The Political Economy of Game Design (Odd Columns, #10)

I. Representation in Human Societies

If I’d never seen a dollar, I might guess this symbol had come from Over the Edge by Atlas Games.

I wrote this to put it into a drawer and let it marinate — but the more I thought on it, the more I figured it would be valuable to put it out for those people inclined to listen to it.

In the past I’ve put forward a staunchly anti-essentialist standpoint: I don’t believe that there is really such a thing as an essential, unchanging human nature (best articulated here, I believe). To be human nature, something would have to emerge not just in every human culture – among the bankers of contemporary London, the indigenous people of the Amazon, the aboriginal peoples of Australia, the San bushmen of Africa, the post-industrial children of the rust belt, Japanese school children, and the Inuit of the arctic – but in every time period, from the earliest hunter-gatherers and agriculturalists to now. That being said, I do think that there are certain things that can be said to crop up enough to make a good case them being human nature: specifically cooperation and representation.

Cooperation is simple to argue for, and potentially not because continued existence is gated beyond the ability to cooperate. A group that cannot cooperate enough to secure food and shelter doesn’t survive long enough to be a group.

Representation is a bit more complex. I don’t mean this in the identity-political sense, but in the broadest sense. Human beings are driven to represent, in one form or another, things that have happened or are visible in the world around them. Some cultures lack all myths, but they still report things that have happened to them and those known to them to other members of the group. In some cultures, this is grand projects that states are formed to support – such as the emergence of the pyramid as a way for a group to steal the grandeur of the mountains for a tomb or a temple – in others it is more personal and individualized – such as in the Papua New Guinean natives who have borrowed the figure of the comic book character The Phantom as an emblem to paint upon shields. Sometimes, like in the former examples, it is a solid object, elsewhere it takes the form of stories or dances or drama.

I intend all of these examples – different as they are – to be seen as subcategories of Representation, the way that ballet is a subcategory of dance (though of course, as mentioned, dance falls under the heading of representation). Now, it’s fairly obvious that some cultures don’t possess representative art (I once put the first chapter of John Berger’s Ways of Seeing in front of a student from Saudi Arabia, and he had a great deal of difficulty with it), but representation still occurs in these cultures among the expression of histories and journalism – that’s why I’m using the term “Representation” instead of “Art.”

One thing that fascinates me, one variety of representation, is the game.

Hear me out.

II. Game as Representation

Depiction of Patolli from Codex Magliabechiano.

There’s an episode, described late in David Graeber’s Debt: The First 5,000 Years where he describes Montezuma, the Aztec emperor, held hostage by the Spanish conquistadors. To pass the time, they played a local dice game called “patolli” (fundamentally, it seems similar to games I remember from my early childhood, like “Sorry!” – it was a race, of sorts). Because of the way the Aztecs conceived of their games, there was always a way for the dice to throw a particular way and cause a sharp turn in fortunes – strategy might be present, but fundamentally, they conceived of the universe as a precarious, hostile place where fate could turn at any moment. (I’ve read a little bit of Aztec Philosophy: Understanding a World in Motion by James Maffie, previously mentioned here, and it backs this up.)

Graeber describes this episode, trying to get inside the mind of Montezuma, describing it roughly as “the emperor playing dice for the fate of the universe.”

In a game, the representation is fundamentally of the processes of the world around us, the processes by which they are shown to work. This dovetails with a text that I’ve used a few times in class, “Toys” by Roland Barthes, where he discusses the toys produced for the French market in the middle of the last century, and compares them to earlier toys. He puts forward the idea that the purpose of these toys is to teach children how to interact with the world in a socially desirable fashion, reproducing in the child the character of the petit-bourgeois property-owner. Games are used to teach children the proper way of interacting with the world and the moral character of that world – they are the means by which the social world is re-created every generation.

In this way, the game of “Cowboys and Indians” the upon the character of children the ideas of settler-colonialism, and “cops and robbers” is the Foucauldian boomerang of this – the cowboys translated to police officers, and the “noble savages” from outside turned into degenerate elements of the inside of society. The war is brought home.

These are just unstructured make-believe, but the rules of games that are structured are also instructive, I believe. They teach more complicated processes, because we live in a society that is supposedly about rules, and we have many words to describe these rules (laws, statutes, ordinances, conventions, and institutions). We use these rules to enable the action of these more complicated games, which in turn results in the complex pleasures that they bring.

III. The Tabletop Roleplaying Game as Economic Model

More than anything else – as several reviews I’ve written over the years indicate – I’m interested in tabletop role playing games (Dungeons and Dragons and its various descendants, for the uninitiated). These games are fascinating for several reasons, but the one I want to focus on is an intuition that I’ve been working with for a while: Tabletop role-playing games – which don’t, in any but the loosest sense, work anything like other games – are toy models of political economy, and I suspect that they could be used as models for alternative political-economic systems.

I’ve said as much in the past, but I want to really drill into this here.

Of the games mentioned in this section, Shadows of Esteren is the newest, least-known, and most criminally underrated.

First, let’s look at how these games differ from other games – I’ll be linking to SRDs if they’re available, but I’m going to go in broad strokes. Before I do, though, I should point out that there will be exceptions to everything I say here. The design space of role-playing games is so broad that it includes not just games like Dungeons and Dragons and Call of Cthulhu and Shadows of Esteren, which all require dice other than the typical six-sided variety and feature character record sheets that are at least two, if not three pages, long, and could stretch months or years of real time in duration; and Fiasco, a brief game played with a handful of dice in two colors that features no character record and is designed to be finished in one evening. They all bear a genetic relationship of a sort with one another, where game 1 might have traits ABCD, game 2 might have traits BCDE, game 3 has traits CDEF, and game 4 has traits EFGH, so you can say game 4 the same kind of activity as game 1 despite sharing no common material. (For more information on this, see Wittgenstein, apparently. I got it from Umberto Eco.)

To start with, unlike board games, card games, or sports, there is commonly no predefined “win condition” according to the rules. One doesn’t complete the game by securing all of their objectives. The game is an engine for narrative, and the game ends when the players agree that it ends.

Second, the primary medium for the game is the spoken word (or written, if played in a text-only online space). It proceeds by way of conversation, and is constrained – occasionally determined – by the non-conversational aspects.

Third, one of the primary engines for continuing the game is some form of symbolic exchange. In traditional games, this might be that the player characters have only so many hit points or sanity points or what have you, and as the game proceeds, in the course of combat or dangers, they exchange these for continuation. In a game like Fiasco, performance by the central character in a scene is rewarded by one of two dice colors, their actions prompting the rest of the table to decide on either success or failure.

Fourth, and finally, all games of this type have both a narrative component and a mechanical component. One could easily build a typology for this – Trad games are MNM (mechanics determine the narrative which leads to the next mechanical intrusion), while Indie games are — or tend to be — NMN (the mechanics intrude in response to character actions, which determine the next narrative moment, essentially), but this would be complicated and I’m not sure it would be terribly useful. But it’s the interaction of the quantitative and the qualitative, and the tension between them that makes it work.

These are all elements of the model, but I’m not sure exactly which parts are results of the modeling or of the thing being modeled. For the rest of this piece, I want to focus more on the mechanical side than on the narrative side.

Let’s look at a particular example.

IV. Dungeons and Dragons as Chartalist Economy

The core rule book for the current edition of D&D. They label it the fifth edition, but it’s at least the seventh version of the game published.

In Dungeons and Dragons, one player is the Game or Dungeon Master (GM/DM) and they portray the setting and adjudicate success and failure. If we analogize it to a video game, they’re playing the roll of the software. The other players (often just called “players”) each portray an individual character who takes actions within the world. On the mechanical side of things, each player character is a combination of chance and player choices – class, race, feats, skill points, what have you – which are fundamentally benefits, drawbacks, and permissions (they are entitled to do this action or that – throw a fireball, talk to animals, that sort of thing). They have three primary jobs: maintain (and, in certain situations, grow) the stockpile of hit points that they possess, and to grow from zero – or close to it – a stockpile of gold and experience points.

Strangely, in some ways, this functions somewhat like the chartalist origin of economy that Graeber describes, but does not embrace, in Debt. Early kings distributed coins to soldiers, and then instituted a tax, whereby each citizen had to deliver a certain number of these coins back to the king’s government, making the whole of their primitive state function to support the military.

In-game gold and experience are incredibly important in the game, but are fundamentally made up and worthless outside of it. It’s not even like you can (usually) take your character from one game to another, and maintain the original benefits. The GM of the second game will usually insist on a completely new character.

Image taken from Introduction to Advanced Dungeons & Dragons by Richard Baker III, David Cook, Kevin Melka, Bruce Nesmith.

Part of the issue springs from the fact that – as a currency that is essentially just marks in a ledger, – the GM can distribute as much or as little as they deem fit. Too little, and the game stalls out, too much and you could say the game overheats, spiraling out of control as the characters advance too quickly to provide much challenge (again, eventually, stalling out due to lack of interest). This matches the ideas about government spending found in Modern Monetary Theory, which has been described as Neo-Chartalist. The problem becomes moving the right amount from an infinite stockpile into a finite container – the total amount of money that a government can spend is the same amount as in-game gold or experience points that a game master can distribute: infinite. For different reasons, it is unwise to move too much (the specter of runaway inflation in monetary theory, the loss of player interest in gaming).

So, to simplify, the non-dice mechanics of Dungeons and Dragons essentially cast the players in a similar role to that of artisans in a primitive Chartalist economy. To continue their journey, they need to acquire the currency distributed by the GM (or king), so that they can return it to that original source for benefit. (In this metaphor, the hit-point currency is superfluous, though it’s very important for game design.)

One could also, potentially, take a Marxist view of this, with the GM as the toy-Bourgeois and the players as toy-Proletariat, possibly as a means of explaining the trad game obsession with an adversarial GM-Player relationship, modeling perhaps the control of the state apparatus by the capitalist (again, Trow’s Maxim, “the referee always wins” comes to mind). However, Capital and Grundrisse are both very, very long, and I have only started my deep dive into this, so I will not be doing a deep dive into this.

Dungeons and Dragons, as the archetypal “trad” game, laid out many of the conventions that would be later picked up by other traditional games, and then reacted against by the “New Wave” of games in the late 1980s/early 1990s (starting with Vampire the Masquerade; while these begin experimenting with many of the things that eventually lead in to Indie games, many of them are still trad), which was in turn reacted against by the “Indie Games” that would emerge out of the Forge at the tail end of the Aughts and start of the new ‘Tens (the story is somewhat more complicated, but this piece isn’t meant, primarily, as a history of game design).

I’m going to propose that almost all trad games, however, have this fundamental Chartalist structure: in the most broad and low-definition sense, it is about the acquisition of one or more currencies to return to its source for some eventual benefit.

Of course, there’s a real irony to this, in the fact that Gary Gygax was a libertarian (his FBI file says so), which is about as far as you can get from Chartalism and still agree that money should be a thing. He wasn’t replicating his thoughts on how the economy should work, he was setting up mechanics that coincidentally mirrored the functioning of the economy from a Chartalist standpoint – which is key here. He didn’t replicate his beliefs in the game to prove them correct — he applied, knowingly or not, a system that was out in the world.

As an aside, I think it would be perfectly possible for an unscrupulous and suitably skilled game designer to make a low-fidelity model to prove any given economic system in the form of a game and have it prove whatever they want it to be. At best, these are models and should be used as evidence for an idea, not as definitive proof.

V. FATE and the Market

While it’s still largely a trad game, FATE bears mentioning here because it adds a wrinkle to the Chartalist model that needs to be considered. One of the important currencies in this game is the imaginatively-named Fate Point. Certain actions require Fate Points be spent, some allow them to refresh, and they can provide a bonus on certain rolls.

One of the less-discussed rules implemented is the fact that Fate Points can move from one player to another, creating a market-like interaction between players: you can invoke bonuses on another player’s behalf, and you can make their rolls more difficult by offering them Fate Points.

While this still operates largely on the aforementioned trad/Chartalist model, it would be easy enough to conceive of a new version of this game that operates on a purely capitalist logic, with a pot of points in the middle of the table that the players have to perform narrative actions to extract and use, exchange between them, and eventually spend back into the pot, with them only rarely passing through the hands of the facilitator. Alternatively, the facilitator could have their own rules for interacting with it that are mechanically similar but ludo-narratively distinct.

I’m not going to state, definitively, that such a game doesn’t exist, but I haven’t seen it.

The economy of Fate Points, though, definitely mirrors the functioning of wages in the capitalist system: the facilitator distributes them to the players by offering them, and they have a clear incentive to offer as few as possible, while the players have an incentive to stockpile them for later use. This can lead to the economy locking up if the group isn’t inclined to interact with it on that level, but I find this to be an interesting case study: not every population – not every culture – is inclined to interact with a market economy on its own terms. In the model economy of the game, this can lead to the game failing; in the real world, this can lead to repression and coercion.

VI. Fiasco as (a sort of) Gift Economy

On the other end of the spectrum (as in so many things I’ve talked about), you might have a game like Fiasco. In Fiasco, the only currency is dice – during the course of play, dice are given by mutual agreement, at the end of each scene. They come in two varieties, white and black (generally). White dice show good outcomes, black dice show bad outcomes.

In the first half of the game, you hand the die your receive to another player as a gift. In the second half, you hold on to it.

At the end of the game, you roll all of your dice, subtract the smaller pool from the larger pool, and that gives you your result – the larger the number, the better, regardless of which kind of die it was rolled on.

Notably, this avoids many of the conventions present in other games. There are no fiddly little currencies applicable in only one place, there isn’t even randomized resolution. Everything is purely democratic. Which means that there’s room for implicit alliances and collusion, and the limited time span – you only have a number of scenes equal to four times the number of players – means that players are encouraged to act quickly.

This means that Fiasco could be said to operate under rules like that of a gift economy: you’re expected to give away what you receive, without official recognition of a debt. In play, debt definitely comes into it, and not always in the most expected ways: the way to achieve the best outcome is to have the most dice of one particular color, white or black, so if you have three black dice already, receiving a white die – while ostensibly a good outcome – throws your position into jeopardy, which might lead to an impetus for revenge in those who seek to game the system. Seeking revenge for a gift being given, and then pursuing that revenge through the means of another gift: I haven’t read Marcel Mauss’s book, but I’ve heard the description of the potlach ceremony summarized, and this pattern sounds similar to it in many ways. One could also compare it to the original practice of a white elephant gift.

VII. Belonging Outside Belonging: A Post-Capitalist Narrative Engine?

The cover of Dream Apart, the B.O.B. game that strikes me as the most interesting, setting-wise.

I haven’t even properly gotten into the Forge community’s innovations – that will be for another time, I suspect – but one descendant of the most notable Forge-derived game system, Powered by the Apocalypse, does bear discussion, the system commonly referred to as Belonging Outside Belonging, which was invented by Avery Alder for use in the game Dream Askew and Dream Apart, the former being an explicitly queer Post-Apocalyptic game, the other being a game of Shtetl folklore.

B.O.B. games are what are called “GM-full” games, a play on “GM-less” gaming. Depending on the scene, players will be either temporary facilitator, or will play a particular character, and instead of resolving uncertainty through dice, players exchange tokens into a central pool. When a character acts, it is either negative for them (and the player takes a token), or positive for them (and the player spends a token). No player starts with a token in their possession – you have to fail at some point to have agency within the story.

In this way, the economy of the game engine is purely voluntary, though it does have a slight mechanical-coercive cast to it: if you don’t participate in the economy, you’ll be fine, but you won’t succeed, and to participate, you need to sacrifice something first. This makes sense from a narrative standpoint: this system is designed to tell character-centered stories, and characters who always make good decisions aren’t interesting to watch.

But what the character ends up sacrificing, where they end up succeeding, is 100% in the hands of the player. The outcome is a matter not of chance, but agency.

In this way, it seems to me that this represents the first narrative engine to experimentally capture a post-capitalist standpoint. In this way it has moved beyond a simple representative model to an experimental model: while B.O.B. couldn’t be used as a model for how to distribute goods and services in society, its descendants might be fruitful grounds in which to test useful ideas for the future.

VIII. An Aside about Coercion

In the examples I have looked at thus far, one thing has really separated these model economies from the scaled-up economies of real-world cultures, societies, and states. Formally speaking, there is no way to coerce someone into participating in a game: a player is either participating of his own free will or they are not participating.

In the scaled-up economies, coercion definitely does exist. As a result, these larger economies are not designed with an eye towards fairness. While the model economies, despite the different roles defined by the mechanics, must have fairness at the core, because if the rewards for participating – the enjoyment of the game – are not something that everyone can participate in, then the game ceases to work.

Part of me wonders if this is perhaps the explanation for people’s investment in the capitalist system: they view it as a game, and they interpret their fortune in participating in it as fairness, with those who interact with it and do not experience similar fortunes perceived as people who interact with it unskillfully.

IX. Notes on Political Economy for Game Designers

Stafford Beer, pictured here next to text that could very well be inserted into one of our articles without much confusion.

For game designers seeking to make their projects more interesting and fruitful, I think it would be a good idea for them to familiarize themselves not just with contemporary theories of political economy (the ones outside of Neoclassical Economics), but also the surpassed, supplanted, abandoned, and discredited theories of the past. Would it be possible to build a tabletop roleplaying game that functions along the logic of Feudalism, or Mercantilism, or the economy established by the CNT-FAI in the early days of the Spanish Civil War, or that built by the Allende government with the help of British cybernetician Stafford Beer?

If you are designing a game, you have moved what is looked (I would argue incorrectly) at as a science into the realm of art, and you are not burdened by the need to correctly describe what is or will be true. By breaking away from traditional game design, you will discover new methods by which emergent narrative can be generated at the table.

I’ve been intending to give GUMSHOE games a shot — they’re designed for investigation stories, and I’ve got an affection for those.

If you need any other inducement, I’d like to point out that Emily Care Boss, one of the founding members of the Forge, and one of the designers of the game Bubblegumshoe (and a number of smaller but well-received indie games), has a degree in political economy. At least one person who’s made a career in the field did so after studying Political Economy extensively enough to get a Bachelor’s Degree (I’m not sure that the Master’s Degree in Forestry has much to do with it, but perhaps I simply don’t know enough about forestry).

X. Notes on Game Design for Political Economists

I’ll admit, first off, that I’ve done a lot more game design than I have political economy. So while the last section was brief, this is probably going to be more brief. I’m going to start, though, by pointing out something that I wrote about in a previous piece: namely, that it seems to me that the social sciences (and certain branches of philosophy) suffer from difficulty with testing, and the use of game design techniques could be used to create models specifically aimed at testing the ideas put forward.

Second, it seems to me that both political economy and game design hinge upon the same problem: notably, how do we create systems that structure human behavior in a productive fashion? What balance of risk and reward, of intrinsic and extrinsic motivation, are needed to make a system work in an open-ended fashion?

The work is already similar. The insights might be interesting to share.

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