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