I think most of us know and resonate with the prayer of seeking the strength to change the things we can, and the serenity to accept the things we cannot and the wisdom to tell the difference. Few remember that it was coined by Reinhold Niebuhr, a prominent 20th century American theologist and political thinker who was trying to construct a kind of middle way for liberal Americans, one that was socialist in its ideas that poor people were not inherently evil and did not need better angels above them in society to direct them, but also one that repudiated the ideas of communism and liberal reforms like anti-segregation movements. You can view him as a fence-sitter emblematic of the worst parts of neo-liberal deference to what they demand is realpolitik, or as an idealist trying to find a straight path in a bent world. I think the fact that he is confounding to some analyses is probably why people like the prayer: stuff feels complicated, and the individualistic sentence of trying to be perfectly moral has never felt harder than today. Our new versions might be “check your privilege” and “there is no ethical consumption under capitalism”.

Anyway, to get back to games, I think we are always in danger of equivocating and saying “it’s complicated” when it comes to semiotics, and yet often seem to need to. Stuff IS complicated, and never more so than when it comes to signs and signals. Everyone comes to an idea with their baggage and we cannot change that baggage, no matter how hard we wish it were not there. My partner is a lawyer, and Australian judges do not use the term Ms; she cautions her female students that if that is the battle they want to fight, it will be difficult to win, noone will flock to your banner and it will be costly no matter the outcome. She tries to model a positive view but without neglecting the terrain the women will be entering. I tend to have the maxim that you should never believe anyone who tells you something cannot change, they are almost always arguing for their own cowardice. A few years ago I was arguing hard that the term “serious games” was a terrible one and needed to change; a friend of mine said the infamous thought-terminating cliche of that ship having sailed. He was, I was happy to say, 100% wrong, and “games for change” is catching on. He was also the same person who looked at my post about how games don’t have to be competitions and remarked that once again I seemed to be tilting at windmills, and trying to ice-skate uphill, when I should just accept that it do be that way sometimes and it is what it is.

I have another friend who designed a game for the Salvation Army designed to built an understanding of how villages in poor agricultural areas can build themselves out of poverty. I asked him why it wasn’t competitive; his answer was that nobody understands cooperative games. Not in the audience he is trying to reach. He’s right. It hurts me, but he’s right. And I guess that’s what this is all coming back to: we are in a watershed moment in games and that involves dealing with the things that, right now, we cannot change. With the hand we are dealt, to use a gaming metaphor.

I’m lucky enough to have lived through the revolution in comics when the western world finally caught on that just because a comic had Batman in it didn’t mean it couldn’t be literature. I also have enough historical connection to the 1960s to remember the same arguments being made about rock and roll and stand up comedy. All of them invariably started with a very similar argument: that the art form being derided as not serious was ancient. Ancient neanderthals drew words and images together on cave walls; they played music around the fire; they told stories to make each other laugh. The idea of this was to create a kind of ritual significance with two ends: to help a thing that felt knew seem less new to the mainstream, but also to calm down the academics at the sidelines. Yes we know, academics, that comics aren’t new, and nothing they are doing is new, but we have to PRETEND it is new because to the maintstream audience, it FEELS very new.

The people who remembered the newspaper strips about Peter Parker’s married life and the POW! BAM! of the Batman TV show were having a kind of cultural shock to see people going “no, this shit matters, and is good and is politically and culturally significant”. Some of that was amazement, a wondrous suprise to find more adult depth in old concepts. Similarly, a lot of people’s experience with board games is “we played them as kids and they were kind of … bad?” or “we played them as kids and then we grew out of them”. Wondrous day then, to find games have “suddenly” somehow “grown up” and become “good” or socially acceptable. More and more I see gamers use the term “modern” meaning “good”, with their particular choice of cut off naturally being “a few years before I started getting into the hobby”. Naturally, as someone who knows games have always been here and who has always been here myself, I object loudly from the kitchen. But I get it: for them, the world has jumped a great distance. The first animes (is that the plural?) I ever saw were Astro Boy and Battle of the Planets, the very next one I saw was Ghost in the Shell; that felt like a bullet to the brain and a very silly thing to say they were the same thing, and confusing to me how one got to B from A. Then people tried to “get me into anime” and all failed because it was super hard to get context and nobody inside was very good at giving me context.

I think, more than most folks, I need that context and a sense of a critical language to understand a medium, so I tend to want to offer all of that to those newly arrived. I have always prided myself on being what I call a dragoman. The term is one I stole from colonial history: a dragoman was the man you, a European, hired when you went to the Middle or Far East, who understood the local world and could introduce you to it safely. (A near equivalent is the term indian agent but it has historical problems.) I often remark at conventions how people from one fandom are totally lost when they encounter another, and I love to be the person stepping up to fill that gap. I love being a teacher and an explainer – not least because that’s how I interact with the universe myself. But it is also worth noting to myself that not everyone needs this. The kids are alright going straight to Ghost in the Shell or Wicked City, and it does not matter to anyone that they think the board games now are COOL because they have HOT CHICKS (or I guess trick taking mechanics, in games) and the old ones are FOR BABIES because they don’t.

But it DOES matter as a game designer, because our audience is vast, and expanding, and shifting. But also because games, even more perhaps than comics and cartoons, depend on interpretation. Games need to be swiftly understood and internalized which means the symbols and signification we use has to work with the software available, and that software is the human brain. It is true that a lot of people react violently to the idea of a cooperative game, or any other kind of ideas outside their view of what a game is. We can change that, but slowly; we have to acknowledge a lot of where we are to begin with. I hate that people think games are competition, and I am driving hard to change that, but I also (grudgingly, with no serenity at all) accept that this is a long ongoing process.

At the same time as our audience is opening up, there is also going to be an urge to not have to keep starting from scratch. Previously the game industry was so small and broken up it was difficult to have a conversation about games in game design. It had to happen instead in a critical space or the academic space. I’d argue that Friedmann Friese probably created one of the first real salvos of games about games with Copycat, so-called because he wanted to acknowledge that he hadn’t invented anything in making it. 504 was then the natural extension thereof, a game that was 504 games in one, just add your own theme. I’d also argue that the problem with both games is they didn’t really make sense to anyone but someone deeply immersed already in that conversation about innovation and euro-game mechanics. Games, because they are so dependent on understanding a shared language, are at great risk of iterating ON that language, until it becomes indecipherable to the new player. Of course everyone knows that red is life points and blue is mana points, and so on.

Here’s the thing: although all art exists in conversation with other art and its time and its context, I’d argue that really great art can and should transcend that and be universal and timeless. It’s true that Watchmen is about superheroes as they were as a storytelling medium and corporate property, but I wasn’t reading comics at the time and I can understand Watchmen perfectly without that context. It operates on many many levels. Shakespeare doesn’t always translate but so much of what he writes does, even when he was flipping scripts and commenting on other works around him. Compare that to Undertale: a video game where when you get stuck a kindly character comes and helps you pass a level. That joke only works if you’re immersed in what video games are; worse still, I could not get to that point of genre-interrogation in Undertale because I couldn’t get past the earlier levels. As interesting as a critique as Undertale was, it was not just unintelligible to the average person, it was unreachable. And that’s with nearly 50% of people regularly playing video games.

At one point I spent a few years checking which games explained that AWSD were how to move around. Almost none of them did. That had become assumed language. I wonder if we’re really close to making the same mistakes in board games.

And that – at last -brings us to why I hate Cole Wehrle. Cole, amazingly, brilliantly, is having a deep conversation about wargames and dudes-on-a-map games, and history games. But the problem I have with him is with each new game he makes, he goes further down a line of conversation that started with some central assumptions about what a war game is and why it exists. And every time he iterates on that, the conversation gets further and further away from me, because I don’t have the experience OR ABILITY to keep up with the kinds of games he makes. (Ability is of course something for a whole other column, but I need to wrap this up at least for this instalment). None of it is approachable or accessible. All of it feels like it’s about things I barely understand. At the same time, I love that he’s asking these questions and iterating over and over further down into those questions. I just wish it was about some other part of gaming that I could relate to understand. It’s frustrating to see someone clearly doing great work in this space and not being able to go with it; but more than that it makes me fear that we might, like video games did, end up in a world where we are so busy congratulating ourselves on subverting the dominant paradigms that we’ve forgotten that those paradigms have become walls that the outsiders can’t get over.

Some might look at that and go well, we’re not designing for those people, and that’s fair enough. It is what it is, and some people can’t be convinced to like a thing. I will never be able to understand the games Cole makes and I’m sure he’s okay with that, and certainly I should be. I also don’t mind when people miss the subtle levels in my fiction or game design writing…but I also want to make sure that, to some extent, they have a way in. I pitch high, but I also don’t want to be very careful not to push away. Not that setting a game at any giving difficulty is inherently pushing away! It’s also probably fine to make games where people attack other people with dudes on a map. I’m only worried about going down the silo too hard. And that designers might occasionally forget that not everyone “gets” the idea of a war game. I tried to play Arcs and immediately I was hit with the idea that the setting didn’t give me any reason to attack anyone. The mechanics did (although not strongly), but I still didn’t want to do it. Shut Up and Sit Down talk about Arcs makes its own lore for you; but at least when I’m being the space turtles I know that I’m supposed to hate those barony guys. Of course, not everyone cares about setting as much as I do, either. Twilight Imperium isn’t a better game because of this element. I think my point is, we should always remember that our audience may be seeing this thing for the first time. We can’t always design for that, if we want to go deep, but, like a memento mori, we should keep it in mind. And maybe I’m weird because I don’t want to attack people in games, but I can tell you like I said in the first article in this series: THE MAIN REASON PEOPLE DON’T WANT TO PLAY GAMES IS LOSING MAKES THEM FEEL STUPID AND WINNING MAKES THEM FEEL MEAN.

And I bring that thought to every game I design, and try to design with that as the hand I am dealt. That doesn’t mean I want Cole to stop being Frank Miller; it just means I think we need some Scott McClouds as well.

And of course I don’t actually hate Cole at all. The fact that he’s talking about this stuff in his games is amazing. I just used that title because although I hate clickbait, I also have to deal with the internet as it is. I don’t have the strength to retrain your brains not to click on outrage, and I hopefully have the serenity to forgive myself for playing to it.