the underlying history, we recommend the following read History of
Modern Africa Each hundred Depressent by Richard J. Reid uh
(23:48):
end quote. So they fucking new, but like they fucking
knew that there is some evil, evil ship that they
have made into a game, and they want you to
know that they knew that you that you were going
to call them. It's like making like a candy Land
version set in the Congo where you have to collect
hands or rubber and being like, yeah, you can read
(24:11):
a book about this if you want. Yeah, this is
like it's such a cop out. It's like it's so bizarre,
Like it's so bizarry not how many people even read
this stuff, like like generously. One person I've ever before
reads the rule book when you're wearing a board game,
like like very generously. Like I'm just a huge nerd
who likes reading this stuff, and I would just like
(24:33):
read this in my jaw was just like holy shit,
I think you could try. It might even be wisdom
and trying to like make a board game about the
Scramble for Africa that's like framed in like a kid
friendly way, but is also like very blatantly horrific. It's
just like the kind of thing that if you think
(24:54):
about it ten seconds, I was like, oh, we're just
like subjugating and massacreing people. But it's also like the
the art style is like themed off of candy Land
or some sort of ship like maybe, but even then
you're probably more likely to just get people enjoying it
on ironically than you are to actually convince anybody to
read about the Scramble for Africa. Well yeah, yeah, I mean,
(25:15):
and well it's actually kind of interesting because there's a
there's like a good tradition of like making like kid
friendly appearing things that are actually quite horrifying if you
think about them for more than two seconds. And yeah,
well Monopoly for example. And I mean, I was going
to take a slight turn away from board games. I
grew up with red the Red Wall books. Yes, yeah,
the Red Wall books. Like even though like stoats are
(25:39):
not a race of people in real life, they are
a type of weasel, uh holy ship, those books managed
to be incredibly racist. It really is racist against like
different types of weasel. But uh, you know they portrayed
this is this very cute see world of you know, animals,
you know, noise and badgers and stuff, and they're just
committing genocide left and right. It's just portray is like
(26:02):
totally okay, it's just like someone who has no idea
what you're talking about. This is crazy. Yeah, popular children's
series and like the eighties and nineties, you know, I
read this book. It was like, yeah, it's like you
flipped back and forth between like, yeah, here is Martin
the mouse and he's the hero, and also he's eating
all of this really nice food and then also we
must exterminate like entire species. It's buck wild. It is insane. Uh.
(26:29):
The Red Wall Feast spot, by the way, it's like
a really good Twitter follow. We're just post excerpts from
the food descriptions. Those are incredible. Um. But the reason
why I kind of made that turn is that one
of the games I considered that I actually really liked
is uh something of a post something of an anti
colonial game called root uh. And this was part of
the part of what I was kind of witnessing over
(26:50):
as I was studying these is that there is a
bit of a discourse, a bit of a development over time.
Uh and uh. Two of the games that I highlighted,
Roots and Spirit Island are kind of are are fairly
anti clonial and Root is a kind of horrifying game
but with very cute see appearances. You know, you play
as like mice and cats and and birds. Uh. And
(27:13):
the birds are like like horrifying aristocrats. Uh, like like
you're like a feudal military dictatorship. The cats are like
trying to turn the entire force into like a giant
woodcutting factory and like subjugate everybody else under the boot
heel of like industrial capitalism. And you can play as
just like the concept of revolution, I guess, like like
(27:41):
there's a woodlanda lions who win the game by like
provoking revolts of the civilian population to overthrow the other two. Uh.
It's it's very weird. It's a very very violent game
by by comparison, it's very hard to lonato player in it.
But it was kind of interesting to me to see
that like you can do it's kind of almost the
the exact opposite, where it is like a lot of
(28:02):
like it doesn't have it has this very obviously horrifying
and graphically violent mechanics, uh, you know, revolutions and subjugation,
but with like the characters look cute, like all the
all the character art is very cute. Um. You know,
you've got like a little mice like making pungee traps
(28:25):
and stuff in the It's very odd. Yeah, I kinda
I kind of jumped a little bit ahead here, but
I don't know that we need to go through the
everything I did in this in this paper that's a
little bit boring, and also we need to leave things
for the readers. And actually Root is uh a little
bit based on a game series that I think would
be particularly appealing to uh, to Robert uh and possibly
(28:49):
the listeners. There's a company called GMT Games. Anybody else
heard of them? These guys are interesting continue tea games
make games like Kuba Libre, a four player asymmetric warfare
about the Cuban Revolution. UM and of ways, yes yes
(29:12):
multiple I one once as the Mafia, which was an
interesting side to play in the UM an interesting and
interesting series of interest to have. Uh. You know, I
could not build an army for ship. I just had
to count on the fact that other people didn't think
it was worth destroying casinos because they're too busy trying
to stamp out revolutionaries um and or their revolutionaries trying
(29:34):
to stamp out fascists. And it was a they're a
very the reason why I think they're very weird companies
that you know, I think they're They are games like
Kuba Libre, Twilight Struggle, A Distant Plane, which is about
the war in Afghanistan. But they also are like these
guys are like Quantico psychos. Uh, they actually they are
(29:55):
the guys who make the actual four real war games
that the Pentagon you yeah, yeah, Quantico if you're not
up on things, is like the part of the Virginia
area kind of a suburb of d C where all
of the all of like the Fed FEDS live. Like
I'm not talking about like border patrol FEDS or ship
(30:15):
I'm talking like, uh, fucking CIA, motherfucker's Capital f Feds. Yeah.
Isn't the CIA is like training facility there? Yes, they have,
and I think at the FBI also has a facility
in quantity the Capital f Feds. All the agents are there. Yeah. Yeah,
don't think of like like your inspectors here. Yeah, I
(30:40):
mean look well. And also just like we're not primarily
talking about like the door kickers, We're talking about the
people who are like the doing the really scary ship.
You know. I will say, though, if if we gave
Osha like CIA powers, the world would be in an
obviously better place. I think we hand them the nukes.
I think we hand them the nukes and a mandate
to use them. If purity procedures aren't followed. Not cleaning
(31:03):
your counter after using chicken, that's the end of Detroit.
You know, there goes San Francisco. Uh, you didn't clean
your food cart well enough? You know, pretty soon collective
of punishment, but just for workplace violations. Yeah, collective punishment
for like basic sanitation violations. I mean, in a way,
not following sanitation does lead to collective punishment, whether or
(31:25):
not you have a federal enforcement for it or not.
That's right. He's the deployment of our nation's nuclear assets. Uh.
Do you know what else is collective punishment? Capitalism? Yes,
listening to ads? Yeah, so let's all endure it together.
(31:53):
We've been collectively punished. Solidarity all all all of us
who must endure advertising. Yes, um, yes, I have been
I've been rambling a lot, and UM, yeah, like I said,
I find this this question of who gets to be
an agent to be very important. Who who gets to
(32:16):
be a player? Who is even given the choice of winning?
You know if if you're not a player, you're completely
written off from the possibility of ever winning. Um. And
you know this is something that like in in video games,
we've seen recurring debates around this, you know, like civilization
is an infamous one for this. You know, who even
gets to be a civilization? Um? Why are some civilization
civilizations and some city states and some barbarians? Um? And
(32:42):
you know it does uh, you know, it does shape
your thinking, you know. And there's there's games are very
valuable for how they create empathy. You know, a game
that can really immerse you can really teach you a
lot of very free, even powerful empathy for groups of
people that you might never have the chance to interact with. Ah.
(33:05):
And then when you keep on creating games that ask
you to empathize with the colonizers, mm hmm. Yeah, you
think it's just the normal way of things. This is
what this is what happens. This is the succession of
events that leads to humans yeah, this session of events
leads the humans. Those who do not participate simply die out.
Uh this is brainwashing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It
(33:28):
is And I mean it's it's you know, you can
the same could be said of all culture. But you know,
I think it's worth being um informed in critical consumers UM.
And I mean I actually do you know? I actually
you know, I know that you wanted this to be
an uplifting episode. And I'm going to be optimistic here.
I I you know, it's not just that we're talking
(33:48):
about stuftware. The stakes are not literal death. The stakes
are you know, getting mad at your friends overboard game.
But also I do think that, uh, we have seen
positive development of people take king of people looking at
these games. You know, there's a game developer who said
about some of the games who was playing, Uh, what
do the locals think about these colonizers, Like, it's pretty
(34:11):
rude that nobody's asking them and tried to design starting
from there. And I have some criticisms of how he
executed that, how well he executed on that vision. But
the fact of the matter is is that even just
through the sheer iteration of somebody looking at a game
like Settlers of Katan and going well, how can I
do this different? You know, I can't just release the
(34:34):
same game every single year. I need to do something new,
and even just a simple one of just reversing who
is the players simple enough, even that has been creating
some iteration in some some additional complexity, which and and
has caused people. I have seen people, you know, go
back and re examine. Even if they're not people who
have any sort of like education, any sort of formal
(34:54):
education in anthropology of post colonial theory, they will they'll
look at like, oh, yeah, I was playing this game
same where you're the colonize, and I played this other
game where they reverse the roles, and I was like,
that was the bad guys earlier. Yeah, I mean I
think portray the other side and maybe winning means you
(35:15):
kick them out or or destroy them. I would like
to see that play out versus that is Spirit Island.
That is what Spirit Island is, that the players cooperate
to destroy the colonizers or to terrorize them into abandoning
the island. Uh, weird game, weird game. I have some
I think there's some good execution in there. Some critics
and I've got some criticisms of it is my favorite,
(35:36):
but it does do some things a little bit well patronizing.
But um but yeah, like yeah, like that's that's something
I think is worth seeing and uh and I think
it's something that um Admittedly, maybe I just really enjoyed
this the space of the world because you know, if
you look at very mainstream video games, for example, kind
(35:56):
of bored of the same, like five feeling the same
five games get released every here, you know, there's some texture,
give me something new. But um, also, I think that
I think that the I think there's some cost for
optimism for people like critically examining the art that they're building,
the art that they're consuming, in the art that they're creating.
And I don't know that counting on that kind of stochastic,
(36:20):
bouncy ball randomness of people just kind of spontaneously going
what if we what if we uh played what if
we reverse the roles in Call of Duty? You know
what if we played the people living in the Fafollo, Well,
call of Duty is happening on in the background. Just
kind of on the randomness of that happening. Uh, might
not be as fast as people want. I wish, I wish. Oh. Yeah,
(36:43):
there was a game called I think it was I
think it was called This Is War. Maybe it's called
This War of Mine. That's what it was. That's a
good game. That's a really well done game. Yeah. Yeah,
and there's I'm I'm I don't know. I'm I did
to see the future of all this stuff, and I'm
excited to see where people go with this. Well, Chris,
(37:05):
I have a question, why did you decide to even
bring on Kyle, Like what do you what what is
it about this topic that you think is prevalent today? What?
What what can we take away from this? Well? I
think I don't know. I think one of the things
that I got was reading the article is about like
(37:25):
one of the ways, like one of the things you
see in how set colonialism gets perpetuated, And I think, um,
why am I now forgetting the name of the Yeah,
declonization is not a metaphor talks about this a lot,
which Yeah, I'll talk about that another time someday. But
(37:48):
like one of the things that you get like immediately
is the sort of is that the settler move to innocence,
And that strikes me as like the sort of it's
the kind of like it's it's, it's the kind of
perspective that you see, I think running across all of
these board games, and I think it it is actually
(38:09):
really helpful to sort of you know, like the way
you break that and then the way you start to
get actually that actually looks like the colonization. It has
to start with people like actually like realizing what they're
doing and not being able to sort of like retreat
to this position of innocence and being sort of confronted
by it. And I think that like that that is
a place where media can actually like be very helpful
(38:31):
because you know, like most and most mostly like it's it's, it's,
it's almost always working in the opposite direction, right, But
it's something where you can actually have this sort of
I don't know, it's it's a part of the cultural
spirit where you could like very like very easily put
someone into a role that is not the one that
(38:51):
they're normally doing and get them to like realize that
like what they're doing is like fucked. So yeah, yeah, yeah,
I mean I could say the first when I was
in high school and played playing sellers in for the
first time, I didn't realize the like it took me
a while to understand that, like, oh, I'm a colonial
(39:11):
list yeah, territory. Uh. And well because they yeah, they
present it as default innocence and also just like exciting too.
There's no there's no backstory to how you get the
wood or the ore or or anything else. You just
like somehow build a road, you somehow have a town.
There is no backstory as to who you're destroying in
(39:33):
the process. And I think it infiltrates in your mind
to the point where you subconsciously just deemed that as normal.
And it's it's definitely not unique, you know, it's definitely
like it's only just another tendril of reinforcing stuff that
we hear from the rest of our culture so broadly
you know that that it's it's just this is just
one aspect, one expression, I should say, of how many
(39:57):
millions of different ways we get colonialism reinforced to us
as a normal, natural part of the world. And uh.
And you know, from cowboy movies to uh to just
like the way the New York Times will write about
who owns land and who's who has a who has
(40:18):
a viable claim on owning a piece of land. Uh.
All of that we get reinforced us in our fiction
are nonfiction every day. Um. I guess again that's part
of I guess why I was drawn to board games
in particular for this, because it's so transparent. You know,
it's so transparent, how all how the all the propaganda
works like it's not there's no movie magic. Yeah, yeah,
(40:42):
the rules are all there. It's it's pretty much. I
don't know, but yeah, but you you sympathized with and
I didn't call you, you empathize with the colonizer because
there who you're who you are. Yeah, you want to win,
you want to win, you want to win. I'm very competative. Uh.
Um and and uh and you know, and they get
(41:04):
to and the people who may get to have this
kind of like discourse that this kind of badge of
like oh yeah, we made like the friendly board game.
You know, they're comparing themselves to you know, making Monopoly,
where like there's like a chance of a divorce happening
every time somebody finishes the game of Monopoly. Uh. And
you know, they get to porture themselves as the nice ones,
and it's like, yeah, we're the nice ones because all
the people who were being mean to don't get a
(41:26):
vorce at all. I just can't believe we made a
game about paying rent, Like, I really cannot believe that.
I history of it because it's very funny. I skimmed
in your in your articles like about it a little bit.
But it was called something that was much more to
the point. What was it called the Landlord's Game? Excuse me, yeah,
(41:48):
the landlords Game by Elizabeth Maggie. She was a Georgiast
activist in the like early twentieth century. Close my mind,
fucking George just a whole well, I mean this monopoly,
Monopoly being the most relevant contribution of Georgism to world
history is somehow incredibly fitting. Let's all look away from it,
(42:14):
brutal the number one selling economics book of American history.
Because you're used to a very bad board game, I
can't say it's unfair, and I guess that that's really
what I've got is that like it's I think it's
still I think it's very valuable to um be a
critical consumer um and um one. Bosston maybe went over
(42:37):
the line, but for the most part, these games haven't
like ruined my ability to enjoy them. If my friends
want to play a game slan, they might just get
an annoying lecture from me. But they're going to get
annoying lecture from me anyway, it just would be about
something else. I mean, it's like any media. It's like
phil and TV or whatever. You're going to realize eventually
that you should be conscious of what you're consuming. So yeah,
I'll still get into arguments about all those things, except
(42:59):
for except for podcasts. People should blindly consume our podcast well,
I mean, I mean, yes, podcasts are the only true
proletarian art form. That's right. That's right. As Karl Mark said,
listen to this podcast like can the subscribe share us
on Facebook? And then and then eventually one day podcast
will wither away into bolish itself. Yeah, that's right, that's right,
(43:22):
classic Marxist podcast theory. That's right, that's right. M is
that the episode? Well, Kyle, where can people find you? Yes?
I I personally am notoriously hard to find on the internet,
being a person who doesn't have any social media whatsoever.
Absolutely the right call. I I have been off of
(43:45):
Twitter for a couple of days. I'm taking a break.
And the best best decision you could make get away
from all our Our publication is at Strange Matters dot
co op. We worked hard to get that dot co
op registry. Uh. We just published on Thurs a couple
of days ago. Uh, love as a verb in article
(44:07):
reviewing uh and um extrand expanding the possibilities of bell
Hooks All About Love two thousand books All about Love,
which is worth reading both the both the review and
the book. Yeah. I actually just finished it um four
hours ago. Yeah, I arned up for the first time
during the pandemic. It wash it in lightning. Read It's
in lightning read. Uh. We we tend to have a
(44:30):
lot of really insane economics stuff if you want to
like read some truly insane ship about money, about where
money comes from and what money is and what we
can do about money. Uh. We've oh boy, we've got
you covered. Uh we have. We have a profile of
(44:50):
Roberts where we have rendered him as a Baron Munchausen
very flatteringly. Uh. A really wonderful review of three different
cyberpunk works by the wonderful anti fascist author Elizabeth sanderfor UM. Yeah,
so please come come check us out at Strange Matters
dot co op. If for we are. We are taking
(45:12):
new writers all the time. Uh, and we've got submission
guidelines on there. And uh, if you want to personally
send me hate mail for besmirching the good honor of
settlers of Katan, I can be reached at Kyle at
Strange Matters dot co op. Oh, and we do have
a Twitter for the for the company. Yeah, what's your
what's the Twitter for the company? It is Strange Underscore
(45:35):
Matters perfectly, Thanks Kyle. Check out Strange Matters contribute to
their fundraiser. I can't I can't recommend doing anything on Twitter,
so I simply uh and thank you, thank you for
having me on again. It's a it was a lovely time. Yeah,
absolutely all right again, as as as with every episode,
(45:58):
go with christ Kay. It could Happen here as a
production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool
Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com,
or check us out on the I Heart Radio app,
Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can
find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at
cool zone Media dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.
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