Cautionary Tales with Tim Harford - "They fall behind and are slowly crushed" - Board Games and Economics with Richard Garfield

Episode Date: December 19, 2025

Playing board games and spending too much money are time-honored Christmas traditions, so to mark the festive season, Tim is joined by the creator of Magic: The Gathering - Richard Garfield - for a special Q&A about economics and game design.How should you go about building the perfect game? Why did the Magic trading card market crash? Why do so many people hate Monopoly? Plus, Richard has a bone to pick with Tim about a previous episode of Cautionary Questions. See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

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We get lots of emails dropping into the course, Tales inbox, ideas for shows, reflections on episodes, you know, honest feedback. By the way, it's Tales at Pushkin.fm and do keep them coming. But a few months ago, I spotted an email from a name I recognised. Richard Garfield is a mathematician, inventor, and the game designer behind the huge game, Magic the Gathering, and many more synths, including King of Tokyo, Robo Rally, and Key Forge. But Richard had a bone to pick with me about one of my previous episodes of cautionary questions. So, of course, of course, rather than argue with him on email, I'd much rather argue with him in person and maybe ask him a few questions, yours and mine, about games and game design.

I'm very excited. Richard Garfield, welcome to Cautionary Tales. Hello, Tim. It's a pleasure to be here. The pleasure is all mine. I think this is going to be a lot of fun. I'm very grateful that you have agreed to do this, and thanks also for being a listener to the show. So very kind of you, to know you're out there listening to Cautionary Tales.

I'm devoted, have listened to everything, and easily my favorite podcast. Wow. Well, that's, I'm blushing. Now, Richard, you got in touch following an episode of Cautionary Questions involving me and Jacob Goldstein. this episode, in fact. What are your thoughts on UBI, universal basic income, as a solution to an AI crisis, and the widespread philosophical and economic implications of this?

If what Alex is thinking about comes true, and if most people just have no economic value, they have value as human beings, have value as members of society, but there's nothing that they could actually sell their labor to do, then that's completely uncharted territory. We've never been anywhere like that, before. So everything we do is kind of speculative. The idea of more or less everybody losing their jobs, I'm skeptical of for the simple

reason that it hasn't happened in 200 years of incredible technological progress. I don't think we're going to have everybody losing their jobs to AI. I definitely could be wrong, but that's what I think. No, I think that's a good working assumption. If you think back a few centuries, basically almost all the labor that people did, they might wash their clothes occasionally. Well, that's been outsourced to the washing machines. Almost everything we used to do is now done by machines, but somehow we still all have jobs. Tell me what you felt when you heard the conversation between me and Jacob. I've been interested in the effects of technology on our economic system for a long time,

and I'm particularly interested in universal basic income as a possible solution. And the core of my disappointment was that I didn't feel like the universal basic income aspect of it was being engaged with in the way I wanted to hear it talked about. Often economists seem to write off some of the concerns in a way which doesn't seem helpful. I was particularly interested in what you had to say about it and that wasn't really there. Yeah. And we didn't do any of that. We mostly said, don't worry, the robots aren't going to take our jobs, which, you know, we may be right or we may be wrong. But it kind of left the universal basic income question to one side. So thank you for raising that, Richard.

We will talk about universal basic income. Hopefully I'm going to be able to talk to you a little bit about games. But before we do any of that, we are going to play the Cautionary Tales theme. I am talking to Richard Garfield. Richard, you are a huge star in the gaming world. When did your love affair with games begin? I was always attracted to games, but I don't think I really became a gamer until Dungeons and Dragons.

Dungeons and Dragons blew my mind. It was just a complete revelation for me. I had no idea the range of things that could be done with games. It became really a lifelong obsession with Dungeons and Dragons. What is it specifically about the tabletop roleplay games? I mean, I'm a huge fan of them as well, that you love so much. Is it the sort of just the endless possibility? It doesn't even seem to be a game in the game.

the normal sense. What originally drew me to it was that it broke all the rules I had understood about games. There was no time limit on them. There was no explicit victory condition. The responsibility for play was much more in a recognizable way in the hands of the player rather than a system of rules. And so its value to me was really showing the range of what could be done with games. I just think that role-playing is in itself an amazing pastime because of the endless possibilities, you know, that anything can be done with it. Yeah, they are remarkable. I remember quite vividly being told by a friend about this game,

and I couldn't quite get my head around what he was describing. So was this a computer game? I was like, no, it's not a computer game. Is there a board? No, not really. There's a map. And I think we should probably help people who don't know how these games work to conceptualize them. And fundamentally, you've got, in your classic role-playing game, you have a game master or a dungeon master who is describing situations.

And then the players are adopting roles. That's why it's called role-playing. So they might be astronauts, space explorers, wizards, and they're describing how their characters respond to the situation. Yes. If you just, if you play traditional games and you first run into role-playing games, it really challenges all your preconceptions about what games are and what they can be. One of the things that interests me, though, is that you're, I mean, you're deep into Dungeons and Dragons, you were, I think, one of the primary play testers for the third edition. Is that right? That's correct, yeah.

But you're famous for your board games and your card games, which are more structured. And the tabletop role-playing games, which can be so free-form, they feel quite different to board games. So I'm curious as to why there is such a lot of overlap. I mean, I love both. You obviously love both. A lot of people love both. And yet it seems a little bit like saying, well, if you love cricket, then obviously you should love, you know, marathon running. But they're not really the same thing at all.

But so why this affinity between the two? Yeah, that's a really good question. I've asked myself why I ended up devoted to. more traditionally structured games than role-playing, since role-playing was my introduction to the hobby. And I'm not sure what the answer is, but one difference between the way I looked at games and a lot of my peers was that my peers found a game they loved, and they became devoted to that game, and I became devoted to games as a whole. So, for example, I became interested in classic games like Go and chess and cards, but I also became interested in sports and what the

games that were being played within sports and trying to see the connections between all these different areas of games. So I'm not sure why I ended up in that area in specific, but I do know that there's been sort of a lifelong exercise of mine to expand and unite games under one umbrella rather than be a bunch of separate things. One of the things that was very interesting to me when I was beginning out is I would ask people what games they played and they say often I don't play any games and then we'd talk a little further and it would turn out they played poker they just didn't consider it a game or they played chess oh no that's not a game that's a sport yeah I was going to say I mean do we have a definition of games that satisfies you

no no I follow the fuzzy definition of games where where there are things that are more or less game-like, but that you're not going to have a precise definition. There's always going to be fuzziness. And often exploring that fuzzy boundary is quite interesting. One game that is definitely a game, there's no fuzziness about it, I think, is Magic the Gathering, which is your game. And, I mean, I think has got to have a claim to be one of the most successful tabletop games of all time. It's an astonishingly popular game. Tell us a little bit about that game and how you developed it. Magic began with a eureka moment, which is not common with my game design.

My game design is more evolutionary than revolutionary, typically. But I was hiking and had this thought which overwhelmed me, which was that not all the players had to have the same equipment in the game. And I just felt like there was endless possibilities with this idea that people would bring different cards or different components of some sort to the game and compete with those. And it took me a little while before that became what it is now, which is a game where the players have cards which represent magic spells and they have a duel with these spells. And yeah, it was published in 93 and it was instantly very hard to keep enough in print to satisfy the growing and ravenous player base. One of the things about it that I, you know, as an economist and as a gamer, one of the things that struck me as so clever was that it's got this kind of collectible baseball card quality to it. This idea of that you would buy packs of cards in the hope of maybe getting a rare one.

I mean, that's kind of genius, both in terms of gameplay and, of course, in terms of economics. I mean, suddenly people have a reason to buy and buy and buy the game. So, yes, well done you. It was a surprise to me as much as anyone how the idea took off. I knew that it was a good game because my playtesters were playing it devotedly, even after two years, with the same set of cards. but I still expected people to buy maybe a deck or two and then just trade after that. I did not expect them to buy like they did.

And it has been an ongoing tension with the game. The industry standard name for them is collectible card games, but I've always fought that as the name because I don't like the emphasis of collectible. I like calling them a trading card games because it emphasizes the original intent, which was that players trade the cards between themselves. And history of the game is filled with speculators interfering with gameplay because they drive the prices up so high that people have trouble getting the cards to play. The economics of the game is fascinating. I have a friend whose thesis, economic thesis, was entirely about magic. I think this interaction

between games and trading, it's interesting. As an economist, when I occasionally play Monopoly, I'm always trying to get people to trade because there are games from trade. If you're playing with five, six people, any two people who get together and trade, they're really stiffing the other players and they should do it.

But in my experience, with kind of non-gamy gamers, who are the kind of people who you're likely to play Monopoly with, they tend not to want to trade. One of the things in designing a game I have found is that you do have to consider not what the optimum play is, but how people actually do play. So if they play in a way, which is in some theoretical sense not optimum and they end up having a miserable time, that's a fault of the game, not the players. And one has to take that into account. Yes.

That feels like a lesson for economic policy as well as for game design. You've got to deal with how people actually behave rather than how they might behave in some theoretical world, which I guess brings us onto the question of universal basic income, which I've promised you I'm going to get to. So let's do it. So the issue on the table was, let's say the robots take all our jobs or the robots take a substantial number of jobs from a substantial number of people. what would we do about that and might a universal basic income be a response? And the basic idea of a universal basic income, it's pretty simple, it's universal and it's an income and it's basic.

So everybody gets some cash, maybe not loads and loads of cash, but they get enough cash. So very happy to tell you what I think about this, but what's your take? You said you've been thinking about this for an enormous amount of time. Yeah, in fact, I would like to give you the thought, exercise, which I've had so much trouble getting seriously considered, which I would ask my economic friends, as a thought experiment, what would happen if the jobs went away? It became almost pathological how often that wasn't taken as a thought experiment that was taken as an opportunity to talk about how that can't happen. Yes, and Jacob and I just did exactly the same

thing. So I apologise for feeding your frustration. I mean, I understand why that is a response, because I think there's a long history of people overrating this possible scenario and getting too worried about it. But sure, let's entertain it. So what I'm imagining is we're living in a world now where most people, there's no real economic value to their labour. It's all being done one way another by automation. That's super radical because our work has always had value in the past and therefore the implicit bargain has always been, you know, if you want to eat, then you've got to work. You trade your labour, you get consumption, you get good stuff. So in this hypothetical world, you can't trade your labour for consumption because your labour doesn't have any value. You still

have value as a human being. So what are we going to do? Technically speaking, it doesn't seem that hard. I mean, one way of thinking about it that ties it to today's economy is you just say, well, the government, which will assume is still a democratic government representing the citizens, the government just taxes capital. So we levy a tax on companies, well, levy a tax on anyone who has a robot. And we redistribute that income to all the citizens. Everybody gets $20,000 a year or whatever it is. And they just spend that money buying stuff from the robots. Or if we're talking more Star Trek, more futuristic, maybe the rule is it's not about

income, you just have a robot who works for you. Everyone's got a robot who works for them, or everyone gets some kind of voucher that entitles them to services from this kind of production system that is all automated. In principle, it's possible because you've got this tremendously productive economy and you've got a bunch of people who want to consume stuff. So what you're trying to do is bridge the gap. Like you're trying to figure out who has the rights to consume the output of all of this production. And how do we assign those rights?

So there are other possibilities, which is, you know, you've got some dystopian state. And Elon Musk controls all the robots and they all have guns and nobody else gets anything. And then we're in some nightmare future. But assuming we still live in a wealthy democracy, it's incredibly radical to say to people your consumption is no longer tied to your production at all but it doesn't seem impossible to set up that kind of system yeah that describes it very well

and it has engaged in the thought experiment quite well I would say that that is one of the things which I find appealing about universal basic income is that it seems like a dial that you can spin it and get some result which might smoothly bridge that gap rather than change everything. And the thing is that if you don't,

if that really is a possibility and we're really on the road there, then at what point do you actually make a change because I suspect if you don't make a plan for it that you're going to end up in a worse situation, it won't be simply we're going to get to a point and people say, oh, we need to do something.

It'll already be a dreadful state. possibly, you'll even get to a place where you can no longer really take the steps necessary to get a smooth transition. Yeah. I mean, we already have a universal basic income in many rich countries. It's just universal subject to the condition that you're over the age of 65. The age varies. What worries me, Richard, is the transition.

And I think one of the things that is that is worrying is people are very concerned, maybe too concerned, but in any case it's a fact. People are very concerned about the idea of the undeserving poor, the idea that you're giving money to people who are, they're taking advantage of you. You know, you're working hard, you're paying your taxes, and then some other guy who's just laughing at you and collecting this money on benefits and they're just a scrounger. It's a very powerful rhetoric and very powerful concern.

So the moment in a society where most people can work, that concern tends to be fought by people saying, well, we're going to have tight restrictions on who can get paid. But the shift to a universal basic income, in the end, you're basically saying, well, everyone's going to get it. So I imagine at a stage where the robots are doing all the work and everybody gets this income,

again, it won't be a problematic there. It's the getting from A to B that's the problem. And I think it seems in this hypothetical world where automation takes all the jobs, I mean, they're not going to take all the jobs all at once. They're going to take some people's jobs first and other people's jobs later. And so you get, you know, 20% of the jobs are automated, then 40% of the jobs are automated. And sure, people are trying to retrain. They're trying to get new jobs, but it's hard.

Then it's 60% of people's jobs. And then you've got the people who remain who no doubt, will be telling themselves a story about how incredibly special they are and how incredibly special their skills are and how they're working hard. But in fact, it's just going to be pure chance what stuff is automatable and what stuff is not. And I can imagine that kind of those questions as to who deserves to get this income and who exactly is going to pay for it are going to loom very large. I agree. I think that has definitely been a big part of the story around universal basic income.

But one way I like to look at it, because I view everything through a lens of games, I like to look at it as a catch-up feature. In games, when you fall too far behind, you can feel like you can't contribute, can't participate in the game in a productive way. And in game design, you can make good catch-up features or bad ones. Now, a bad catch-up feature encourages people to lean on it rather than do what they're supposed to be doing, which is playing the game. So when we start talking about these people get universal basic income, but these don't, that really opens up this possibility for, I feel like these people are not playing the game. They're just leaning on the catch-up feature, and that feels bad.

But if it really is universal, if it's a citizen's dividend, then it's something where it raises everybody and the people who do have work, they're going to have a better lifestyle because they're getting paid above and beyond. They won't feel like, oh, I shouldn't be participating because I'm denying myself this dividend. Yeah. I mean, there is an argument that the most successful government programs are always the universal ones, so whether it's the UK's National Health Service where, you know, everyone who lives in the UK, actually they're slightly tightening it, but basically the National Health Service is for everybody. Most rich people, for the most part, using the National Health Service. And the same is true for the state pension.

I mean, rich people have private pensions as well, but nevertheless, everybody gets the state pension. Nobody is told, well, you're a millionaire. You don't get the state pension. And that, I think, has been quite important in building support for this sort of thing. So maybe Universal, income could potentially benefit from that as well. Yeah, I think that's almost a necessary ingredient of getting it to work. Richard, I have loads of questions from our listeners for you. Before we do that, are you happy? Have we entertained the hypothetical enough? Absolutely. Yes. Thank you. It was very engaging. I'm very pleased. I'm here to serve, so it's good to hear. It's good to hear. Right. After the break, we will be dipping into the virtual mailpack.

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We're back. I'm here with game designer extraordinaire Richard Garfield to answer your questions about games. So, Richard, we have a question from Ronan, who was a member of our cautionary club. He got in touch via Patreon to say, would love to hear about the creative process of creating a game. Is it often a flash of inspiration, refined and polished and then released, or is it much more iterative?

Does the theme arise first, or the mechanics? So the mechanics, basically, the rules of the game. You've told us a little bit about the flash of inspiration behind Magic the Gathering, but you said that was unusual. Yeah, I engage in a very iterative game design process, and part of the reason for that is the games are often really complicated systems and I found that it is not worth my time to try to analyze everything up front that it is much better use of time to make a prototype and play it just because you can you can think about things forever and just miss fundamental stuff

so I design games play them iterate on them and then eventually sometimes often actually give up on them and maybe return to them years later or take pieces of them and combine them with other things. There's occasionally a eureka moment like I had with magic, but usually it's much more gradual. Yeah. The theme of magic is your wizards dueling using spells, but it didn't have to be that theme. It could have been some other theme. So how important is the theme? So magic in particular was a mechanics first and then theme. And I would say more often than not, I do mechanics first, then theme, but I do it the other way as well. One of the most extreme examples of that was that I was playing a quiz game with my wife, Connie, and we were putting together

these words to try to find the answers to these questions. And two of the words we put together were fat Dracula and we started laughing because it was such a... I'm immediately again. Such a good image and it's it has a rhythm to it so it makes a good game title. So I started making a game based on that. The idea was basically that these vampires get up at night and go out and eat a bunch of people and try to waddle home before the sun comes up because the more people they eat the slower they get.

And it didn't actually end up being even called fat Dracula. it's called The Hunger. The publisher decided to go with the hunger as the name, but that is as close to beginning with the theme and ending up with and adding the mechanics as I've run into. So for me, it works both ways. And for designers, I think it often works both ways. On the subject of this iterative process, we had a couple of listener questions about play testing. So Andy's been in touch to say, please tell Richard, I played a lot of treasure hunter with my son when he was younger, he's now 14. It's a game I intend to keep on the shelf for the day when I have grandkids. So I think that's a rave review. But Andy wants to know how you test your

games. And Mike B has another question, similar question. He says, Richard, how much playtesting goes into a game before it gets released? And have you ever had a mechanic that you just couldn't make work? Or if you solved it, how? Ideally, a lot of playtest. It's hard. to model in your head what's going to happen with the gameplay to begin with. So that's solved by playtest. At first, just playtest with the designer and friends. But then in the long run, you have this other issue, which we talked about a little earlier, which was that if people are playing in a way which isn't necessarily optimum, but that's the way they want to play, then it should still be a fun game. It should still work. I mean, there can be some.

some situations where there's a line of play which isn't fun and is discouraged. But in general, you shouldn't design this game for the best players and assume it's going to work out for everybody else. But that must be an issue with the play testing because presumably,

well maybe this is the wrong assumption. I was assuming a lot of playtesters are very keen gamers and are going to play very well, but maybe that's not true. No, that's often an issue. And that is true. So when I playtest, I do keep around often the same playtesters throughout the development, but at the same time,

I try to mix in other playtesters, and I try to mix in, depending on the game, more casual players and people who have no idea what's going on. And I look at how they play, because I want them to enjoy the game as well or to have something to work with. It's very easy to find yourself designing and designing and designing and iterating until you have a game which people who have played for three years love, but nobody else can really get their head around it. Yeah, I can imagine.

Barbara writes to say, please bless Richard for the joy that is Bunny Kingdom, smiling face. You've got a lot of fans here, Richard. I've not even heard of Bunny King. You've designed so many games that I can't even keep up with them all. Anyway, Barbara loves it. And in fact, her Cautionary Club profile photo comes from the Ladies' Gaming Weekend where she first played it. Anyway, her question, what is the process you like best for collaboration with the artists that illustrate your board game designs? And is there a visual artist in the gaming world or not that you would really like to work with on a game?

My favorite way to work with artists is to give them as much room to work as possible because they're generally in art because they're creative. And so this went back to the original work I was doing with magic. Which as a whole, I mean, an amazing visual aesthetic. I mean, the art is an incredibly important part of that game. Yes. The original 300 cards, there were maybe 20 artists, maybe. more. And in the early days, there was this idea of setting up a Bible of how to do the art and description of exactly what you wanted. In my approach and the way we tried to keep it

for as long as I was around was to instead give them as little information as possible and see what they did. And I liked the variety that would give. I felt like you got more special things. And I've tried to keep that in my games in general. In magic, at some point, they had to really turn up the prescription part of the art because it was becoming too crazy where one artist would draw goblins in one way and the other one would draw them as a completely different species. But still, as a philosophy, I like to give the artist as much room to work as possible. That does feel very Jim Henson, though. The goblins don't even look like they're the same species. Everything's different. But yes. That's true. I think

you can make it work. I think you probably could. I mean, what is a fantasy universe for after all? And so, to answer Barbara's question, the second part of Barbara's question, any particular visual artist you'd love to work with? I mean, let's broaden it, live or dead, you can have Rembrandt, you can have Frida Carlo, you can have anybody. Who would you love to work with on a game? Oh, Asher, maybe. Why is that? I like the graphic sensibility of Asher. like the imaginative quality to the work that, you know, like he was clearly somebody who liked to play with the rules and sort of see where that took him. And these kind of, these visual illusions. Almost a game designer personality that was expressed in the art. Very good. So I've got more

questions. A question from John, who asks, Magic the Gathering is more popular than ever, but digital collectible card games seem to be on the decline. Do you think there's a necessary component of in-person play for games like this? So before you answer, Richard, you should tell us what digital collectible card games are because this is kind of, I think this is going to be new to a lot of people. Yeah, so the most popular digital collectible card game was probably Harthstone. And so, yeah, these games exist basically the same idea. as magic or Pokemon where players build a deck,

they construct something and they bring it to a game and play it against competitors who bring their own decks. And so this is something which lends itself very well to the digital world because it's so easy to modify and add and change cards in your deck and do all the shuffling and all that great stuff. And there's a lot of things you can do that you can't do in paper. So is it important to be face-to-face?

the face-to-face quality of board games is very important, very valuable. And the community which you develop with it is critical and is much more critical with these massively networked games like magic than it might be for a game which is played more with in a less networked way. But at the same time, the digital world brings its own stuff and there is a digital community as well, which people, get real value out of it. I think right now we might be in a collectible bubble where there's a lot of the value of these games, these paper games are very high because the cards are being seen as very valuable. It's part of the idea that there's a bubble in everything, right? So there's these Bitcoin's in a bubble and, you know, maybe AI's in a bubble and yeah, everything's in a bubble at the same time. So these rare cards also may be in a bubble. Yeah. And this has been an issue with magic from

the very early days. In fact, very early on, we had to intentionally crash the market because we were afraid that the speculators were just going to drive out the actual players. And people thought the game was going to be dead because we printed so much of the fallen empire's expansion. And they said it was the worst expansion ever and so forth because they were a inflating whatever the play value was with what the value of their collection was. But it was very good for the game to see that crash. And we got a lot more players and people engaged with the game as they were intended to. Yeah, interesting.

Possibly, this is all good practice for running the Federal Reserve. Yeah. Learning when to pop the bubble. I hope you're enjoying this Games special with Richard Garfield. I know I am. And Richard and I will be answering. more of your questions after the break. Run a business and not thinking about podcasting, think again.

More Americans listen to podcasts than ad-supported streaming music from Spotify and Pandora. And as the number one podcaster, IHeart's twice as large as the next two combined. So whatever your customers listen to, they'll hear your message. Plus, only IHeart can extend your message to audiences across broadcast radio. Think podcasting can help your business. Think IHart. Streaming, radio, and podcasting. Call 844-844-I-Hart to get started. That's 844-844-I-Hart. Malcolm Gladwell here. At Pushkin, there's no better gift than an audiobook. If you feel the same, I have good news for you. All Pushkin audiobooks are on sale through December 23rd. Whether it's for you or a loved one, all titles are 25% off with code, gift, that's lowercase G, 2025. Gift, 2025. The Pushkin Library is vast, from the ever-relevant, the big short, to the celebration of comedic genius in Douglas Adams, the ends of the earth.

Or, if you're looking to sharpen up your conversation skills, there's the art of small talk, and then there's miracle and wonder. Conversations with Paul Simon, where I sat down with the man himself and heard stories about his childhood, his collaborators, and his music. Give the gift of an audiobook this season. Search the Pushkin audiobook library at Pushkin.com. FM slash audiobooks and enter the code, Gift 2025 at checkout. We're back. Richard Garfield and I are answering your questions about everything from universal basic income to games. And Garav would like to know, what are your favorite stories about games? For example, movies, TV shows, comic books featuring games. There are a number of poker movies that I like, Rounders and Cincinnati Kid.

I'm trying to think of some which deal with games in general. There's Queens Gambit. It's about chess. There's Tron, of course, and War Games. It's a classic early 80s movies about computer games. Yeah. Well, Queen's Gambit was excellent. I enjoyed that a lot.

And Ian M. Banks, the player of games. Oh, that's amazing. Yeah, that is a, that I'm a big In Banks fan, and that is certainly a top draft for me. Yeah, it's an incredible sci-fi novel about a culture where game-playing is incredibly important and about a person who's unbelievably good at playing games and becomes of civilizational importance. Something that sort of qualifies there is also Ender's Game. Ender's Game had the protagonist being taken away in training to fight aliens, but they were a kid,

and so they played these sort of arena games and it was very interesting how game-like the evolution was like how they built up strategies and within the game they gamed the system they did meta-games and all that so when you read it

it feels very game-oriented yeah the more I think about it so there's a Corey Doctro novel for the win which is all about it's massively multiplayer online games and trading within those games and it's all about economics there's a lot

Does the Hunger Games count? Yeah, yeah, no, no, absolutely it does, absolutely does. Because I would say what ends up being, you know, counting is, I don't know, when they're making moves in it that feel like they're playing a game. And that's kind of a fuzzy thing, but they definitely do that in the Hunger Games. Richard, any chance Magic the Gathering will ever become a movie? There is a chance I've seen, heard noise, and that it was definitely going to happen many times over the last 25 years.

So I've certainly not holding my breath, but it's always possible. And they made a movie of Angry Birds. Magic the Gathering seems a lot more promising than Angry Birds as a piece of material. But there we go. We will see. I wouldn't have bet on it back in the 90s where games made into movies were awful. These days, yeah, it's a die roll. It might work.

Richard, we have a question about a classic episode of Cautionary Tales. Yeah. Susie writes, in the episode Do Not Pass Go, you talked about how Monopoly doesn't really work as a critique of capitalism, even though that was the original intent behind the game. Instead, it ends up being more about the fun of crushing your opponents and getting rich. So here's my question. Why is it that games like the farming game actually succeed in teaching how hard and unpredictable farming is, while Monopoly totally misses the mark when it comes to critiquing capitalism? What is it about the or gameplay of the farming game that helps its message come through and why does Monopoly lose its message and the way people play it? I love the question. So just to refresh people's memories or to inform people who hadn't heard the episode about the creation of Monopoly, so Lizzie McGee, who created the immediate precursor to Monopoly, and her game looks like Monopoly and it plays quite like Monopoly in its capitalist version, but it was supposed to have two modes. And in the other mode, it was more cooperative. It embodied principles of Georgist

land taxation. And basically, if you played it that way, everybody got rich together. And that did not catch on. And I think when you describe it like that, it's pretty obvious why it didn't catch on because that sounds like a really bad game. Everyone just gets rich together. When people are playing a game, they want to challenge. So feel free to disagree with me, Richard. But my theory is that it's not much of a game unless there's a challenge. Cooperative games do exist, and some of them are very good, but they are designed to present the players with obstacles, whether it's a game in Dungeons and Dragons, or it's a board game like pandemic. They're very carefully designed to be difficult. And so when you succeed,

you're cooperating with all the other players, but you're trying to beat the game. Whereas this kind of landlords game that Lizzie McGee designed seems to be a game where there is no challenge. The whole point is to say, hey, if you all kind of reformed capitalism, then everything would be fine and no one would suffer, which, you know, sounds great as a political message, but sounds terrible as a game. Am I wrong? No, I think that's correct. One of the reasons why it probably doesn't work as the critique that, you know, that she was intending for is she did put the players in the role of being the capitalist. And so I did this game, King of Tokyo. It's a great game, by the way. I put the players in the role of being monsters tearing down Tokyo and beating each other up. And if I was aiming to make people see how bad it is to tear down cities, then I wouldn't have chosen that approach.

But it doesn't mean that they come out of this thinking, oh, you know, tearing down cities is great either. It's just people are able to get into the game. They can watch a horror movie and not end up thinking horror is a terrific thing. Also, I actually wonder if it's as bad at showing the evils of capitalism as she saw them as it's viewed in the sense that monopoly, there's a lot of people who really dislike the game. And those people, one of the things they really dislike is because they fall up behind. and then they're slowly crushed, and they don't feel like they can get out of it. That's not the only problem with the game, but that is what a lot of people will take away from it. Yeah.

That kind of is a critique of capitalism. Yeah, I think it probably is. Success breeds success. Yeah. And a small amount of capital early on is often decisive, which I guess is a critique of capitalism, but it also makes for a terrible game. But there you go. People still play it.

Richard, on the subjects of monopoly, I mean, that is a game that brings families together at Christmas, possibly because it's just the game that everybody knows how to play. Are there any games that you associate with Christmas that people might play as an alternative? Oh, sure. One of my favorite games for big get-togethers is HiveMind. The basic idea of HiveMind is that you ask a question

and everybody writes down the answer, then you tally up points based on how many people answered the same way. So if your question was, and the question might be, you know, name three planets, which I guess isn't properly a question, but that's the sort of thing, which you would do. So the three planets I would name are Earth, Mars, and Jupiter. And so I should have let you think of some planets also. So in retrospect, what would you name as your planets? Saturn, officially the best planet, Uranus, the most amusing planet, and Venus, goddess of love.

So I should have said you are allowed to choose the same. So let's say you said Saturn, which is a very reasonable answer, and Earth and Mars. Then each of us would get two points for Earth and Mars, because we both named those, and we would each get one point, one for, you would get one for Saturn, and I would get one for Jupiter. And, of course, you extend this to the whole group, and whoever scores lowest gets a strike, and when you get three strikes, you're out. And the questions can be very open-ended, like, you know, name three things that are in the refrigerator, or name three things that begin with a letter S. And you just get, you get crazy answers, and people trying to sort of get on the same wavelength. Anyway, it's a game which is very social, handles any number of players.

and we sort of find it endlessly engaging at holiday time. Yeah, that's a good one. The thing I do every Christmas is gather together my tabletop role-playing group, and we always play a Christmas-themed game. So in one way or another, the characters have to save Christmas, or there's something Christmassy about it. The game that I'm running this Christmas, it's based on a game someone else has created called the Wasseling at Klaus Manor

or Claus Manor and it's basically a kind of social satire upstairs downstairs where all the players are are playing the role of the domestic staff it's kind of Edwardian so the butler the maid whatever at

Santa Claus's manner and basically everything is falling apart the night before Christmas in various chaotic ways and you're playing the domestic servants and they can't they cannot afford to lose this job So no matter how unreasonable the requests from Santa Claus or Lady Claus or whatever, they've just got to keep this show on the road. And they're, yeah, I'm looking forward to it.

It should be suitably ridiculous. But we will see. Richard, it's been wonderful to talk to you. Thank you so much for joining us. One more question. What are you planning to do next? I'm working on a couple of autobattlers. Autobattling is a fascinating digital game concept where

they feel very much like paper games but whatever it is your building sort of fights by itself and so it unites this I've been fascinated with games that are played digitally but feel like they could be paper games for a while and this is in that

between space which is good so one of them is Vanguard Exiles and it's an early release on Steam and the other is chaos agents. One of the best games I ever played was actually an autobattler, and this is in the 19, what would have been about 1991. I played it at school. We had a game called Robot Arena,

where you had to program your own robot and send it into an arena, and it used a programming language a bit like logo, which used to be drawn, you know, you move a turtle around. Great game. Yeah, I played a game very much. much like that. Yeah, I hadn't really thought of them as auto-battlers, but you're right, they certainly do qualify. And it was very, yeah, very interesting. Richard Garfield, thank you so much for joining me on cautioning questions. I hope being

roped in hasn't put you off listening to the show. Oh, not at all. I'm completely caught up and intend to stay caught up. So, yeah, please keep them coming. We will. We will. Merry Christmas, and thanks again. Thank you. Cautionary Tales is written by me, Tim Harford, with Andrew Wright, Alice Fines, and Ryan Dilley. It's produced by Georgia Mills and Marilynne Rust. The sound design and original music

are the work of Pascal Wise. Additional sound design by Carlos San Juan at Brain Audio and Dan Jackson. Ben Adaf Haferi edited the scripts. The show also wouldn't have been possible without the work of Jacob Weisberg, Greta Cohn, Eric Sandler, Carrie Brodie, Christina Sullivan, Kira Posey and Owen Miller.

Cautionary Tales is a production of Pushkin Industries. If you like the show, please remember to share, rate and review. It really does make a difference to us. And if you want to hear it, add free, and receive a bonus audio episode, video episode, and members-only newsletter every month, why not join the Cautionary Club? To sign up, head to patreon.com slash cautionary club.

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