Eighteen busy days away
September 25, 2023 12 Comments
Well, I have had a very eventful few weeks recently.
LONDON
On 28 August I flew to the UK, arriving the day after – as one does – and checked into the King’s College London student apartments on Great Dover Street, which is in Southwark but not as convenient as the ones on Stamford Street. Either way, it’s a bargain for within-London accommodation as the College rents these for the summer term; what you get is nothing like a hotel as it’s essentially a room with a bed, a desk, and an all-in-one sink, shower and toilet unit (so if you are going to take a shower you must put the roll of toilet paper outside first or it might get soaked). But more private and quiet than a hostel, certainly. I’ve found the best way to beat jetlag is to force yourself to stay awake until everyone else goes to bed and use melatonin or a sleeping pill if necessary to reset your clock. But it still takes a couple of days.
The next few days I spent visiting museums and different gaming people: the National Army Museum, the Imperial War Museum, and the British Museum (which I fled quickly because it was thick with phlegmy tourists still). I had a wonderful long lunch with Charles Vasey at his favourite Venetian restaurant in Chelsea, talking about all kinds of things… also met my stepmom and stepsister before they went off to an end of summer holiday at Southend.
I also spent a fair amount of time with Fred Serval, designer of Red Flag Over Paris and creator of the “Homo Ludens” podcast. We spent some time at a board game cafe down the street from my apartment, trying out my SUBTLE (metaphorical military planning game with a saboteur mechanic) and had an interesting play of Turncoats, a very clever abstract game by Matilda Simonsson (https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/352238/turncoats). Later, Fred interviewed me for a later episode of Homo Ludens and took me on a walking tour of The Barbican Estate, something that most people associate with the Barbican Centre theatre and performance space but which is also a 1970s era planned community with residential towers, schools, stores and so forth. We also had a nice lunch courtesy of his wife, and I taught him to play Guerrilla Checkers, though I lost.
(Shucks and other comments. But Fred’s a quick study.)
Another notable event was a collective play/demonstration of Civil Power, using Professor Richard Barbrook’s mega-size demo set, with 2″ counters mounted on foam board and large printed maps. He organized it through the Class Wargames group and about a dozen people came, including a fellow who came all the way from the Netherlands to meet me and play the game as he was considering making a digital version of it. We played a standard “student riot” scenario to an indeterminate conclusion – the Police did clear the crowd out of the plaza but most of them just wandered off to the nearby park to start a large drum circle.
(playing Civil Power in the courtyard of Pelican House, South London)
On Sunday I went out to Anerley Methodist Church which is where the Chestnut Lodge Wargames Group holds its monthly meetings. CLWG is a group of long-standing and mostly quite mad wargamers and wargame designers and I have long wanted to attend a meeting; that day I was not disappointed as Jim Wallman (Mr. Megagame) brought his design about London firefighters during the Blitz. We played on several separate tables fighting fires started by a German aircraft raid; at my table, several POL tanks were hit right away and exploded spectacularly but we managed to keep them contained from doing further damage… meanwhile a nearby furniture store could not be saved, especially after a large unexploded bomb was discovered nearby. Jim brought an incredible amount of custom-made terrain and equipment: miniature buildings, firefighting equipment and miniature firemen. One nice touch was a large wad of cotton wool with a bit of paint on it to suggest a smoke cloud, with a flickering electric “tea light” in its base to show an active fire burning – impressive with the lights off.
(Officer Plod rescued a beer truck from the flames!)
SANDHURST
The next day I went out to Camberley, the small town adjacent to Royal Military Academy Sandhurst, to get ready for the 2023 Connections-UK conference on professional wargaming, first one I’ve been able to attend since 2018. Before getting on the train I had a couple of very interesting hours talking to James Buckley of Cardboard Emperors about all things game-related!
The first day of the Connections-UK conference was dedicated to a “megagame” as a sort of ice-breaker event. It was called “This Is Not A Game” and the players were teams of either sponsors or suppliers of wargames or game research projects for the Freedonian defence establishment. For once I was on the Control side of the house, and spent my time trotting back and forth between the supplier teams (consultancies, university think-tanks, etc.) and the adjudication room, dispensing advice, money and Reputation tokens. This game was put together by Jim Wallman as well, with a clever team of associates, and had the excellent attention to detail and spiffy graphics that marks these megagame productions.
(the adjudication room.)
The next day was panels in the morning, and a Games Fair in the afternoon. I presented on a panel about urban warfare that included MAJ Shaun Clarke (who attended the last Urban Operations Planner Course) and a video by David Burden, who is doing a PhD on urban warfare games. I talked about the five games on urban topics I have been working on since starting in on the Urban Operations Planner Course arc: QUICK, SUS, SUBTLE, 91 DSSB Staff Game, and EXURB.
Connections-UK 2023: panel on urban warfare (for notes and slides explaining what those acronyms are)
In the afternoon two officers from the US Army War College played the 91 DSSB staff game and were intrigued by it, also Peter Sizer came and played EXURB. I’ve been corresponding with Peter since early 2021 at least, he is doing a PhD about games and game representation of counterinsurgency. This was the first time I’d been able to meet him in person!
The next day was presentation of academic papers and more Games Fair, begun and concluded by plenary speakers.
I think this was a quite well-run Conference, though events were necessarily divided between two buildings that were some distance apart and some time was spent moving back and forth. There was quite adequate time between events and over lunch and in the evenings for the very necessary get-acquainted that allows people to actually make the connections the conference franchise is all about.
Ouf, it was sweltering all week though! 30-32 degrees and sunny every day, the hottest end-of-August period for London area in a very long time. I think we might have also been dealing with some mild PTSD from some participants since I overheard a lot of remarks by participants about how they thought they had seen the last of this place! Anyway, I hope to make it again next year and I think the venue is Kings College London again which would be good.
The next day (Friday) I spent moving from Camberley to Gatwick Airport, which involved a couple of changes of train. Be aware that changing from Ash Vale railway station (Southwestern Railway) to North Camp station (Great Western Railway) is not the short walk advertised; it’s a good 3/4 mile trudge along a busy motorway with few signs… I would not want to do it at night with a lot of luggage if I didn’t know the way. In the afternoon I flew to Turin via British Airways; I was quite early as I didn’t know what kind of chaos to expect – the last time I was in Gatwick Airport was in 1988 on my first visit to the UK. Just a bit of tedious waiting as their practice is to wait until about 5 minutes before boarding to tell you what gate the plane is leaving from.
TORINO
I was met at the airport by Professore Giaime Alonge, of the University of Turin. Giaime and I had been corresponding since before lockdown, after he wrote a short piece commenting on the chapter Volko Ruhnke and I wrote for the Zones of Control anthology, and had even been planning an event in 2020 in commemoration of the Battle of Corso Traiano (an extended street battle in Torino in 1969 between authority and assorted striking FIAT workers, immigrants and students) before COVID derailed everything.
Giaime took me to a restaurant his family had been going to for years, that specialized in Piedmontese food as well as some Ligurian dishes which is where the owner came from. I had brandacujun, a salt codfish and potato dish dressed with olives and olive oil; agnolotti al plin, small lamb-filled pasta in meat gravy; and a sort of pear and cocoa dessert I did not catch the name of but was great.
This was the first of several good meals I would have in Torino, and make me feel that as far as eating well goes I have spent much of my life sitting in a wet ditch hurriedly scooping dollar store canned beans into my mouth with my fingers. Later in the week I also ate: insalata de polpo e patate, a warm salad of octopus and potatoes with olives; tagliatelle con ragu al salsiccia, fresh long pasta with a tomato ragout made of different kinds of sausage; a sort of chicken salad which was threads of chicken in a light sauce on top of basil and little tomatoes; a fricassee of rabbit with peppers; farinata con salame, a sort of pancake made with chickpea flour and some thinly sliced salami on top; good fresh foccacia; some gelato of course; and chocolate sorbetto. I even tried some raw veal and raw sausage from a nearby town called Bra. All simple food, nothing fancy at all for Italy, and tasty. Even the fast food was good because it was made of fresh ingredients: I waited too long for dinner and ate at a kebab place one night – fresh lettuce and tomatoes, fresh fries, nice rice with vermicelli, even the mystery cone-meat tasted good but the loaf of pita bread was the crustiest, tastiest pita I had ever had.
(sorry, no pictures of food)
My hotel was adorably old and a bit decrepit, mirrors everywhere to make the room look bigger and very high ceilings (with some glow-in-the-dark star stickers to remind you it was there at night), and Internet powered by an arthritic hamster. But it was right downtown; we had a running joke that everything I needed or wanted to see was generally within two blocks of it. There was even a game store right across the street! Mostly Funko Pop dolls and Eurogames and the same sort of people you see at practically every such store… I visited a practically identical one in London, and I could swear the two sets of nerdy clerks talking to each other while ignoring the customers could have been cousins.
Saturday morning I went with Giaime while he did his food shopping at the large farmer’s markets that are open near downtown every day – it was interesting to tag along and watch him buy vegetables, meat, oil and flowers from people he had been buying from for years.
(I spent Saturday night in a laundrette (less than two blocks from my hotel), doing a badly needed laundry run)
Back of the farmer’s market area was the Balon market which I visited on Sunday, this is one of the larger antique flea markets in Europe with tables full of weird old junk – among other things I saw for sale were a traffic light, a straw container/carrying basket for artillery shells with the 4 empty tubes still inside, a lot of dishes and clothes and furniture of course. Later in the day I went with Giaime and his son Ettore to a “Play Torino” game event, this was mostly board game related but had some vendor booths and mock medieval fighting displays put on by the local equivalent of the Society for Creative Anachronism. Ettore is quite into movies and making props, so had built a costume of The Flash that was quite impressive and was walking around in it. We were supposed to meet Eric Zimmermann (who co-wrote Rules of Play and is an academic at New York University, with a wife who had family in nearby Aosta) but wires got crossed and didn’t see him after all.
Monday I went to the Mole Antoniella (less than two blocks from my hotel), it is a local landmark and one of Italy’s national museums of film and cinema. Some really interesting exhibits of movie props, posters and exhibitions for different filmmakers. The main open area had a set of reclined chairs you could sit back in and watch rotating clip shows of scenes from noteworthy Italian films.
On Monday evening I went down to the side of the River Po (three blocks from my hotel) and sat down to read and rehearse my talk for the next day as the sun set. It was cooler and pleasant sitting by the river (it was 30 degrees or more for most of the week), only a few rowing shells on the river.
(the walking and shopping arcades at night)
Tuesday was my visit to the Museo Diffuso della Resistenza, Deportazione, Guerra, Diritti e della Libertà, a museum devoted to life in Turin under Fascism and Nazi occupation. Unlike many other museums, this one had only two physical objects on display – a chair used by Fascist firing squads to shoot their prisoners, and a “pedalini” or foot-operated printing press used for clandestine pamphlets and newspapers.
An underground section that mimics a bomb shelter was closed because it had been flooded but the rest of the museum was impressive, with displays of films and interviews of people who had suffered through this period from many aspects. The final room, reached by going upstairs “from the depths of authoritarianism”, was completely plastered with yellow post-it notes of the written reactions of visitors, in many different languages. It was really affecting.
Touring the museum was followed by my brief talk about games on modern insurgency and Why They Are Different From Other Games, and then enough people had come to this public event that we had two tables playing A Distant Plain at the same time.
I Giochi di Clio: Turin, 12 Settembre 2023
People certainly seemed to be enjoying themselves! It was the first in a series of four public game-playing events jointly put on by the a historical institute associated with the Museum and Giaime’s department. Since the game’s designer was present, Giaime made a crack about my favourite scene in Annie Hall, where Woody Allen shoots a bore down by pulling Marshall McLuhan himself out from behind a cardboard standee in a theatre lobby… ha!
(“You know nothing of my work!” Always wanted to say that….)
Wednesday morning I spent at the University (Humanities department campus, less than two blocks from my hotel) helping playtest a very interesting game design that Giaime and his colleague Riccardo Fassone (who I did not get to meet, as his mother had suddenly taken ill) had been working on for years. Won’t say what it was about but I will say it’s an interesting choice and their hard work and research shows.
Wednesday afternoon was my lecture to a class of students in some doctoral program about popular culture that included some courses in game studies… I couldn’t quite figure it out as it seemed very interdisciplinary as many doctoral programs are. About 8 students came, along with a few faculty from other departments. Before I knew it, we had been talking for almost two hours! Some excellent questions from the students and I met one whose thesis was on ludic representations of the Partisan movement, so I gave him copies of Operation Canuck and Mastering Resistance (Orange Gobi) which delighted him. Good luck to you Mauro!
Thursday I took a one-day side trip to Milan, to see the Museo del Novecento which is a national museum of Italian avant-garde art. From Torino it is one hour by fast train and a short subway ride. It is in the same piazza as the Duomo and the Galleria, the two main tourist attractions of the city (cathedrals of religion and of shopping) but no problem getting in. It had a gallery of Futurist sculpture and paintings that I had only ever seen in textbooks before, and wanted to see for real. It’s funny how when you see the actual item, it is either 12 feet tall or it is very nearly the same size as its image in the textbook! For some reason my phone wasn’t working in this city, though it did in Torino, so I did not have a decent map – otherwise I might have explored a little bit. Anyway, I was soon back in Torino and packed up my things.
(my favourite Futurist painting, Interventionist Demonstration, Carlo Carra 1914… not much bigger than a magazine page. It had glitter on it too, something not reproduced in the art history textbook illustrations.)
Friday was taken up with travelling back home, via Munich and Vancouver… the German border guards complimented me on my German, which I told them I had not used since East Berlin in ’89 (before either of them had been born, it appeared!).
(More broadly, I would remark that I spent three months doing the Italian course on Duolingo, at least 1 lesson every day, but it did not stick nearly as well with me as my other languages… when I was trying to think of the Italian word or phrase while there, something in French, German or Japanese would bubble up in my head. However, it has been 30 years since I tried to learn a new language (and that was Japanese) and I could tell that things were starting to come together after just a few days’ immersion in the language. As it was, I could usually communicate what I wanted or needed, and people would switch to English not all the time but I suppose when they wanted to be helpful, or frustrated by the sweaty barbarian trying to talk to them. )
Now I am back, with a lot more photos and a hatful of commitments and promises of collaborations on game designs with people! This was my big trip of the year, of the last 5 years really, and I don’t think I will ever have another chance to visit Italy to do something like this again… but I would go back in a heartbeat.
(poster on a wall less than two blocks from my hotel… “educate yourself so you don’t become like me – fascist”)
brtrain 
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