The Games Art Snobs Play

I “published” a board game yesterday.

Hold on, background first: I am a game geek. I play board games, card games, video games, watch game shows, analyze games, track the statistics of sports, etcetera. I am fascinated by all aspects of games, and believe very much that, particularly at this point where the average American has been trained to be distrustful of anything labelled “art,” games are inherently an art form all to themselves.

To simplify, ever since the advent of photography, the purpose of art is less about being accurately representational (as it once was), and more about being transcendental. Art is now created as a way of capturing emotion rather than physical appearance. Sure, it's always been capable of capturing emotion, but in the past 120 or so years, art has been enabled to chase meaning without a recognizeable body - but the stripped-down transcendence is, ironically, the same trait that makes the layman so nervous around it. Art could stop simply being a picture of a man, and could become something of a true mirror, for both the artist and the audience. Art can now allow itself to exist for no other reason than to give the audience a jumping point from which to think about the way they think about things.

Games, good ones anyway, do the same thing.

Chutes and Ladders is not a game. You roll the dice, and a random event tells you how far your piece moves. You move the piece, and the space tells you whether you advance, fall back, or stay in place. You have no control in this experience at all, and no amount of “practice” can change it. A machine could, without thought or motive, replicate the events of Chutes and Ladders, and would have achieved every bit of accomplishment that a human would, which is to say, “none at all”.

Chutes and Ladders is, in this way, an attractive painting of some blissfully “nice” and mindless landscape. It’s not about the splendor of God’s creation or the play of light on the hills and trees, it’s about temporarily sedating a mind that could have made better use of time by actually trying to think through something. Interesting how we teach our children to both color inside the lines and play with so-called “games” that can be played without mustering a single actual thought.

Real games force constant decisions and rationalizations. These are things that can be practiced, and will teach a person to respect the sanctity of their actions and the results thereof. What does a child learn from Chutes and Ladders? That sometimes you win and sometimes you lose... and eventually, that you really don’t have any personal control over which one is going to happen next. That’s not a game, that’s BRAINWASHING. That’s a formula for producing drones happy to let someone else make the tough calls, for producing the kinds of people afraid to take risk, responsibility or recognition. Or, worse yet, it produces people who don’t understand when it’s appropriate to take those things; “I won at Chutes and Ladders as a child. I was good at it. That means I’m good at games and I desrve to win.”

Those are the same people, not by any coincidence, that refuse to recognize Duchamp, Rothko or Pollack as artists.

Give me a real game. Real games involve strategies and skills; things like lying, cheating, and stealing. Things like balancing resources and investments. Things like cooperation and betrayal. Things like assessing values on the fly and trading for profitability. Real games actually feel like an accomplishment when won because they can actually measure a persons ability to win. Real games can actually hurt the loser a little bit, because they with force into focus shortcomings of the player. Real games expose meanings and motives.

Like art.

So back to my earlier story about “publishing” a board game.

Five of the world’s most prolific modern game inventors got together and created a set of pieces collectively called “Stonehenge”. It comes with five sets of rules, as each designer had a different vision of what those pieces could be used for. In many ways, it’s a concept similar to a deck of 52 standard playing cards; the pieces can be used for a multitude of different games.

The creators of the game leave it open to the game-playing public to create other new games to be played with these pieces. There’s even an online library where Stonehenge players can post their newly-authored games. The execution of the library is done beautifully, even in its infancy; when a new game is posted, it can be viewed as a webpage or downloaded as a formatted PDF that stylistically matches the actual rulebook that comes with the Stonehenge boxed game.


My own submission was published into their online library yesterday. True, it’s no more “brick and mortar published” than this blog; it had no editor, no production for store shelves, and no more editing than I put into it myself (actually, Heather helped me playtest the game and read over my instructions before I posted it), but it’s out there for people to play. I had no more physical investment in creating it than purchasing a copy of the Stonehenge boxed game. Then again, that means the original creators of Stonehenge and its publishers at Titanic and Paizo are willing to allow aspiring game inventors the chance to create something representational to go along with their own “something physical”.

They’ve provided the canvas in order to allow outsiders the chance to turn it into art.

Is my game (“Artifakes,” a game about defrauding the legitimate anthropological and archaeological communities) real art? Who knows? There is some strategy involved, and it’s certainly been entertaining for me to have this chance to got through the creative process of conceptualizing and testing a new idea. There’s currently no way at Paizo’s site to track how often the game gets downloaded or viewed, and I’m largely reliant on player feedback in their forums to find out if people like it. Titanic and Paizo have plans to eventually release additional official rulebooks with collected sets of game rules to go with Stonehenge, so I suppose the real proo would be to see Artifakes make it into one of their compendiums.

I’ve put my first game out there, and now, it seems, it’s out of my hands.

“Out of my hands,” though, would imply something akin to a real-life Chutes and Ladders scenario playing out, which this isn’t. I put conscious thought into the game I wrote. I used prior knowledge of games and puzzles when making it, and expect that players will judge it based on their own involvement with it and other games when they play it. It’s not “out of my hands,” so much as it’s being shared with other hands.

We shall see...