I’ve been in a bit of a slump lately, not able to make myself read much, only paying half the requisite attention to anything to really form an opinion worth saying. It’s a very 2020 mood, is all I can really say on the matter. The attention I have been able to muster has to be earmarked for grading, because we just passed through the first four-week-block of the semester and that means that there was a paper to grade.

So it took me a while to come up with something to write about, is what I’m getting at. I’m still not sure this is going to be a topic with broad appeal, looking at the intersection of game design and politics. I speak here of tabletop or analog gaming, because we all know that video games aren’t political unless there’s a realistically-drawn woman or a gay person present (ignore Ronald Reagan emerging from the depths of the uncanny valley to use they/them pronouns to refer to a player character before ordering them to commit war crimes. The pinkwashing is strong here.)

For my thoughts on Ronald Reagan, please see the piece I uploaded last week.

I’ve referenced this a few times in the past (for example, here), and have written about Ludology and Game Design here, but I’ve been dipping my toes back in to game design recently, and I had an idea I’d like to sketch out near the end of this piece that references all of this.

But let’s start from the beginning.

Tabletop games, when you get down to it, are engines for producing narratives, much as civilization is an engine for producing history. Different engines are good for producing different narratives (despite what D&D enthusiasts will tell you, it is not universally applicable.) They do this using many tools that are used for decision-making in other contexts – for example, Powered by the Apocalypse games encourage the person running the game to turn the outcome of an action over to group discussion at some points.

The “spotlight” mechanic (what the D&D player knows as “initiative”) is simply a mechanism for determining who goes first in the conversation and the order in which people speak. One game, Troika! has even turned the spotlight-passing mechanic into a sortition system, with randomly drawn tokens determining who has the right to move next.

Moreover, many game designers discuss the “economy” of their games or design a “currency” into it, reproducing a profoundly simplified market logic in the game. The most explicit and well-known of these would be that of FATE, which uses tokens to indicate how many of a specialized currency a player has to spend to activate their abilities, and which they receive from the game master, who functions as a central bank, in return for taking actions which make the narrative more interesting (generally by making tactically poor decisions that are in keeping with the character they are playing.)

What I’m trying to make clear is that game design, on the level of mechanics assembled to make the game produce a narrative through player interaction, already cribs a lot of its procedures from politics, including political economy. A means that a powerful tool could be built from these pieces.

To look over at politics – specifically the politics of the United States, sorry international readers – the 14th Amendment of the U.S. Constitution requires that all citizens be granted equal protection under the law and was the de jure (though not de facto) end of slavery. There are some problems with it (the de facto continuation of slavery in the form of the Prison-Industrial Complex and the doctrine of corporate personhood both came from this amendment,) but for our purposes in this discussion, one of the biggest problems is that it discourages any period of political experimentation at the national level.

Now, in some ways this is a good thing (I’m not sure I would much like the experiments conducted by any administration after Jimmy Carter,) but in other ways its bad. Pilot studies in Universal Basic Income have been conducted in Canada, Finland, and India, but all such studies in the United States have been implemented at the state or municipal level. A national experiment would be necessary, to see how it interacts with things like monetary policy and interstate trade. A national experiment, likewise, can’t be done because a study requires a control group, and that means that – for a time – people would have to be treated differently under the law. Such a thing is unconstitutional in the United States.

This is why I mention game design as a possible remedy.

Look, I’ve played a lot of tabletop roleplaying games, but I never really got into LARP. It just seems like a huge investment, honestly.

A game – specifically a tabletop game or a LARP (Live-Action Role-Play) – has many of the characteristics of living in a different regime, because games of this sort are artwork that uses the medium of the social contract. As such, they can be used as a sort of political science “hot lab”, a place where experiments can be conducted in a controlled fashion, separated out of from the world around them. Tabletop game designers are already experimenting with a variety of safety measures, some as simple as the “X card” I have mentioned previously, and others far more nuanced and ritualized (the “Horror Contract” that some games have put together come to mind, as does the “lines and veils” approach. Most of them seem to be moving past the simple braking mechanism — originally a safe-word — imported from BDSM.)

It may be possible to use the techniques of a LARP, for example, to study different systems of political economy, or social arrangement. I’m imagining that this would probably look a lot like a Burn with better documentation: but if procedures could be developed, short-term pilot studies could be put together to test radically different political regimes in a fashion far more controlled – and safe for the participants – than intentional communities and communes of previous eras. Something that has been shown to work well in the short term could then be commissioned for longer-term studies, and then policy could actually be made with experimental proof as guideposts instead of just ideology and guesswork.

On the other hand, I personally feel like game designers could take the initiative here and design radically different sorts of in-game economy to test out. I speak here not of a diegetic economy, portrayed in the narrative of the game, because narrative portrayals only prove what the creator of the narrative think would work, but of extra-diegetic economies, layered into the rules of the game itself.

Note: the tragedy of the commons is a problem that arises out of selfishness. Only in the backwards mind of an ecofascist like Hardin would you think the solution is more selfishness.

An idea that occurred to me on this front would be something I’ve actually been toying with since my piece about “the tragedy of the commons.” I feel that replicating the ground conditions of the situation described in that piece would lead to the players altering their behavior to win the game as a group, so long as you frame it all as winning or failing as a group.

Consider, in the center of the table (or, in these days, in a ledger managed by the game referee,) there is a pot of poker chips. In the course of telling the story, the players can pull chips from the pot and spend them – some actions, when done, would return the chip to the pot. Others would remove it from the game entirely. The minor actions that cycle a chip would be things that moderately benefit the player cycling the chip; the major actions that remove a chip would be things that benefit the table as a whole, but which requires the player to forgo the reason they drew the chip to begin with. When the pot is exhausted, the end of the narrative is triggered, or perhaps a major turning point in the story.

To make this work, it would be necessary to give the players the option to generate more chips for the pot, which I’m going to go ahead and say would probably require them to forgo an advancement or other major reward.

Given these initial conditions, I’m going to guess that it’s entirely possible that the first run-through of this game would go much like Hardin predicts – because Americans, at least, have been socialized to be selfish – but on subsequent run-throughs of the game the players would begin to strategize and plan their approach as a team.

This is why I feel game design has implications for political science and policy making: it allows wicked problems to be modeled, and then gives the people working on them the permission to be wrong, something which just doesn’t really exist when we’re talking about policy.

Being able to create conditions that allow people to test various approaches and train is the point of play. We use these tools to ready ourselves for the challenges that we predict will come in the future: we have a lot of challenges appearing on our horizon, so perhaps we should start to train ourselves to think differently.

※

If you enjoyed reading this, consider following our writing staff on Twitter, where you can find Cameron and Edgar. Just in case you didn’t know, we also have a Facebook fan page, which you can follow if you’d like regular updates and a bookshop where you can buy the books we review and reference (while supporting both us and a coalition of local bookshops all over the United States.)

Training to Think Differently: Ludology, Sociology, and Politics