[HN Gopher] Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published
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Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published
Author : musha68k
Score : 134 points
Date : 2024-10-20 16:44 UTC (6 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.polygon.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.polygon.com)
| pvg wrote:
| Related NYT piece
| https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/crosswords/kurt-vonnegut-...
|
| https://archive.ph/t3CBZ
| karaterobot wrote:
| > While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ
| is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that
| Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an excellent training aid for
| future military leaders, including cadets at West Point. How are
| modern audiences to reconcile those words from the same man who
| wrote Cat's Cradle?
|
| As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves
| believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated
| relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple,
| consistent positions that are legible to others. That's
| especially true if those people are introspective, creative
| types. So I agree, and this is a head-scratcher for me just like
| it is to the author of the article.
| robertlagrant wrote:
| It is Polygon, after all.
|
| But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is
| used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a
| military.
| gweinberg wrote:
| I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be
| "uncynical" in the first place.
| vundercind wrote:
| Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a
| familiar example.
| jhbadger wrote:
| "The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some
| would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that
| its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the
| radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach
| why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that
| Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make
| any sort of political point.
|
| https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
| pessimizer wrote:
| Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly
| excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker
| Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the
| Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business
| selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at
| his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was
| making their own set.
|
| The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the
| game altogether (Parker Brothers _purchased_ the game
| from Magie), and didn 't start until after she was dead
| and couldn't complain about it.
|
| It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got
| caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended
| that the graphic designer was the author.
|
| edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of
| games with a similar structure (read the two patents and
| watch how the details changed between them.) It has two
| halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second
| half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where
| players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land
| ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner,
| because the second half is really a proof that the first
| half is no way to run a society. In the first half
| everyone starts off in the same place with the same
| resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill
| differences, one player ends up _owning_ all of the
| others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that
| society doesn 't have to work this way.
|
| It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not
| cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say
| that systems _must_ be sick.
| wahnfrieden wrote:
| Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis
| wileydragonfly wrote:
| I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is
| passionate about Monopoly. I don't think there's too much
| strategy there besides "don't let property go unsold" and
| "hoard houses" but he disagrees.
| phmqk76 wrote:
| When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?
| NeoTar wrote:
| 2014
| QuesnayJr wrote:
| It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a
| bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered
| the game as saying:
|
| > In Sirens of Titan, there's this army of Mars which is really
| a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really
| in charge of what's going on. They're all mind controlled.
| Nobody has any real free will. They're just set up as a pawn to
| be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-
| style.
|
| The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it
| turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is
| completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated
| by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
| dkarl wrote:
| I don't think the author doubts the _possibility_ , they are
| just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself
| thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go
| through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would
| be really interesting to have some information about. It
| appears there might not be any first-hand information, but
| maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article
| and connect it to other information that shows a change in
| Vonnegut's thinking about war.
|
| I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and
| novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he
| wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also
| had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed.
| After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the
| executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a
| child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that
| were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a
| can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to
| death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his
| friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there
| in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the
| accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head,
| sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the
| nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he
| wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night
| in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence
| every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence,
| and his nightmares went away.
|
| If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution,
| wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then
| stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange
| about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as
| he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's
| not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it
| has been raised before, might eventually unearth some
| information that fleshes out his story.
| aprilthird2021 wrote:
| This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and
| protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or
| being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree
| with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree
| about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is
| essential and want it to function properly
| zoeysmithe wrote:
| At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A
| lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors
| of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats
| on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc.
| Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply
| racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California
| voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige
| candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on
| trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.
|
| Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his
| commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in
| with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and
| good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more
| to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.
|
| I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal
| idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down
| and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught
| to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually
| cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism,
| MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism,
| xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the
| former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far
| more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than
| "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even
| replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and
| even things you might personally benefit from if we want a
| peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class
| moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never
| challenge it too much.
|
| Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper
| or an Obama or a Chris Christy.
| righthand wrote:
| Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks
| often appear prejudicial. I wouldn't be surprised if that was a
| misinterpretation.
| hammock wrote:
| Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine
| cookie_monsta wrote:
| > As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves
| believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated
| relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple,
| consistent positions that are legible to others.
|
| This is all sarcasm, right?
| donio wrote:
| BGG entry: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/422478/ghq
|
| How-to play video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXPIhvFPjw
|
| Space-Biff review: https://spacebiff.com/2024/09/25/ghq/
| slowhadoken wrote:
| Thank you.
| snarf21 wrote:
| All credit for this go to Geoff and his efforts to bring this
| to life. He is a well-known game designer with dozens of
| published games and founder of the podcast Ludology (no longer
| an active host after 100s of episodes) that posits that _Games
| are worthy of study_.
|
| He is also a co-founder of the TTGDA (https://www.ttgda.org/)
| that aims to be a guild like resource for designers. It is his
| connections that got this into Barnes & Nobles. Also of note,
| the TTGDA has recently convinced B&N to list game designers on
| all detail pages and search results in the same way they do
| today for books and writers. He also runs a free newsletter
| called GameTek (https://gametek.substack.com/) that is a
| continuation of an old podcast format he did where he does deep
| dives on specific games and game concepts. In short, he's
| awesome.
| grahamplace wrote:
| For any Vonnegut fans who find themselves in Indianapolis, I
| recommend checking out the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library:
| https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/
|
| When I visited for the first time this year, I learned about GHQ
| and the upcoming release
| treetalker wrote:
| Is the game fun?
| consentfactory wrote:
| Reminds me of Memoir '44.
|
| https://www.daysofwonder.com/memoir-44/
| donio wrote:
| Other than the theme the two have very little in common. Memoir
| 44 is card-driven and uses dice for combat resolution so there
| is a lot of randomness. GHQ is a pure abstract with no
| randomness at all. On the gameplay side GHQ is much closer to
| chess than to M44.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| There should be a trigger warning for Polygon links.
| chrishepner wrote:
| What's wrong with Polygon?
| pmarreck wrote:
| I'm guessing you might end up going down a rabbit-hole you
| don't have time for
| slowhadoken wrote:
| The rabbit hole is 14+ years old at this point, yeah.
| slowhadoken wrote:
| It's the BuzzFeed of gaming websites. Both Polygon and Kotaku
| are owned by Vox Media. Its brand of degenerate circa 2010
| faux-liberal corporate consumer rhetoric is social pollution.
| Recently both websites have plummeted in popularity do to
| divisive content and their staff making blatantly racist and
| sexist comments about consumers, developers, and the video
| game industry in general. I've never liked them or Venus
| Patrol and video game journalists that came out of Boing
| Boing, Brandon Boyer most of all.
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