(2). trash culture
Something very sinister happens to the people of a country when they begin to distrust their own reactions as deeply as they do here, and become as joyless as they have become…Such a person interposes between himself and reality nothing less than a labyrinth of attitudes. And these attitudes, furthermore, though the person is usually unaware of it (is unaware of so much!), are historical and public attitudes.
-James Baldwin, The Fire Next Time
As I write this essay, I’m in an antique shop that I regularly visit. It has a cute coffee shop, filled with lovely people, or at least that’s how I imagine them. The antique shop itself is filled with an ever-rotating avalanche of things. Just walking through it overwhelms me. One day you’ll walk in and see a big row of dolls, another day an avalanche of metal signs, and on still another a great piled collection of hats. It’s all just packed with stuff. Today, there are about fifteen chandeliers hanging from a single display.
We find ourselves confronted over and over again with a bizarre juxtaposition of two extremes: ungodly overproduction, consumption, and unchecked gluttony on one end; yawning scarcity, lack, and dysenteric emptiness on the other.
It’s become cliche to point out the enormous variety of nut butter you can find in a grocery aisle, while just outside that same grocery store, a completely immiserated and starving human being stands, begging the can machine for a few nickels. This contrast demands compartmentalization and mental bifurcation.
One of the crises this creates for art is that the excesses of wealth create so goddamn much of it, and because there’s so goddamn much of it, none of us know what to do with all of it. Do we treasure it? Do we consume it and throw it away? In my experience, it is often the latter. Board games, comic books, and other media of this type are trash culture. They’re cheap to manufacture, cheap to produce, and are often designed with the expectation that they will be thrown away. Renier Knizia, a well-regarded German game designer, has designed more than six hundred published games. Consider the scale.
A capitalist-driven consumer culture allows for wide-scale production and dissemination of art, but it is also hostile to one of art’s core tenets—if you’ll allow some sentimentality, art is vitality made manifest through time. Some cynics would say that this reduces artistic production to a futile attempt to deny death, but that’s a bit sociopathic. The vibrancy, depth, and beauty of life, for better or worse, is channeled into the works that we all create. Even the most cynical and consumerist forms of art contain an animating spark, no matter how misguided it might be.
The goal of any critical measure worth a damn is to attempt to unearth and engage with that spark, to see what its possibilities are, the seed that lives within the thing.
As a system with a foundation of exploitation, of taking, getting more than you put in, of, well, capitalizing, capitalism is antithetical to the aims of the artist, whether that artist realizes it or not. If art is vitality, life, expression of life force, capitalism seeks to squeeze all of that out in search of profit, better modes of exploitation, and gain.
The art of critique is to consider what is made carefully, often in a way that makes the wheels of the consumerist machine fall off, grinds the gears a bit, make people stop and look at the engine for a moment.
For art like board games, it is exceedingly difficult to find good critique. Most of what you find is advertising. The reason for this is that there are very few incentive structures in place for criticizing what is essentially a factory that spits out boxes with pieces of wood in them. There are few university programs specializing in board games, and most of them produce works and critiques that position themselves above consumer culture, when in fact their existence is predicated on its continuance. Outside of the academy, the world of board game edutainment is completely saturated with dozens of bright shining faces who are just waiting to tell you about bright shiny things.
Search around for some board game reviews online, and you’ll see hundreds of descriptions of games, and you’ll see a shitload of uses of the word fun, enjoyable, and similar descriptors. Many “reviews” and “critiques” are what is essentially descriptions of the mechanisms that make up the game. I have written many reviews like this myself. I’m not a fan of punching down and dredging up the writing of others, so here’s how this writing looks:
I played a game called Scout last night. Scout is a ladder game, which means unlike trick-taking games like Hearts, Spades, and the like, you continuously play until a set end point in the round is reached.
You have a hand of cards, each card having a different combination of two numbers between one and ten. When your hand is dealt, you first choose whether to turn the hand one direction or the opposite, which sets the values of your hand cards for the round. After that, you proceed in sequence, playing runs or sets of cards. When you beat a run or set with your cards, you take the beaten cards as points. You are also not allowed to rearrange your hand, except when you “scout,” pulling one of the cards from the current set or run on the table.
While it’s a bit blunt, many reviews proceed this way. They present you with a summary of the mechanics that compose the game, and then they give an opinion about how fun they thought those mechanisms were. Video games are often written about in a similar way.
This is a good way to help people make consumer decisions, but it also presents a specific set of problems and contains certain assumptions. The main assumption is that games are essentially toys that are an amalgam of different mechanisms. They are toys that more experienced toy-players will interpret for you, telling you what they mean.
By this logic, a painting is simply a collection of brush strokes. Imagine if someone wrote about Degas by saying “there are some ballerinas posing in the frame.”
Because one of the functions of advertising is to get people addicted to memes, to shorthand, to signifiers. This is an incredibly effective way to get people to buy games. Ask any gaming hobbyist what “tableau building” means, or what a “deckbuilder” is, and you’ll get a well-formed and explicit response. These mechanisms are created and reinforced through repetition, and those who write about games do the heavy lifting of reinforcing convention.
Board games lend themselves to this, more than any other form of trash culture. While there are designers and house styles, the most beautiful thing about game design is that it is very human. Human in the sense that it mirrors how we are bound to the dirt. Games develop through new editions, new versions, new revisions. Mechanisms rise, and fall, are replaced by smoother, more conventional methods. Not all of this is the demand of capital.
I have a collection of forgotten, broken, or even “bad” games—Medieval Merchant, Goldland, Mecanisburgo, De Vulgari Eloquentia, Workshop of the World, Cavum. These games live alongside the “good” and well-regarded ones—Tigris & Euphrates, Hansa Teutonica, Inis, Imperial, Risk, Catan, Ark Nova, Acquire. The truth of these games is that they allow us to see aspects of ourselves in muddied light, in vague forms on the horizon, and they confront us with those forms, often by accident.
Because the players are the game and the game is the players, the game takes on the properties of those who play it, moving, shaping into new forms, and becoming new things.
Until it coalesces into a form that we can speak of, which rarely happens.