Original subtitles

This is Tigris and Euphrates. This is one of the first modern board games I

bought. In 2010, I got it and El Grande together for like 20 bucks on clearance.

And because I didn't have a lot of money, there were several months where

were the only two games I played.

The rules say that Tigris is about building up a civilization back in,

Babylon times, but it's really just a tiling game, a spatial puzzle. It's not

about civilization.

The tiles could be anything, right?

Like, these blue tiles aren't farms.

I mean, yes, the rules call them farms, and you have to place them on river

spaces, which makes sense for a farm. But nothing about the river space makes

a river.

It could be completely abstract.

The green leaders aren't traders.

True, only the trader gets to take the wild cubes, and only when there's at

least two cubes in the same kingdom.

And that takes a little bit of work, and does kind of feel like constructing a

trade route.

The red tiles, though, they're not temples.

Sure, all four of your leaders, regardless of their color, could only be

adjacent to a temple because, and I quote, leaders and gods always hang

together, which is certainly what those leaders wanted you to think.

Early kings laid claim to a divine right to rule, or even a divine lineage.

Even today, secular political leaders are very eager to demonstrate their

and make that a reason why they should have power.

Leaders and gods always hang around together.

And to be clear, I'm not saying that this is commentary that Ryan Canizzi is

making, or that Tigers and Euphrates makes a political argument.

I think that's a stretch.

But there are games that do make arguments. Games that try to move us.

do it in the same way.

By using mechanisms as metaphors.

TITLE DROP!

...matters, I think, to ordinary game players, which I think we are.

Um, they came across a little pretentious. Anyway, personally, I don't

token offhandedly. I like to have it given only once per game, then want us

sit with it and explore what it feels like. For me, this circumstance

a much deeper contemplation before respect is given, and as a result, lets

give and receive it in more heartfelt earnesty.

What?

Does that even mean board games are toys?

They are toys. They really are. We mustn't pretend that there's something

This is not, this game isn't changing lives.

And I think when we bring out games like these, the ones that, oh, look at this,

and we act all kind of self -important playing these, I think we're doing the

hobby a disservice by that.

Resistance to the idea of board games as art is rooted in a refusal

to engage and a frankly impossible standard that isn't applied to most

forms. The idea that anything that a board game expresses can only be

ludically through its mechanisms and not through the things those mechanisms are

called. This is not a farm, this is not a river, and therefore board games

cannot have meaning.

You don't actually make an argument. No, you don't. That's the theme in the

game. That's not gameplay.

This space here, it's not Canada.

There is nothing mechanically that expresses the idea of Canada.

Canada is just the name we put on it.

This space isn't nuclear Armageddon.

It's a defeat trigger that limits your play of certain cards.

approach purely mechanically.

Twilight Struggle's death contract isn't brinkmanship and bluster, but a

resource to be spent.

The cubes in Pandemic are not diseases, they're just cubes.

But if they're just cubes, why did sales shoot up at the start of 2020?

And why did the sales drop off as the real -world Pandemic wore on?

If they're just cubes, if this is just a toy,

Why is it that no one I know really feels comfortable playing it anymore?

Pandemic was actually really formative for me understanding mechanisms as a way

to model something.

The epidemic cards put the discards back on top of the deck, so the same nodes

get hit over and over again.

You think you're done with them, and nope, there it is again.

It makes those nodes more likely to have outbreaks, spreading to the surrounding

area. And yeah.

That's a pretty basic model of how diseases spread and infections reoccur,

why it's difficult to eradicate them.

But that model only works when we call the cube a disease, and when we call the

node a city.

The framing, the language, matters.

It's part of what creates the meaning.

That's the theme in the game. That's not gameplay.

Imagine if we expected books to communicate with the words on the page,

with what those words meant, just the letters and sounds, the shapes.

It's not impossible, but it does limit the kinds of things you can express and

how well you can express them. Or imagine if we only looked at a film's

based on the cinematic language, camera angles and cuts.

Without dialogue, without actors, without anything that has a meaning

film.

Again, it's not impossible, but the palette is incredibly limited.

And you might say, well, these examples are ridiculous.

We all know film is a form of synthesis.

That dialogue and actors are part of the language of cinema.

Words have specific meanings, and sentences string those meanings

This is just how those forms inherently create meaning. It's how they work on a

basic atomic level.

And I'd argue that this process of pairing a mechanism with what it

that's how board games work on a basic atomic level.

Now, this doesn't mean it's always been done well.

And Eurogames especially have a reputation for pasted -on themes for a

collection of clever levers and efficiency puzzles that have had a theme

lacquered carelessly over them.

I think Great Western Trail New Zealand is a great game, but boy, it has almost

nothing to do with New Zealand.

El Grande's Castillo is fun, but a little weird. It makes a lot more sense

you consider it started out as a Trojan horse, but the publisher wanted a

different theme, so sure.

The game's about Spain now, and this is a castle that hides people?

And this kind of cavalier approach is at the root of the colonialism and

orientalism that historically has been baked into modern board games.

And the apologetics for these games have often turned on the argument that we

should engage with them solely as decontextualized ludic objects,

what the game says it's about.

Puerto Rico isn't about Puerto Rico.

These little brown discs aren't slaves because the game calls them colonists,

but they're not colonists either because none of this really means anything.

Now, this conception of board games is changing.

When I got into modern games 15 years ago, I definitely saw a lot of people

rolling their eyes whenever anyone mentioned that the discs in Puerto Rico

them uncomfortable.

Now those concerns are taken a lot more seriously, leading to a new edition of

Puerto Rico that attempted to address this.

Partially, this is because of the growing number of people playing the

who aren't going to put up with doing unexamined colonialism.

And partially, this is because of the continued cross -pollination of two

distinct traditions of board game design.

A European tradition that, broadly speaking, is focused on mechanisms,

with light or sometimes incoherent theming, and an American tradition that

more focused on making arguments and modeling, a simulationist approach.

There was a period of time not too long ago where these did feel quite separate.

Eight years ago, I did a game called This Guilty Land about the debate over

slavery in the decades before the American Civil War.

I tried, through the mechanisms, to make the argument that centrism, compromise,

and incremental progress on moral or social issues only prolong suffering and

ultimately serve calcified systemic oppression.

When the game was announced, I did have some people who assumed I had just taken

some abstract mechanisms and then I chose this heavy subject matter to be

controversial or to upset people.

Now, some of those people took me at my word that I started with the subject and

created this system of mechanisms around it and to express it, but they still

strongly urged me to re -theme the game to something more palatable.

Which is a weird thing to say about what is essentially a work of non -fiction.

But it's of a piece with the idea that the form itself is incapable of

expression, that it can't be art.

And again, we don't really run into this with other forms.

Or, to be more precise, we don't anymore.

Oh, no offense.

Movies are entertaining enough for the masses, but the personalities on the

screen just don't impress me.

I mean, they don't talk, they don't act, they just make a lot of dumb show.

Well, you know.

The fact is, emerging and popular art forms are often dismissed at the outset.

I mean, there's nothing wrong with it. I have no problem with it. It just isn't

music. And people who get to be great at rap are not great musicians. They're

just great at rap.

There's no road from rapping into music. You know what I mean?

Music is something that you can get better and better and better at. I don't

know if you can do that with a rap. I don't know whether it has that kind of

space in it or that kind of leads off into infinite numbers of possibilities.

Music does.

Roger Ebert famously said that video games can never be art.

Why are gamers so intensely concerned anyway that games be defined as art?

Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves?

Do they require validation?

In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co

-workers, or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen

and explain, I'm studying a great form of art.

And it's like people walking around hoity -toity, like this hat, hoity

hat, pretending to be something, and other people look at them and go, the

emperor has no clothes.

In response to a TED Talk, which brought up Braid as an example of an art game,

Ebert wrote, You can go back in time and correct your mistakes.

In chess, this is known as taking back a move and negates the whole discipline

of the game.

Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my

in a video game.

She also admires a story told between the game's levels, which exhibit prose

the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

Returning to Braid quite recently, I actually find the writing quite

and moving.

Yes, taken out of context, it's easy to dismiss it. The same is true of most

writing. In January, the New York Times quoted John Ingold slagging on Disco

Elysium as massively overwritten and really tedious.

The game's opening is 20 minutes of someone describing breathing.

I just can't understand why anyone should take 30 pages to describe how he

tosses about in bed because he can't get to sleep.

In order for art to work, we need to meet it where it is, with an open heart.

You have to let it touch you.

And if you just refuse to engage, then it won't. You can't talk someone into

That has to come from inside them.

What? I am a woman.

Some people don't think so.

And some of those people used to be held quite dear in my heart.

And I spent a lot of energy early on trying to convince them, debate them,

persuade them.

But the goalposts would always shift, or they just would dismiss what I said

outright.

Which isn't to say that people can't come around.

A few of them did.

But I didn't do that.

That came from inside them.

They had to want it.

Being open also takes work.

I like old things. I like weird things.

But I didn't spring forth from Zeus' forehead with a Blu -ray of Selene and

Julie go boating in one hand and a copy of Dux Newberry poured in the other.

I learned how to appreciate these things.

Curiosity, vulnerability, and aesthetic sensibility are not inherent qualities

that someone either has or doesn't.

It's something that you have to continually develop and cultivate.

The other day, I saw 28 Days Later.

I had seen it once before when it came out in theaters, and at the time, I

really hated that.

Part of that is that I think I came into it wanting to hate it. I had very

strong opinions about the speed of zombies.

And so, in a way, I refused to engage with the film. It felt really ugly. It

a pretty dismal and limited color palette.

And a number of the action sequences are shot and edited in a very fractured,

impressionistic way. The frame rate of the film often feels wrong.

And that's because it was shot using a consumer DV cam.

It was still, at that time, an inferior quality imaging camera.

but it had this shutter facility that I messed around with, the frantic shutter.

Denny was fascinated by this kind of brittle, savage, hectic ability that the

digital shutter had to capture movement well, and not well. You could create

this demonic atmosphere.

I found it very disorienting, viscerally unpleasant to watch, and in a knee

-jerk kind of way, I dismissed it as a bad film, as bad filmmaking.

I am 99 % certain on the car ride back home, I told my friends the action was

incoherent and didn't have a strong sense of screen geography.

Now I'm in a place where I can appreciate the film's qualities.

I've seen other films with disorienting, fractured, overwhelming visual rhythms.

I have more of a taste for things that are ugly or jarring on purpose.

More than that, I am more open today to the fact that maybe I'm wrong.

When I bounced off the film the first time 22 years ago, my instinct was to

this film is bad, and the people who like it are wrong. Or maybe they're

They just want to look smart and cool.

And it's like people walking around hoity -toity, like this hat, hoity

hat, pretending to be something, and other people look at them and go, the

emperor has no clothes.

Why are gamers so intensely concerned, anyway, that games be defined as art? Do

they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, I'm studying a

great form of art?

But the fact of the matter is, I think to ordinary game players, which I think

we are, what the text says, the curtains were blue.

What the teacher says it means, the curtains represent the character's

depression and lack of will to go on.

What the author meant, The curtains were fucking blue.

This bit of dipshit copypasta has been kicking around the internet for years.

I see it shared whenever someone wants to ridicule those highfalutin nerds who

think they're so smart.

But, like, first of all, it's a terrible example.

Colors do have some pretty basic cultural associations.

Blue is moody and sad.

Green feels sickly and wrong.

Red signals danger or excitement.

There's a point I want to make here, but actually, Dan Olson already made it in

his video Annihilation and Decoding Metaphor, and he did it better than I

So I asked Dan if I could use a clip from his video, and he said, oh yeah,

that's fine, just cite it properly.

So, thank you, Dan.

They are often a form of anti -intellectualism operating on the

ignorance is purity, that an understanding of culture that rejects

that rejects the symbolic and clings to the literal is more true. It is part of

the process of denying art the capacity for meaning.

This is not...

This game isn't changing lives.

It is rare to find someone who will entirely reject the idea of approaching

broadly from a thematic or metaphorical point of view, but all too common to

find people who will lightly sneer at the actual attempt to do so and suggest

that it's overthinking things. And by suggest, I mean they will say it in

exactly those words.

We're going to give them two ratings. We're going to give them a rating on how

much we like the game.

And then have pretensions there.

Yeah. Okay. And I want to be clear. I'm not saying it's automatically a moral

failing for someone to be fundamentally incurious and closed -minded.

But maybe that's not the most ideal quality for a critic or reviewer to

Criticism plays a major role in framing our understanding of a medium and the

works within it, their value and their potential.

It can give you new ways to engage with it, help you appreciate a wider variety

of works, help you as an audience become more literate within that art form.

Criticism can expand our understandings, but it can also make it smaller.

Consistent feature within modern film criticism, which taken on the whole is

a distinct phase where the loudest voices in film discussion are incurious.

proudly ignorant, and approach plot as a problem to be unpacked and solved.

And you've said this for years. We talk about board games are toys.

They really are.

We mustn't pretend that there's something else.

This is not, this game isn't changing lives.

Let's talk about Lizzie Maggie.

Born in 1866, she was the daughter of an abolitionist. She was an inventor, a

journalist, a writer, a feminist, and a Georgist.

What is a Georgist?

So, Henry George was a dude who had a lot of ideas about addressing economic

inequality.

I'm going to vastly oversimplify his whole deal, but the big idea is the

tax. This idea goes that we shouldn't be taxing income from labor.

The people who do the labor don't have that much money.

You clock in at the office, you take orders at the drive -thru, you don't pay

taxes. Instead, the only thing that should be taxed is economic rent, money

generated by land ownership, licensing of intellectual property, natural

monopolies like the electric company, all those profits.

should be enough to take care of the cost of running a government, and then

everything in excess of that is given to everyone as universal basic income.

So you eliminate income tax, sales tax, tariffs.

There's just one tax, a single tax, and it's only paid by the people who own all

the shit.

And this has not come to pass, and probably won't in my lifetime, because

people who own all the shit...

don't want it to happen, and they have a bunch of money from owning all the

shit, and they can use that money to make sure the people who make the laws

don't do that.

Lizzie Maggie believed in the single tax and believed in it so hard, she made a

board game about it to educate and persuade the public.

Children of nine or ten years and who possess average intelligence can easily

understand the game, and they get a good deal of hearty enjoyment out of it.

They like to handle the make -believe money, deeds, etc., and the little

landlords take a general delight in demanding the payment of their rent.

They learn that the quickest way to accumulate wealth and gain power is to

all the land they can in the best localities and hold on to it.

Let the children once see clearly the gross injustice of our present land

system, and when they grow up, if they are allowed to develop naturally, the

evil will soon be remedied.

and it turned out to be the best -selling board game of the 20th century.

Sort of. The landlord's game? It is very nearly identical to Monopoly in every

fundamental way. If you look at Monopoly, you can kind of see its

nature. The rich become more powerful, and the other players slowly slide

towards bankruptcy.

But Monopoly isn't particularly compelling as a game, and neither is it

compelling as a polemic. There's no bite.

to his critique of the system.

And nothing that really argues in favor of the single tax.

And that's because Monopoly cut all of that out.

Maggie iterated and improved on the landlord's game over the course of her

lifetime. There are different versions with different rules, different victory

conditions, different play styles, different boards.

She was the Cole Whirly of the early 20th century.

Sorry, Cole.

Let's look at the game as described in two of her patents, number 748 ,626,

granted in 1904, and number 1 ,509 ,312, from

1924. Thanks to the website landlordsgame .info, I'm also able to

the rules and boards for the 1906 and 1932 editions.

The 1904 edition starts by dealing out some of the property cards among the

players. which they can buy at the outset.

This is something which runs throughout the various versions of the Landlord's

Game. In Monopoly, we all start with nothing, unequal footing, able to make

own destiny, very Horatio Alger.

But in the Landlord's Game, we are born into very unequal circumstances.

If you land on the space I got at the start of the game, I get a dollar.

If I land on yours, you get 22.

The properties in Monopoly are treated as a sort of terra nullius until someone

lands on it and buys them. That's not the case here.

If you land on a space that's not owned by a player, you can buy it. But if you

can't afford to, you have to pay rent. Nothing here is ever free.

And if I land on a space and pay rent, and then you land on the same space

I'm there, you pay me.

Half the rent.

The original landlord's game has a mechanism for subletting your apartment.

In addition to these properties, the board has a number of absolute

Bread, shelter, clothing, which each incur a $5 tax.

This represents indirect taxation.

If you're ever unable to meet your expenses, you mortgage your properties.

if you run out of those, you go to the poorhouse.

On your next turn, you roll the dice.

and you only move forward if that space is one you can afford to move to.

So players aren't eliminated when they run out of money in this version of the

game. Instead, they're stuck in what feels like a hopeless situation,

the other players moving on.

And that certainly is what poverty can feel like. This is distinct from the

jail, where you remain until either you throw a double or pay a fine of $50.

One of the ways you end up in jail...

is by trespassing on this corner space, owned by Lord Blueblood. How dare you,

you fucking pleb. The fourth corner space is Labor Upon Mother Earth

Wages, which gives you 100 bucks. This is go.

The game ends when every player has passed Mother Earth five times, and then

player with the most money wins.

The 1906 rule set makes a number of changes, and here's a few of the most

noteworthy ones.

As before, landing on an unowned property means either paying rent or

except another player can bid more for it even if you want to buy it.

There are of course auctions and monopoly, triggered if you choose not to

property, but this idea that there's always an auction, that someone with

money can always just snipe on you,

It really expresses the power of that money. Also introduced in this version

the concept of a monopoly.

Own both utilities and you have the municipal cinch, raising the rates from

to $25.

Owning multiple railroads increases the fare, and if two players own all four

between them, they form a trust, charging a higher fare and splitting the

profit. This version of Maggie's Game is already sharper.

there's more texture to it, and the players with money have more

to cut poorer players off from resources.

When players have become thoroughly familiar with the rules and principles

the game, they will readily perceive that if the game be continued long

the inevitable result will be that one player will own everything on the board.

Under the ordinary rules, however, two or three sittings would probably be

necessary to reach this end.

Therefore... It is suggested that in order to arrive more quickly at a

point, the following rules be observed.

What follows are rules for doubling and redoubling the taxes on necessities. And

once any block of lots have one, two, or three houses, the rent is doubled each

time. That's a pretty nice variant.

But she's not done. There are two other variants.

Lizzie, you've got to save that for an expansion or a stretch goal.

First up...

It's a set of rules called the Monarch of the World.

The Landlord's Game is based on present prevailing business methods.

This the players can prove for themselves, and they can also prove what

the logical outcome of such a system, i .e., that the land monopolist has

absolute control of the situation.

If a person wishes to prove this assertion, having first proven that the

principles of the game are based on realities, let him do so by giving to

player all of the land, and giving to the other players... all other

of the game.

Provide each player with $100 at the start and let the game proceed under the

rules, with the exception that the landlord gets no wages.

By this simple method, one can satisfy himself of the truth of the assertion

that the land monopolist is monarch of the world.

The remedy is the single tax.

And that sounds unplayable. As a ludic object, it sounds miserable.

But as a model meant to persuade...

Baller move, 10 out of 10, no notes. So this is the argument against the system

as it stands.

Then she makes the argument for the alternative.

If the players wish to prove how the application of the single tax would

everybody by equalizing all opportunities and raising wages, they

time during the game put the single tax into operation by a vote of at least two

of the players.

Once this is instituted, all rent money...

is paid into a public treasury.

There's no more taxes on necessities like food or shelter.

And once the money in the public treasury hits certain thresholds, it's

purchase utilities and then the railroads, making those spaces free to

for all players.

Lord Blueblood's estate is seized and turned into a free college.

Landing there gives you education cards, and four of those can be turned in for

a professor card, getting you extra money at the end of the game. As the

continues and the cash in the public treasury continues to meet thresholds,

wages of the players are all raised again and again and again.

The single tax rules demonstrate not only the world Georgists imagine we

live in, but how we could get there.

The way this policy change would gradually transform society into

equitable. And it does this by changing the rules of the game while we're

playing it, modeling the way laws would change society. And I think that's just

really elegant.

Now, the 1924 patent doesn't list these single tax rules.

There's no poorhouse, and players who go bust are just eliminated from the game.

However, you don't win by being the last one standing.

Victory is simply achieved by being the first player to hit $3 ,000.

This, for me, is less interesting than the 1906 game, but it has a couple of

barbed delights.

When you throw doubles, you not only roll again, but you roll a chance cube

six faces and multiples of five.

Five. Caught robbing a hen roost. Go to jail.

Ten. Caught robbing the public.

Take $200 from the board. The players will now call you senator.

My favorite thing, though, is Laswell Hotel.

This space represents the distinction made between classes, only money guests

being accepted.

A player on this space pays to the board $25 if he has in his possession... $2

,000 or more in cash.

If he has not such an amount, he throws his dice again and moves backward.

1932 saw the release of The Landlord's Game and Prosperity, which builds on the

rules presented in the 1924 patent.

This version is for exactly four players. It does not work with any other

number. And that rules.

The object here is to hit $2 ,000, at which point you become the big landlord.

But if the other three players agree, the game continues, changing from the

landlord's game to prosperity.

And as you might expect, this is similar to the single tax rules from 1906.

Indirect taxes are abolished. Rent is paid to the prosperity land rent fund,

which is used to purchase utilities and railroads.

This version of the game ends when all players have doubled their original

capital. There's no winners or losers.

because we all benefit from a more equitable system.

The Landlord's Game shows why our national housekeeping has gone wrong,

Prosperity Game shows how to start it right and keep it going right.

Now, modern gamers do not regard Monopoly highly.

It is old -fashioned, clumsy, and tedious.

So saying Lizzie Maggie is the real creator of that game, it does her a

disservice.

especially because her approach to games as a political, persuasive art form

is very modern. But I want to avoid special pleading here. I think this work

very expressive, but it's expressive within a very limited mechanical

vocabulary.

It's a little bit like finding out someone tried to make an M -Sim in 1977

the Atari 2600.

Modern mechanisms are more sophisticated, and they allow us to make

sophisticated arguments.

I just think, if this is what she did with what she had, what could she

do today?

What could we do today? The pre -Lizzie Maggie is an award given each year at

the Ren and Drew Board Game Festival.

to highlight what board games bring to society as a cultural object.

For many, the board game remains a toy with rules, an object whose main

is entertainment.

However, like cinema and literature, this medium can make a very different

It can be dramatic, committed, informative, or an artistic performance,

other things.

This year's winners included Avery Adler, the designer of the role -playing

games Monster Hearts and The Quiet Year, and Daybreak, a cooperative board game

designed by Matty Omenepes and Matt Leacock.

Like Leacock's Pandemic, Daybreak uses negatively reinforcing feedback loops to

model the cascade effect of things getting worse, in this case, climate

It has a huge deck of cards that present various things that can be done about

climate change, ways to shift to green energies, reduce carbon emissions, and

take care of the environment. There is something to be said for the ways games

with lots of cards, each with specific identities and different effects, with

dozens of mechanical metaphors, can be more expressive and textured than a

purely systems -driven approach.

Each of the cards in Daybreak has a little QR code taking you to a webpage

explains the real -life thing the card represents.

This could be a game that pushes people out of the doomerism that surrounds

climate change, that makes them feel empowered, that changes lives. The game

saying, if we work together, we can fix this. But there's a friction inherent in

that we.

The QR code suggests ways that we, ordinary people, can take action.

But the we that acts within the game, that can actually operate at the scale

avert catastrophe, they're all major world powers.

For example, China or the United States.

As someone living in the United States in 2025,

that leaves a real bitter taste.

I mean, frankly, in my lifetime, there has not been an administration that has

taken real, meaningful action on climate change.

Because the people who own all the shit use the money they have from owning all

the shit to make sure the people who pass the laws don't stop them.

My takeaway from the game isn't, if we work together, we can fix this.

But the people in power could fix this if they wanted to.

or if we had any way at all to actually hold them accountable.

And if I thought that was the game's intention, to show us what we could

what we should have, what we know we don't, I think I'd really like it,

actually. But a game where you're working with the United States to stop

change, working within capitalism to solve the problems it's caused, it feels

like an absurd fantasy.

It's like a Lord of the Rings game where the Fellowship has to work with Sauron

to destroy the ring.

Daybreak, like Maggie's Prosperity Rules, is a cooperative game that

system that can be reformed, and it doesn't dig in its heels.

My own games about destructive systems are competitive, with one player

embodying that system, and that's because it's all friction, all heel

all the time.

I don't think one's a better approach than the other.

It does reflect an essential difference, however, in how we see the world.

So I've been talking a lot about board games using mechanisms to make

to express and advocate for ideas.

And partially that's because that's the major focus of my own work.

And I think it's something that board games are uniquely good at, better than

other forms.

But art is more than just ideas.

What about emotions?

Every other art form can make us feel something.

Can board games do that?

Can they touch our hearts? Can they break them?

Most of those other art forms can be narratives. There are people in them

personalities that we can identify with.

or be repelled by.

Things happen to them and we worry about what's going to happen next.

Or we know what's going to happen next and we're filled with dread and anxiety

about it.

Board games aren't really a narrative form in this way.

They can have the shape of a story, an arc, a structure, but they don't have

dialogue or big swelling emotional moments.

Characters don't drive the story of a board game.

Systems and players do.

The Landlord's Game tells a story through its systems, which the single

bends inevitably towards utopia.

Players don't actually have much to do with that outcome.

The systems in Daybreak bend toward collapse, but the game positions players

opposition with the goal of averting that collapse.

and that creates some tension. We're not quite sure how it's going to end.

In many competitive games, the systems are more stable, but set players to

accumulate greater power and capability, an arc of improvement.

This is also the narrative arc you see in most video games, and for that

in traditional TTRPGs.

These are three forms that have significant overlap.

All three are interactive, driven by player agency.

All three are built out of systems and rules.

All three use mechanisms as metaphors. Hit points is an example that runs

through all three forms, a numerical, discrete measure of how alive something

that goes up or down as you are healed or attacked.

The term probably originates with D &D.

But you can trace the basic idea back to wargaming.

In hex encounter games, units have combat factors, which often correlate to

numerical strength.

You take losses in combat, the number gets smaller until the unit is removed.

Now that doesn't mean all those people are dead.

This removal represents not only death and injury, but...

desertion, disorganization, lowered morale, physical exhaustion, a decision

retreat and regroup.

This is the power of a metaphor.

It can have multiple overlapping meanings all at once, without having to

single one of them.

It doesn't represent, it evokes.

Hit points are not a measure of how much people juice you have left in your

container.

Losing hit points is taking an injury, it's being exhausted, it's being

out, it's having reduced reaction time. It's all of these things, and maybe none

of them, all at once.

Hitting the enemy in a TTRPG isn't always hitting it.

It could represent an attack that is dodged or blocked, but leaves them open

your next blow.

And we understand this intuitively in tabletop games.

you don't ask how the monster survived being arrowed ten times.

You can feel a little weirder in video games, where that representation is less

abstract and more literal.

Hurry! Over here!

Save me!

No! Why did he take so many arrows?

They're wearing chainmail. I'm trying to shoot him in the face parts.

But it's, you know, limited utility.

Well, I killed one of them, but we don't have the arrow to kill another because

it takes like seven.

So, yeah.

Like board games, video games are essentially made up of rules and

of interlocking systems.

But because the representation is more literal, more immediate, we don't really

read them as metaphors.

When I move a piece in a board game, I have to count the squares and think

the rules governing that movement.

But when I move in a video game, I just move.

There is an intuitiveness and a congruence between myself and my digital

Moving through a space in a video game can create an emotional resonance,

heightened by the lighting, sound, and other elements.

A role in a board game is a collection of mechanisms and rules.

A role in a video game is a body we inhabit.

Board games stay on the conscious plane, but video games can operate in our

subconscious.

In short, it's immersive.

You can get lost in it. This is something all other art forms can do,

-narrative forms like music and dance, and it helps that art to move us.

But you know who hates that shit? My boy, Bertolt Brecht.

Verfremdungseffekt, baby!

Brecht was born in 1898.

Distrustful of authority, he hated capitalism, fascism, nationalism, and

There's a famous story about how when he was a teenager, during World War I, his

teacher assigned an essay on how patriotism was rad.

And what he did...

If he wrote that patriotism wasn't rad, actually it sucks, and only a fucking

idiot could be persuaded to die for his country.

Bertolt Brecht believes in these ideas so hard, he writes plays about it to

educate and persuade the public.

His most popular play to this day is the Three Penny Opera, an absolutely

furious indictment of capitalism and its treatment of the poor.

It's an argument about systems.

But no one is really paying attention to that, because they're too busy singing

Mack the Knife. It's a catchy number.

They get lost in the story,

in the emotion.

And so he comes up with the ver -frem -dungs effect, the alienation or

distancing effect.

If you break the fourth wall, prevent immersion, avoid emotion, the audience

no choice but to actually think about your ideas.

The audience was hindered from simply identifying itself with the characters

the play.

Acceptance or rejection of their actions and utterances was meant to take place

on a conscious plane instead of as hitherto in the audience's subconscious.

One reason why board games are good for making arguments is their distance

already built in.

It keeps us thinking about the game and what it's saying. We're not distracted

by a story.

We don't get lost in the experience. But those cerebral abstract qualities that

make games uniquely good at modeling and critiquing systems might also be a way

for us to evoke emotion.

Now, throughout this chapter, I've been using video game and board game a little

imprecisely.

When I describe the immersive qualities of video games, I'm not really talking

about the medium as a whole, but a specific subset, action games.

The fact is, there are a lot of video games that are very abstract, that

essentially are board games.

There are so many deck builders right now, and moment to moment, these are

games.

Often these are combat focused, and here they take you out of your digital body,

abstracting its capabilities into cards.

When you're playing a fighting game, making decisions in fractions of

you only have access to the moves you can think of.

These turn -based games recreate that stress with a hand of cards.

Griftlands is interesting because you're building two decks, one for combat and

one for negotiation.

Some challenges can be approached either way, and after winning a combat or

negotiation, you'll add a card to that deck.

The more you fight, the better you are at fighting. The more you talk to

the better you get at talking.

Conversation in this game functions as a combat, replacing physical hit points

with mental resolve.

Both you and your opponent can play a number of arguments that circle around

and support you, and these can be targeted in order to neutralize them.

This makes it feel subtle, winding, abstract, indirect. It gives it a very

different feeling than the physical combat, which is very straightforward.

But, like I said, it still essentially functions as combat, where the goal is

dominate and destroy your opponent.

This is often the way video games treat conversations, as a challenge to be

overcome. You choose the right dialogue option, or you make the right role, and

that makes the character like you and give you the thing that you want.

Signs of the Sojourner is the first game I can think of where a conversation

feels like a conversation.

Like Grifflands, this is a deck builder.

But it's not about wearing down your opponent in the marketplace of ideas.

You're not talking at them, but with them. And you do that by matching

If you get to the end of a line without a mismatch, you score one of these white

dots, score all of them, and the conversation went well.

Mismatches lose you black dots, and when you lose all of them, the conversation

shuts down.

You start the game all circles and triangles, empathy and logic.

And the people around you, people you grew up with, they're circles and

triangles people too. It's the culture that you've come from. But as you

out into the world and meet new people, some of them are very creative or very

direct. Diamonds or squares or both.

And you don't have any of those cards, so you try to respond with what you

Circles or triangles, you get a mismatch. It's worse than that, because

don't have circles and triangles, they can't match what you played either, and

so you have two failures in a row.

But this is a deck builder, and after each conversation, regardless of how it

ended, you replace one of the ten cards in your deck with a card that they

played.

Meeting people and talking to them changes you.

gives you new ideas, new ways of looking at the world, new ways of expressing

yourself, new desires, and new dreams.

Keep trying and growing, and you'll be able to connect with those diamonds and

squares.

But that also means it's going to be harder to maintain your connections with

the people back home.

This is anchored in the game's story by your relationship with Elias, a

childhood friend, who doesn't like how much you've changed.

and how the two of you are growing apart.

When you have a hand of cards you can't make use of, you feel awkward, clumsy,

even rude.

People get hurt or angry when you mismatch, and more than once, I found

apologizing out loud.

Partway through the game, there's a natural disaster, and a bunch of

gain new cards with a new symbol, representing grief and trauma.

It suddenly becomes very difficult to talk with the friends you've made.

But as you do talk with them in these difficult conversations, you're able to

gain these cards yourself.

That gives you a new way to connect with people and understand them. The game

says something about how we connect to people, how we learn from them, how we

change, and most of all, how all of that feels.

It's not an idea being expressed, but an emotion.

expressed through what is, mechanically, a pretty simple board game. The cards

you play don't represent literal dialogue choices.

The game only hints at the content of these conversations.

Which doesn't even exist, because the game doesn't say you're supposed to be

putting down an argument when you play a piece. You don't actually make an

argument. No, you don't.

Metaphor gives us words for the ineffable.

It's something that operates...

on the subconscious.

And board games are, in a way, all metaphor.

If they lean into that, if those metaphors are less representational,

concrete, it creates a space for us, not so much to fill in the meaning that's

missing, the particulars, but to engage with the work on that subconscious

level.

As metaphor.

Which isn't to say that it's simple to do that.

This game might play like a board game, but it is paced like a video game.

The longer you spend with the work, the more time you have with it, the deeper

it's going to be able to touch you, and the more texture it's going to have.

Video games that actually have themes and ideas tend to be single -player

experiences that you're intended to finish.

There's no way to really lose.

I can say anecdotally that when my games have resonated with people on an

emotional level, they've been solo games. And they've been games without

conditions. And those are still a tough sell. I don't have the answers.

I just know that board games can do more.

Can be more.

I know that in some ways already they are more.

They can have meaning and purpose.

If we aren't afraid to take them seriously.

My Patreon producers are the ones who make these videos possible, and that's

extra true this time. The project folder for this is 150 gigabytes, and my old

computer would not have been able to handle that.

Only reason why I have a new computer is the people on Patreon supporting me

over this last year. Thank you very much.

$5 a month gives you producer credit, $10, double producer credit, or you're

listed twice in a row.