Players of Games

This is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu. We’re talking about games. We have racked up literally thousands of hours playing the Total War series, and countless Sundays spent staring suspiciously at each other over a gaming board. Why do we do this? Why do we enjoy it?

Games sometimes have a reputation of being antisocial, but that’s not true at all. In fact you have to develop pretty robust social skills to be locked in battle with someone (friend or stranger), humiliate them or be humiliated by them, and at the end not hate them or be hated by them. The goal, after all, is not to win - it’s to be invited back, to be able to play further games. The real game is infinite, not finite, so there is a subtle blend of competition and cooperation.

Of course playing Total War: Thrones of Britannia or Hearts of Iron IV on ones own is a bit less social, so what are you getting out of that? Well what is a game? A tightly controlled, limited simulation. Tightly bounded by rules, space and time, simulating an element of the world that we experience and have to contend with. It sections off a bit of reality, decides what’s important, sets a framework, and then the aim is to try and win. This gives you a safe space in which to hone skills that are useful - rational analysis, situational awareness, risk management, resource allocation, tactics. A dojo, if you will. “Drillers are killers”. But this is not an episode about Brazilian Jiu-Jitsu.

We must not forget the aesthetic aspect, though. If you play a game as if it’s a spreadsheet, it’s not much fun - we get quite enough of that in our day jobs. There’s got to be some “fluff” (narrative, vibe, aesthetic) to balance to “crunch” (rules, mechanics), else there’s no reason to play. But anyway, crunch without fluff isn’t how the world works. The reason humans respond so strongly to aesthetics is because aesthetics are an abstraction of the complex underlying mechanisms of the world - if something is beautiful, it’s because it has some adaptive value, however oblique. In the very best games, and in life itself, the fluff and the crunch are the same thing.

Board games mentioned:

• Twilight Struggle (reliving the Cold War one unfair defeat at a time)
• Spartacus (fighting and trading in ancient Rome… but toxic)
• Dominant Species (an evolutionary race for up to five players)
• A Victory Denied (ten hours if you’re quick, pushing chits around a map near Minsk as your choice of the Soviets or the Nazis either defending or attacking Moscow)
• Navegador (you’re rival Portuguese explorers, exploring the world and setting up trading posts)
• Scythe (vibe heavy conquest of nineteenth century Eastern Europe, plus mechs)
• Settlers of Catan (gateway drug)
• Bananagrams (Scrabble, but more stressful)
• Roger Penrose’s party game that explains how the physical laws of the universe came to be
• Warhammer (no introduction necessary)