Board Games and Settler Colonialism

Um we are all meeting for the first time. UM. I have that disease that Adam Sandler has or what's her name has in that Adam Sandler movie where he forgets she forgets everything every day. That's me. But Drew Barrymore, is that that's right? That's right, Cherie, Drew Barrymore, So I forgot, I forgot. I can just is it the same thing as a Memento, because that's all I can think of. Yes, Adam Sandler and Memento. Yes, Adam Sandler's

Memento favorite movie. Well, we should probably introduce the episode today. Yeah, so it's me. It's good for long and today we're doing an episode that is uh you know, okay, we we we've we've we've we've been forced feeding you really grim stuff for a long time. So today we working to an episode about southern colonialism and politics and board games because that's also extremely cool and it does not I mean, it is kind of depressing, but it involves

less doom than normal. And yeah, and with me talk about this. That it is is Sharine or our wonderful producer who also writes for us and is great and we love thanks. I'm here. Yeah, and Robert who we we tolerate. H Oh, that's nice to you. You shouldn't, but we we do. Kyle, it's nice to meet you. Yeah. And also we have a Kyle from Strange Matters. Yes, yes, I'm Kyle Flannery. I'm my editor and co owner of

Strange Matters magazine. A. I guess we technically have now launched, even with the print issues are not in people's hands, a new leftist culture and politics magazine here to be uh the consulting super nerd uh awesome. Yeah, I am very sad. I mean, well, okay, I feel like weirdly for a group of people that I'm in, I have probably played the least board games of anyone here, which is man. Yeah. So when when I was a kid, my my board game was risk. Yeah, I did a

bunch of others. I played like he re Quest and obviously Access and I'll say I say I played Access and Allies. I set up Access and Allies boards many a time and then gave up after like fifteen minutes of playing it. I mean, that's that's how That's how I played here. Request, Yeah, because I was request rule book and I was like, I have no idea what's going on here? But um no, specifically my fucking thing.

We would speech and debate eight tournaments, you know, because when you do it, you're basically out for a whole weekend, sometimes three days, sometimes like four, um, and you're basically living in this school. But but you have like maybe one or two hours of stuff per day and the rest of the time you're just hanging around hearing how your friends are doing. Is like, the competition goes on and we would play epic specifically Lord of the Rings Risk.

We would have these massive risk games. Oh I have Yeah, I have very good memories playing Lord of the Rings risk with my friends. Yeah. I just had the normal vanilla risk woll I was really missing out. I just thinctly remember being at a bachelor party where h After we finished all the normal bachelor party stuff, we crawled back to the place where everybody's gonna camp out for the night, and so we managed to convince one of the other groomsmen that a game of risk when it

takes about an hour. I did, like, like it was like three in the morning. Yeah, that's the wedding that day. Yeah, it was like three on the day of the wedding. It was an act of extraordinary cruelty. Anyway, didn't get married, but he didn't take Comchotka, which is really key to his his plans to assault North America. We we, we shockingly did all make it to the wedding, which was very much a risk, very much a risk. Yeah, very

much a risk. Uh yeah, that's why it's called that. Yeah, I was I was smart enough to just go, no, I'm going to bed. I'm not doing three a m risk. That's not happy. But yeah, I guess to kind of back up in front a little bit of context about why I kind of thought this was so worth talking about, because I'm guessing that there's some readers at home who are having a very common thought, which is, why why are you talking about board games? Like who cares um.

And you know, I reminded a little bit of the little tweet joke from a while ago of a couple of years ago. Whm I talking about a little while ago of on Star Trek they have the uh you know, we've got there. What do they call that? The Holi Deck? Uh? They about the Holida Deck. And but for some reason, every week everybody's into some weird new board game. What

the hell's going on with that? Uh? And for the people who aren't aware of this kind of sector of nerddom, board games are actually massively more popular than they were when I was a child, when osmlenules were young. And a large part of that posh has actually been from game developers themselves. The people who make your video games absolutely fucking love board games. Uh. And it's for a pretty simple reason, which is that you know, all of the rules to the game. Board games are naked before

your eyes. You have you have stripped them down to their their atomic components before you have done anything. And that means that if you are interested in the art of how a game works, uh, they're actually wonderful case studies because you can see very quickly the way that you move from what the mechanic is doing to like what it means, Whereas in a video game that can be a lot more obscure, it can be a lot more complicated, uh, and it requires it can require a

lot of digging. You don't have to, you know, I am enough of a turb owner that I have broken into the game's files for video Verius video games, I've played and ripped out the code and looked at it and been like, so that's the drop rate Because again I'm a consulting turb owner here. But with the board game, you don't have to do that. You just know all of the rules up front. Uh, and so you know if you're uh. And so that that's you know, reveal.

I can reveal a lot about what the designer's intentions are, what they're communicating, and how that communication all works. So that's that was kind of my start point here. Should I just keep on going and explain what the hell is going on with this article that I'm about? Yeah, I mean, I was going to note that the primary board game played in Star Trek T and G was was was Stratagema in the uh, the classic episode in which data has to get really good at what is

basically holographic chess. Um. Yes, anyway, you talked about Star Trek the Next Generation, So now that's that's all. It's good. It's good that we didn't get into the awful board games from d S nine. Oh god, yeah, there's I mean, Strategy a M is pretty ridiculous and the episode is very silly, but it's it's one of the more fun data episodes episode from DS nine. I think it's really

considered the worst episode in all of d S nine. Yeah, yeah, I mean there's I think the worst episode of Star Trek the Next Generation is not the board game, but it's the one where Riker and his dad fight in what's basically American gladiator jud where they have to have the bandit sticks that they have to fight the ultimate martial art. Anyone, please continue? So so talk. So I

wrote this article that has is upcoming in publication. It's going to be in our first issue, uh, And it's about a particular trend that I noticed in board games that there were a lot of board games that were in terms of what was actually going on on the board, they were incredibly violent, but they managed to make it look like there was no violence going on. And so I actually I am grateful for Robert for talking about the games that you talked about, you know, access and

Allies and risk. Uh, even like Monopoly. These are games that are in was generally known as the American tradition, where the goal is to eliminate all the opposing players to be the last last one standing. Yes, like everything in American it is like one person wins by using either violence or capitalism on the You you survive, you outsurvive all of your opponents. Uh. Because that is what we do in America. We just survive. We just pray to God that there is somehow a tomorrow and by God,

they're going to take Comchatka. Political stance as an American is that we will take the Comchatka Peninsula and we're going to take Australia for those three extra armies that Australia strategies. Uh. I feel like half the risk strategy, half their experience I saw, were just waste to nerve the Australia strategy. Uh. But um, in any event that

there's a European tradition uh. And one of the things that has been a lot that's been very popular, has made an absolute shitload of money over the last several years, shipload being very relative because again, board games are pretty small field compared to video games or gambling or booze or something like that. Um, but even kind of the dominant name in the game. And uh, one of the kind of major conceits of this style game is you

don't elimit other players. All players. Any player who starts the game at the table is going to end the game at the table. You you never limited anybody, and this is I think an admillable enough goal. Yeah, that's one of the things that's annoying about a lot of games is like if you're trying to do a party thing and people are getting eliminated. Although it can be fun, if everyone is drinking at the same time and while you play the game, people get eliminated and then get

drunker and heckle everyone else at the table. That's actually not bad. That's actually not bad. I remember it being like middle school in high school, where you just have somebody sitting there bitterly four hours. Well, you try to clean up a risk game. Um. Anyway, the one that most people are probably the one that is the most famous, infamous is sellers of kat Um, and that's kind of

what's my start point. Sellers of katan Is is a board game where you play as European colonizers to a almost uninhabited islands and almost uninhabited island, and you cannot damage the other players directly. There is no mechanism for doing this. You can block them off from building things, you can never send him. I always go hard on the roads. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you can block people with roads. It's a very like it's kind of like like about

like a rivalry between developers almost. But one of the things that that is kind of outstanding about this is that, uh, it's not a technically on inhabit island. There is a quote robber that starts out on the island, uh, and the robbert is capable of inflicting violence on the players and it can be sort of controlled by the players. And so the part that was again striking to me about this is you can't directly you know, this would

actually be the right number players of me. Chris, Sherene, and Robert were all sitting at a table will playing out of katan I could not eliminate any of them. None of them could eliminate me. We could not harm each other directly. We can just negotiate with each other, we can trade with each other, but there's still ultimately

a winner. And uh, you know this is if you are willing to make some some kind of specific historical amnesia about how colonials am actually operated, where you know, like wars of colonial aggression also included like wars in Germany like the Seven Years War, or you know, the wars of Spanish succession. We're all happening at the same time, but you can, you know, it can be viewed as

similar to that. And again it has this explicit theming, and that is I do think that those things, those things are dealvetailing together, right that the only people who are real people are the colonizers. The colonized are non agentic. They're just set. They're they're they're setting um. And the more you think about it, it's just it's just kind of messed up. It's it's just kind of it's kind

of messed up. And I do think it's kind of interesting that, h the game doesn't really say this very explicitly, right, um. And I know, I know there's going to be somebody's going to say, oh, you know the game says rob or it doesn't say Native American. How can you know?

It's like, come on, man, if you watched a movie where there was some there was a group of people in the movie who were portrayed as violent and incapable of acting on their own, and all of these racist tropes, even if they were not played by Native American actor, even if they didn't use an explicit Native American references. If all of the good guys are people who dispossessed

this person, you know what's going on. People don't look at the tempest and see Caliban and go this person has nothing to do with the Americans that yeah, yeah, uncivilized like civility or like civilians in general. They come

from somewhere else and they inhabit the place. But yeah, you're right, like just like Columbus discovered America, the natives are based like it's it's it's a blank slate as far as white settlers are concerned, and like the positionality, like like the game is very explicit about who is a settler and who is not. Right, the settlers are you and everyone else playing the game, and then you have the other person who's on the island who got

here before you? And it's like, yeah, I mean the name is pretty blunt, like you are, like you know, there's no I don't know. It's it's very it's very hard to evade. And you know, like you can see the art from the game, like it's all white people. Uh, and it's it's it's kind of interesting cause in the first edition printing they're all kind of medieval, but in later editions they're like colonial America. Like it's I don't think it's like it requires some very deliberate uptuseness to

miss that this is what's going on. Um. And uh So anyway that that has um that was that was released like twenty something years ago. Uh. I find it very funny that settlers of Katan managed to win games with the Year awards in both two thousand and five. Like it hasn't changed, mud, I don't know. Yeah, those those are different years, Like what's going on? Definitely? Yeah, they did add boats. They did add boats. That's true. You're not you're not wrong about you don't. You don't

you don't have boats? Come on, that's true. Actually, it's funny. My neighbors have a boat. I do not have a boat because I'm a regular person who doesn't have lived next to a lake. M Oh yeah, yeah, I also do not have a boat. So yeah, I briefly had a commute to work that I could have kayaked, but I don't know to kayak. That's New York baby. I developed a desire to have a boat last year because yeah, I was in Spain and I met a Spanish guy with a boat, and that does seem like the life.

But that's neither you're You're You're horrible descend into turning into some sort of Hemmingway adjacent character. Yeah, just just I mean it is. It is nice to be drunk on about. It's also very expensive to have about, So maybe I'll get drunk on an inflatable raft instead. I just get a sunfish and just flip it over every thirty seconds. Um, the working man's boat. Yeah, the working

man's boat. Um. But yeah, and uh so so from there, I kind of what has happened is unsurprisingly that, you know, board games are actually kind of a summit demographic art form compared to video games, because all you really needed some paper, Like really, that's all you need? You need

some paper? Uh, and you can make a board game. Uh, if you have tabletop simulator, do you just need tabletop simulator, You're already done, like uh, and then you just need to be able to bully people into play testing your game. And that's really the hard part. Uh. But you know, so this means that, you know, people will iterate on things pretty quickly. You know, so very like fan fiction environment, people will will iterate rather quickly on your ideas and

develop them further. Um. And so I looked through some of the other games that I've played and liked, and uh, you know, I actually tend to like pretty much all the games that I studied. Splendor is the one that is very fun, very casual, very easy, and it just says this art that bugs me, this art that really

bugs me where it's about being a gem trader. And it's very much seems to be based on Renaissance Italy or like renaissance on TWERP you know this and m for some reason, like you don't see people in minds. It's very weird. All of the there will be pictures

of minds. It's like, okay, you bought this emerald mind and there's like nobody there, which is very weird because I have seen pictures of pre industrial I've seen pictures of minds from the nineteen eighties, which is firmly industrial, where there are thousands of people you can barely see the ground, you know, thousands of people everywhere. You know,

mining is very labor intensive. Um, you only start seeing mining become kind of like capital intensive, like very recently, and even then only really in the United States and a couple of other countries. Germany obviously uses very capital intensive mining. Everywhere else it's very very labor intensive, but splendor. They won't show you the people doing the mining, but they will show you the people short sorting the gems, which is just skipping the slavery part exactly, exactly the

part they're skipping. Yeah, it's even today, like you ignore what your how your cell phone is made, right, You're just like you're glossing over the unflattering parts and going

straight to making a gym. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're you're going straight to you know, I've I've you know, I've got my my pretty purple cell phone, you know, and the the part where you know, there was yeah, pretty much of war in the Congo fought over it, and then they had to install suicide nets in China gets completely glossed over and all that stuff goes into this phone. But uh, you know, to me, it's just kind of

a necessary hunk of plastic and metal for surviving in America. Um, And I you know, I'm not entirely I don't want to be too hard on the designers here. It's very like there's a part of me that wants to be and there's a part of me that wants to be kind of forgiving and being like do you really want to be playing this like fun casual game and like

be confronted with slavery. Uh, But at the same time, like but yeah, you you really try to have it both ways here, Like this is like I don't make the game about something actually fun, not yeah, not something that well. I mean there are there and there are people who do that. You know, It's like not that hard to find people like making games about like theme parks or like haunted houses or utopian or like like weird like utopian arcologies and stuff like that. Like people

make these things. But like so this, uh, this colonialism keeps on like coming back, and part of that, you know, part of that is I guess like all sci fi is kind of colonialist. But wait before we go, do you know what else keeps coming back? You know what? Tell me what? Sure? You capitalism? It's time for an ad break and there's still more capitalism. But that's true, that's true different capitalism. Yeah, right now we're we're in

like more early capitalism. And uh so the the game that like really stuck in my cra all the weirdest and uh, I might end up reading a quote out from here. I'm sorry for being an incredibly irritating person and doing that as a game called Mombassa. Um, and uh, Mombassa is so aggressive about how colonialist it is. It is so so aggressive. The premise of the game is that you are adventurers in the Scramble for Africa, and

the goal is to be the player who retires the richest. Uh. And the ways in which the mechanics of this game are messed up, uh, the part of the mechanics that I will say is genuinely clever. And if they hadn't made it about the Scramble for Africa, I would have like no, I would just be like, yeah, cool. So I still have to admit that this is this as cool is that you start out working for a different joint stock company. But anybody can buy shares in anybody

else's joint stock company. So the best strategy is to buy somebody else's company and then they make the company valuable and you contribute as little as possible. Free rider problem. You know, the classic of game theory that the liberal economists fucking love talking about. Uh. Great thing to do with the game. But the way you make your company

valuable is like it's it's pillaging Africa. Like like it's pillaging Africa, and it's it's very very weird, Like there's you have this map of Africa in front of you, and the map of Africa has valuable things in it has, you know, diamonds that you can pick up. It has like there are books, which is unclear if that represents Like you write an adventure novel like King Solomon's Minds, or you write a naturalist guide, or you write an ethnography, but you're writing some sort of book that is based

on how you despoiled the African continent. Uh. And what what always struck me is so weird is that the territory is just when you enter the territory. You just take everything, you just you just pillage it. It's not like territory that you hold and really make more productive. You don't develop it. There's at least it's honest about

that to a certain extent. At least it's honest that like the Europeans were lying about any of that development, civilizingnition ship like that they were there to steal um and But what is so so weird to me about it is that like there's there's no resistance, there's no risk to expanding across the continent, there's no negotiation. The only other characters at all are the other players, the

other Europeans. Uh. You know this continent that at the time had hundreds of millions of people, uh, many of whom had legitimate kingdoms that in some parts of Africa where you know, had full gunpowder militaries just totally glossed over, just totally not not mechanically represented at all. Um. Well, it's like they're only there, they're portraying the only future that that is possible. Like you know what I mean,

this is how you become a civilization. There's no other that there's one path um I mean, is there is one path to being a civilization, and it does involve a lot of taking other people ship. To be fair, No, I said that ironically, Robert, I know, I said in their mind there is one path, yes, but I do feel like I've got to read this out from the rule book because it was like so hypopic to me. This is this is from the rule book. This is

the start of the rule book, the opening quote. In one Bassa players are choir shares of chartered companies based in Mombasa, Cape Town St. Louis and Cairo and spread their tailing pasts throughout the African continent in order to earn the most money. Chartered companies were associations formed for the purpose of exploration, trade, and colonization, which links them inextricably to a very dark shafter in human history, global colonialism.

This period rough lasted roughly from the fifteenth century to the middle of twentieth century and is associated with exploitation and slavery. Although Mombasa is loosely set within this timeframe, it is not a historical simulation is a strategy game with an economic focus that roughly refers to historical categories and places them in a fictional setting. The exploitation of the African continent and its people is not explicitly depicted

within the gameplay. If you want to learn more about the underlying history, we recommend the following read History of Modern Africa Each hundred Depressent by Richard J. Reid uh end quote. So they fucking new, but like they fucking knew that there is some evil, evil ship that they have made into a game, and they want you to know that they knew that you that you were going

to call them. It's like making like a candy Land version set in the Congo where you have to collect hands or rubber and being like, yeah, you can read a book about this if you want. Yeah, this is like it's such a cop out. It's like it's so bizarre, Like it's so bizarry not how many people even read this stuff, like like generously. One person I've ever before reads the rule book when you're wearing a board game,

like like very generously. Like I'm just a huge nerd who likes reading this stuff, and I would just like read this in my jaw was just like holy shit, I think you could try. It might even be wisdom and trying to like make a board game about the Scramble for Africa that's like framed in like a kid friendly way, but is also like very blatantly horrific. It's just like the kind of thing that if you think about it ten seconds, I was like, oh, we're just

like subjugating and massacreing people. But it's also like the the art style is like themed off of candy Land or some sort of ship like maybe, but even then you're probably more likely to just get people enjoying it on ironically than you are to actually convince anybody to

read about the Scramble for Africa. Well yeah, yeah, I mean, and well it's actually kind of interesting because there's a there's like a good tradition of like making like kid friendly appearing things that are actually quite horrifying if you think about them for more than two seconds. And yeah, well Monopoly for example. And I mean, I was going to take a slight turn away from board games. I grew up with red the Red Wall books. Yes, yeah,

the Red Wall books. Like even though like stoats are not a race of people in real life, they are a type of weasel, uh holy ship, those books managed to be incredibly racist. It really is racist against like different types of weasel. But uh, you know they portrayed this is this very cute see world of you know, animals, you know, noise and badgers and stuff, and they're just committing genocide left and right. It's just portray is like totally okay, it's just like someone who has no idea

what you're talking about. This is crazy. Yeah, popular children's series and like the eighties and nineties, you know, I read this book. It was like, yeah, it's like you flipped back and forth between like, yeah, here is Martin the mouse and he's the hero, and also he's eating all of this really nice food and then also we must exterminate like entire species. It's buck wild. It is insane. Uh. The Red Wall Feast spot, by the way, it's like

a really good Twitter follow. We're just post excerpts from the food descriptions. Those are incredible. Um. But the reason why I kind of made that turn is that one of the games I considered that I actually really liked is uh something of a post something of an anti colonial game called root uh. And this was part of the part of what I was kind of witnessing over as I was studying these is that there is a bit of a discourse, a bit of a development over time.

Uh and uh. Two of the games that I highlighted, Roots and Spirit Island are kind of are are fairly anti clonial and Root is a kind of horrifying game but with very cute see appearances. You know, you play as like mice and cats and and birds. Uh. And the birds are like like horrifying aristocrats. Uh, like like you're like a feudal military dictatorship. The cats are like trying to turn the entire force into like a giant woodcutting factory and like subjugate everybody else under the boot

heel of like industrial capitalism. And you can play as just like the concept of revolution, I guess, like like there's a woodlanda lions who win the game by like provoking revolts of the civilian population to overthrow the other two. Uh. It's it's very weird. It's a very very violent game by by comparison, it's very hard to lonato player in it.

But it was kind of interesting to me to see that like you can do it's kind of almost the the exact opposite, where it is like a lot of like it doesn't have it has this very obviously horrifying and graphically violent mechanics, uh, you know, revolutions and subjugation, but with like the characters look cute, like all the all the character art is very cute. Um. You know, you've got like a little mice like making pungee traps

and stuff in the It's very odd. Yeah, I kinda I kind of jumped a little bit ahead here, but I don't know that we need to go through the everything I did in this in this paper that's a little bit boring, and also we need to leave things for the readers. And actually Root is uh a little bit based on a game series that I think would be particularly appealing to uh, to Robert uh and possibly the listeners. There's a company called GMT Games. Anybody else

heard of them? These guys are interesting continue tea games make games like Kuba Libre, a four player asymmetric warfare about the Cuban Revolution. UM and of ways, yes yes multiple I one once as the Mafia, which was an interesting side to play in the UM an interesting and interesting series of interest to have. Uh. You know, I

could not build an army for ship. I just had to count on the fact that other people didn't think it was worth destroying casinos because they're too busy trying to stamp out revolutionaries um and or their revolutionaries trying to stamp out fascists. And it was a they're a very the reason why I think they're very weird companies that you know, I think they're They are games like Kuba Libre, Twilight Struggle, A Distant Plane, which is about the war in Afghanistan. But they also are like these

guys are like Quantico psychos. Uh, they actually they are the guys who make the actual four real war games that the Pentagon you yeah, yeah, Quantico if you're not up on things, is like the part of the Virginia area kind of a suburb of d C where all of the all of like the Fed FEDS live. Like I'm not talking about like border patrol FEDS or ship I'm talking like, uh, fucking CIA, motherfucker's Capital f Feds. Yeah.

Isn't the CIA is like training facility there? Yes, they have, and I think at the FBI also has a facility in quantity the Capital f Feds. All the agents are there. Yeah. Yeah, don't think of like like your inspectors here. Yeah, I mean look well. And also just like we're not primarily talking about like the door kickers, We're talking about the people who are like the doing the really scary ship. You know. I will say, though, if if we gave Osha like CIA powers, the world would be in an

obviously better place. I think we hand them the nukes. I think we hand them the nukes and a mandate to use them. If purity procedures aren't followed. Not cleaning your counter after using chicken, that's the end of Detroit. You know, there goes San Francisco. Uh, you didn't clean your food cart well enough? You know, pretty soon collective of punishment, but just for workplace violations. Yeah, collective punishment

for like basic sanitation violations. I mean, in a way, not following sanitation does lead to collective punishment, whether or not you have a federal enforcement for it or not. That's right. He's the deployment of our nation's nuclear assets. Uh. Do you know what else is collective punishment? Capitalism? Yes, listening to ads? Yeah, so let's all endure it together. We've been collectively punished. Solidarity all all all of us

who must endure advertising. Yes, um, yes, I have been I've been rambling a lot, and UM, yeah, like I said, I find this this question of who gets to be an agent to be very important. Who who gets to be a player? Who is even given the choice of winning? You know if if you're not a player, you're completely written off from the possibility of ever winning. Um. And you know this is something that like in in video games, we've seen recurring debates around this, you know, like civilization

is an infamous one for this. You know, who even gets to be a civilization? Um? Why are some civilization civilizations and some city states and some barbarians? Um? And you know it does uh, you know, it does shape your thinking, you know. And there's there's games are very valuable for how they create empathy. You know, a game that can really immerse you can really teach you a lot of very free, even powerful empathy for groups of

people that you might never have the chance to interact with. Ah. And then when you keep on creating games that ask you to empathize with the colonizers, mm hmm. Yeah, you think it's just the normal way of things. This is what this is what happens. This is the succession of events that leads to humans yeah, this session of events leads the humans. Those who do not participate simply die out. Uh this is brainwashing. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it is. It is And I mean it's it's you know, you can

the same could be said of all culture. But you know, I think it's worth being um informed in critical consumers UM. And I mean I actually do you know? I actually you know, I know that you wanted this to be an uplifting episode. And I'm going to be optimistic here. I I you know, it's not just that we're talking about stuftware. The stakes are not literal death. The stakes are you know, getting mad at your friends overboard game.

But also I do think that, uh, we have seen positive development of people take king of people looking at these games. You know, there's a game developer who said about some of the games who was playing, Uh, what do the locals think about these colonizers, Like, it's pretty rude that nobody's asking them and tried to design starting from there. And I have some criticisms of how he

executed that, how well he executed on that vision. But the fact of the matter is is that even just through the sheer iteration of somebody looking at a game like Settlers of Katan and going well, how can I do this different? You know, I can't just release the same game every single year. I need to do something new, and even just a simple one of just reversing who is the players simple enough, even that has been creating some iteration in some some additional complexity, which and and

has caused people. I have seen people, you know, go back and re examine. Even if they're not people who have any sort of like education, any sort of formal education in anthropology of post colonial theory, they will they'll look at like, oh, yeah, I was playing this game same where you're the colonize, and I played this other game where they reverse the roles, and I was like, that was the bad guys earlier. Yeah, I mean I think portray the other side and maybe winning means you

kick them out or or destroy them. I would like to see that play out versus that is Spirit Island. That is what Spirit Island is, that the players cooperate to destroy the colonizers or to terrorize them into abandoning the island. Uh, weird game, weird game. I have some I think there's some good execution in there. Some critics and I've got some criticisms of it is my favorite, but it does do some things a little bit well patronizing.

But um but yeah, like yeah, like that's that's something I think is worth seeing and uh and I think it's something that um Admittedly, maybe I just really enjoyed this the space of the world because you know, if you look at very mainstream video games, for example, kind of bored of the same, like five feeling the same five games get released every here, you know, there's some texture,

give me something new. But um, also, I think that I think that the I think there's some cost for optimism for people like critically examining the art that they're building, the art that they're consuming, in the art that they're creating. And I don't know that counting on that kind of stochastic, bouncy ball randomness of people just kind of spontaneously going what if we what if we uh played what if

we reverse the roles in Call of Duty? You know what if we played the people living in the Fafollo, Well, call of Duty is happening on in the background. Just kind of on the randomness of that happening. Uh, might not be as fast as people want. I wish, I wish. Oh. Yeah, there was a game called I think it was I think it was called This Is War. Maybe it's called This War of Mine. That's what it was. That's a good game. That's a really well done game. Yeah. Yeah,

and there's I'm I'm I don't know. I'm I did to see the future of all this stuff, and I'm excited to see where people go with this. Well, Chris, I have a question, why did you decide to even bring on Kyle, Like what do you what what is it about this topic that you think is prevalent today? What? What what can we take away from this? Well? I

think I don't know. I think one of the things that I got was reading the article is about like one of the ways, like one of the things you see in how set colonialism gets perpetuated, And I think, um, why am I now forgetting the name of the Yeah, declonization is not a metaphor talks about this a lot,

which Yeah, I'll talk about that another time someday. But like one of the things that you get like immediately is the sort of is that the settler move to innocence, And that strikes me as like the sort of it's the kind of like it's it's, it's the kind of perspective that you see, I think running across all of these board games, and I think it it is actually really helpful to sort of you know, like the way you break that and then the way you start to

get actually that actually looks like the colonization. It has to start with people like actually like realizing what they're doing and not being able to sort of like retreat to this position of innocence and being sort of confronted

by it. And I think that like that that is a place where media can actually like be very helpful because you know, like most and most mostly like it's it's, it's, it's almost always working in the opposite direction, right, But it's something where you can actually have this sort of I don't know, it's it's a part of the cultural spirit where you could like very like very easily put someone into a role that is not the one that they're normally doing and get them to like realize that

like what they're doing is like fucked. So yeah, yeah, yeah, I mean I could say the first when I was in high school and played playing sellers in for the first time, I didn't realize the like it took me a while to understand that, like, oh, I'm a colonial list yeah, territory. Uh. And well because they yeah, they present it as default innocence and also just like exciting too. There's no there's no backstory to how you get the

wood or the ore or or anything else. You just like somehow build a road, you somehow have a town. There is no backstory as to who you're destroying in the process. And I think it infiltrates in your mind to the point where you subconsciously just deemed that as normal.

And it's it's definitely not unique, you know, it's definitely like it's only just another tendril of reinforcing stuff that we hear from the rest of our culture so broadly you know that that it's it's just this is just one aspect, one expression, I should say, of how many millions of different ways we get colonialism reinforced to us as a normal, natural part of the world. And uh.

And you know, from cowboy movies to uh to just like the way the New York Times will write about who owns land and who's who has a who has a viable claim on owning a piece of land. Uh. All of that we get reinforced us in our fiction are nonfiction every day. Um. I guess again that's part of I guess why I was drawn to board games in particular for this, because it's so transparent. You know, it's so transparent, how all how the all the propaganda

works like it's not there's no movie magic. Yeah, yeah, the rules are all there. It's it's pretty much. I don't know, but yeah, but you you sympathized with and I didn't call you, you empathize with the colonizer because there who you're who you are. Yeah, you want to win,

you want to win, you want to win. I'm very competative. Uh. Um and and uh and you know, and they get to and the people who may get to have this kind of like discourse that this kind of badge of like oh yeah, we made like the friendly board game. You know, they're comparing themselves to you know, making Monopoly, where like there's like a chance of a divorce happening

every time somebody finishes the game of Monopoly. Uh. And you know, they get to porture themselves as the nice ones, and it's like, yeah, we're the nice ones because all the people who were being mean to don't get a vorce at all. I just can't believe we made a game about paying rent, Like, I really cannot believe that. I history of it because it's very funny. I skimmed in your in your articles like about it a little bit. But it was called something that was much more to

the point. What was it called the Landlord's Game? Excuse me, yeah, the landlords Game by Elizabeth Maggie. She was a Georgiast activist in the like early twentieth century. Close my mind, fucking George just a whole well, I mean this monopoly, Monopoly being the most relevant contribution of Georgism to world history is somehow incredibly fitting. Let's all look away from it, brutal the number one selling economics book of American history.

Because you're used to a very bad board game, I can't say it's unfair, and I guess that that's really what I've got is that like it's I think it's still I think it's very valuable to um be a critical consumer um and um one. Bosston maybe went over the line, but for the most part, these games haven't like ruined my ability to enjoy them. If my friends want to play a game slan, they might just get

an annoying lecture from me. But they're going to get annoying lecture from me anyway, it just would be about something else. I mean, it's like any media. It's like phil and TV or whatever. You're going to realize eventually that you should be conscious of what you're consuming. So yeah, I'll still get into arguments about all those things, except for except for podcasts. People should blindly consume our podcast well, I mean, I mean, yes, podcasts are the only true

proletarian art form. That's right. That's right. As Karl Mark said, listen to this podcast like can the subscribe share us on Facebook? And then and then eventually one day podcast will wither away into bolish itself. Yeah, that's right, that's right, classic Marxist podcast theory. That's right, that's right. M is that the episode? Well, Kyle, where can people find you? Yes? I I personally am notoriously hard to find on the internet, being a person who doesn't have any social media whatsoever.

Absolutely the right call. I I have been off of Twitter for a couple of days. I'm taking a break. And the best best decision you could make get away from all our Our publication is at Strange Matters dot co op. We worked hard to get that dot co op registry. Uh. We just published on Thurs a couple

of days ago. Uh, love as a verb in article reviewing uh and um extrand expanding the possibilities of bell Hooks All About Love two thousand books All about Love, which is worth reading both the both the review and the book. Yeah. I actually just finished it um four hours ago. Yeah, I arned up for the first time during the pandemic. It wash it in lightning. Read It's

in lightning read. Uh. We we tend to have a lot of really insane economics stuff if you want to like read some truly insane ship about money, about where money comes from and what money is and what we can do about money. Uh. We've oh boy, we've got you covered. Uh we have. We have a profile of Roberts where we have rendered him as a Baron Munchausen very flatteringly. Uh. A really wonderful review of three different

cyberpunk works by the wonderful anti fascist author Elizabeth sanderfor UM. Yeah, so please come come check us out at Strange Matters dot co op. If for we are. We are taking new writers all the time. Uh, and we've got submission guidelines on there. And uh, if you want to personally send me hate mail for besmirching the good honor of settlers of Katan, I can be reached at Kyle at Strange Matters dot co op. Oh, and we do have a Twitter for the for the company. Yeah, what's your

what's the Twitter for the company? It is Strange Underscore Matters perfectly, Thanks Kyle. Check out Strange Matters contribute to their fundraiser. I can't I can't recommend doing anything on Twitter, so I simply uh and thank you, thank you for having me on again. It's a it was a lovely time. Yeah, absolutely all right again, as as as with every episode, go with christ Kay. It could Happen here as a

production of cool Zone Media. For more podcasts from cool Zone Media, visit our website cool zone media dot com, or check us out on the I Heart Radio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to podcasts. You can find sources for It Could Happen Here, updated monthly at cool zone Media dot com, slash sources. Thanks for listening.