love and other games (introduction)

Note: Over the coming weeks, I’ll be posting the entirety of a manuscript I’ve been working on for several years. It is an essay collection about board games. I hope you enjoy it. -t

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I used to think that writers needed to be modest. I used to think this because I’m no scholar of truth or the human condition—beyond being a member of the taxon. I don’t have any special insight into people; they’ve confused me just as much now as they did when I was very small. We are creatures of earth, the ground.

It’s an interesting paradox—for these creatures of dirt, being demure when writing, recording, and speaking—it’s the height of arrogance.

Writing is a demand. Writing requires literacy, and literacy demands interpretation. By writing this, I am demanding readers from the universe; and, I am doing so because I believe that what I have to say on the subject of games is meaningful, and might change the way those readers think. No room for modesty there.

Fictional characters, manufactured events, narratives, propaganda, stories, lies, whatever you call them—they are products of the human spirit, and that is what interests me. That demand, to create and share meaning, that’s what keeps me going. Art helps us to form meaning out of meaningless events, and the games we choose to play are the tools with which we make those forms. These tools shape our past, the shape our present, and they shape our future. Art is the great game.

Games form a reservoir for emotions; games as problem-solving; games as mating ritual; games as snobbery—games exist across a spectrum that cannot be denied or at least is denied at our own peril. Why would board games be any different?

I’m not a board game evangelist, at least, not in the traditional sense. I don’t care if you, the reader, ever decide to pick up and play a game or not. Board games do not require evangelism, because everyone knows how to play, and most people know that playing is a high-stakes endeavor. It’s something that each and every one of us does every day. You can hide behind ironic distance, clever wordplay, or pretend that you’re above it all, but some of the games that we are forced to play kill us if we don’t engage with them.

Here’s one: work. Unless you are blessed with wealth, you have to work. There is a clear and distinct path that leads to immiseration and death if you don’t. Capitalism and the society we have constructed around it create a series of random outcomes that are independent of how good, smart, or brave you are. The system we inhabit doesn’t fucking care about merit, it cares about exploitation, and seizing opportunities if you can perceive them.

Sure, we love the tale of the poor person who rises from the bottom and inherits the world, but we refuse to think about the millions that don’t, and the ever-growing millions more that finance that fantasy with their hopes, dreams, and life forces. In the game that governs our lives and only values the exploitation of available resources, it doesn’t matter what you are or are not capable of.

Naturally, living in such a system, our greatest weapon becomes new games, unusual games, subversive games.

I love propaganda. I love discovering it and I relish in the discovery that I am subject to it. What is interesting about propaganda is not the standing back and sneering at it, at believing that you are above agendas, credos, and -isms, but the myriad ways we encounter it. Propaganda’s purpose is, first and foremost, to confuse. Some cultural force, some institution of power, has an interest in the repetition or continuation of that power, and its primary force in the modern era, media, is the delivery tube for that institution’s message. Its goal is to damage your ability to have a sense of where and who you are.

Propagandists’ and writers’ primary tool, the word, is a shifting and tricky beast, and the modes in which it presents itself to your ear holes and brains is sneaky and subversive. Language is dangerous precisely because of its chimeric quality. If you don’t like something I said, I can retreat from you, tell you that you didn’t understand, that what I said was not what I said, rather something that you heard.

Games, the games I will talk about for much of this book, present an altogether different proposition. Yes, board games.

They come in boxes, with pieces and rules, and those pieces and rules abstract themselves into a system that sits, waiting, demanding specific interpretation. But unlike the systems that you and I are subject to, the rules and regulations we have to follow so we’re not facing down a cop’s gun, they have absolutely no power. They are completely trivial, frivolous enterprises. A game that declares itself “serious” is about as serious as a clown brandishing an FBI badge that squirts water.

But, you should give a shit about board games because they are propaganda. They are propaganda that offers different possibilities, my favorite of which is a concern with the Right, rather than the Good.

The Good, we are told, is what society, and humanity is oriented toward. We maintain and discipline ourselves to maintain the Good. We don’t revolt, because revolt would damage the Good. We go to work to preserve the Good. We cover our eyes when we see something horrible playing out in front of us. It’s for the Good.

And in the process, we lose sight of the Right.

Games bring propaganda—of all kinds—the players bring the animating spark. And they bring more than the spark—they bring the blood sacrifice that is necessary for the operation to sustain itself for the time period that it needs to have any sort of sense.

This is my attempt to catalog the myriad forms and ways in which these so-called games propagandize. Games are for you because, baby, propaganda is for you. Games are engines, and you are the fuel.

Ignore this at your peril.