It Could Happen Here - Board Games and Settler Colonialism

Episode Date: June 16, 2022

We talk with Kyle Flannery from Strange Matters about the implicit and sometimes explicit politics hidden in board games like Settlers of Catan.See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.

You should probably keep your lights on for Nocturnal Tales from the Shadowbride. Join me, Danny Trejo, and step into the flames of fright. An anthology podcast of modern-day horror stories inspired by the most terrifying legends and lore of Latin America. Listen to Nocturnal on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. Ah, here we go. It could happen here.

It's a podcast where our intros get increasingly more segmented as you realize we have no idea who was going to do the intro. Yeah, we've never, at no point during the existence of this show or its growth, have we planned a single thing or talked about how to do our jobs. I've never, I don't even know who we are. We are all meeting for the first time. 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. Drew Barrymore? That's right. That's right, Shireen. Drew Barrymore. I don't know what her disease is, but I I can just, is it the same thing as in Memento? Because that's all I can think of. Yes. I'm trying to figure out Adam Sandler in Memento. Yes, Adam Sandler's Memento. My favorite movie. Well, we should probably introduce the episode today.

Yeah, so it's me, it's Christopher Wong, and today we're doing an episode that is, you know, okay, we we've been force feeding you really grim stuff for a long time so today we're going to do an episode about uh settler 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 and with me to talk about this is Shireen our wonderful producer who also writes for us and is great and we love thanks I'm here and Robert who we tolerate

oh that's nice of you you shouldn't a bit we do Kyle it's nice to meet you also we have Kyle from Strange Matters. Yes, yes. I'm Kyle Flannery. I'm an editor and co-owner of Strange Matters magazine. I guess we technically have now launched, even if the print issues are not in people's hands,

a new leftist culture and politics magazine. Here to be the consulting super nerd. Awesome. Yeah, I am very excited. 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. What?

I'm excited for this episode. I'm obsessed. When I was a kid, my board game was Risk. Oh, me too. I did a bunch of others. I played like HeroQuest and obviously Axis. I'll say this. I say I played Axis and Allies.

I set up Axis and Allies boards many a time and then gave up after like 15 minutes of playing the actual game. That's how I played HeroQuest. Yeah. Because I was like, I tried to read the HeroQuest rulebook and I was like, I have no idea what's going on here. I was into Hero. Because I was like, I tried to read the HeroQuest rulebook and I was like, I have no idea what's going on here. I was like 10.

No, specifically my fucking thing. We would speech and debate tournaments, you know, because when you do it, you're basically out for a whole weekend, sometimes three days, sometimes like four. 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 as 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 of playing Lord of the Rings Risk with my friends, yeah. I just had the normal vanilla Risk. Wow, I was really missing out. I distinctly remember being at a bachelor party where uh after we finished all the normal bachelor party stuff we crawled back to uh the place where everybody's gonna camp out for the night and somebody managed to convince one of the other groomsmen that a game of risk only takes about an hour and he did this at like this is like it was like three in the

morning yeah like it was the wedding that day yeah it was like three on the morning Yeah Was the wedding that day? Yeah it was like three on the day of the wedding It was an act of extraordinary Cruelty Anyway he didn't get married but he did take Kamchatka which was really key To his plans to assault North America We shockingly

Did all make it to the wedding which was Very much a risk Very much a risk We shockingly did all make it to the wedding, which was very much... A risk. Very much a risk, yeah. Very much a risk. I'm sorry. Yeah, that's why it's called that. Yeah. I was smart enough to just go, no, I'm going to bed.

I'm not doing 3 a.m. risk. That's not happening. But, yeah, I guess to kind of back up and provide 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 are you talking about board games? Like, who cares? And, you know, I'm reminded a little bit of the little tweet joke from a while ago, a couple years ago. Why am I talking about a little while ago?

On Star Trek, they have the, you know, they've got their, what do I talking about a little while ago, of on Star Trek they have the you know, they've got their, what do they call that, the holodeck. They've got the holodeck and but for some reason every week everybody's into some weird new board game. What the hell is going on with that? And for 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 us millennials were young, and a large part of that push has actually been from game developers themselves. The people who make your video games absolutely fucking

love board games. 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 stripped them down to their atomic components before you have done anything. And that means that if you are interested in the art of how a game works,

there are actually wonderful case studies, because you can see very quickly the way that you move from what the mechanic is doing to what it means. Whereas in a video game, it can be a lot more obscure. It can be a lot more complicated. And it can require a lot of digging. You don't have to... I am enough of a turbo nerd that I have broken into the game's files

for various video games I've played and ripped out the code and looked at it and been like, ah, so that's the drop rate. Because again, I'm a consulting turbo nerd here. But with a board game, you don't have to do that. You just know all of the rules up front. And so, you know, if you're... So that can reveal a lot about what the designer's intentions are,

what they're communicating, and how that communication all works. So 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 to talk about? Yeah, I mean, I was going to note that the primary board game played in Star Trek TNG was Stratagema in the classic episode in which Data has to get really good at what is basically holographic chess. Absolutely, yeah. Yes. Anyway, you talked about Star Trek The Next Generation. basically holographic chess. Absolutely, yeah. Yes, anyway. You talked about Star Trek The Next Generation,

so now that's all I'm going to give you. It's good that we didn't get into the awful board games from DS9. Oh, God, yeah. I mean, Stratagem is pretty ridiculous, and the episode is very silly. But it's one of the more fun data episodes. Whereas the board game

episode from DS9 I think is generally considered the worst episode in all of DS9. Yeah. I mean, 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 judo

where they have to have the padded sticks that they have to fight with. The ultimate martial art. Anyway, please continue. I'm sorry. So I wrote this article that is upcoming in publication. It's going to be in our first issue. And it's about a particular trend that I noticed in board games.

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 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 am grateful for Robert for talking about the games he talked about, you know, Axis and Allies and Risk, even like Monopoly. These are games that are in what's generally known as the American tradition, where the goal is to eliminate all the opposing players. Yeah. To be the last one standing. Yes, like everything in American,

it is like one person wins by using either violence or capitalism on the other. Yeah, you out-survive all of your opponents. 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, we're going to take Kamchatka. That's my only political stance as an American, is that we will take the Kamchatka Peninsula. And we're going to take Australia for those three extra armies. That Australia strategy

is, I feel like half the risk strategy, half the risk variants I saw were just ways to nerf the Australia strategy. But in any event, there's a European tradition, and one of the things, and that has been a lot, that has been very popular, has made an absolute shitload of money over the last several years. Shitload being very relative, because again, board games are a pretty small field compared to video games or gambling or booze or something like that. But they've been kind of the dominant name in the game. And one of the kind of major conceits of this style of game

is you don't eliminate other players. All players, any player who starts the game at the table is going to end the game at the table. You never eliminate anybody. And this is, I think, an admirable 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 more remember it being like middle school and high school where you just have somebody sitting there bitterly for four hours while you try to clean up a risk game. But anyway, the one that most people are probably, the one that is the most famous, infamous, is Settlers of Catan. And that's kind of what's my start point. Settlers of Catan is a board game where you play as European colonizers to a almost uninhabited island.

An 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, but you can never send your army to conquer their territory. I always go hard on the roads. Yeah, yeah. You can block people with roads. It's kind of like

a rivalry between developers. Almost. But one of the things that is kind of outstanding about this is that it's not a technically uninhabited island. There is a, quote, robber that starts out on the island. And the robber is capable of inflicting violence on the players and 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 of 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 of players. If me, Chris, Shireen, and Robert were all sitting at a table playing Settlers of Catan, 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 is still ultimately a winner. And, you know, this is, if you are willing to make some kind of specific historical amnesia about how colonialism 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 were 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, um, I do think that those things, those things are dovetailing together, right? That the only people who are real people are the colonizers. Uh, 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 kind of messed up. It's just kind of messed up. And I do think it's

kind of interesting that the game doesn't really say this very explicitly. Right? And I know there's going to be somebody who'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 a Native American actor, even if they didn't use any explicit Native American references. played by a Native American actor, even if they didn't use any explicit Native American references, if all of the good guys are people who dispossess 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. Well, yeah. Yeah. Because they're making him 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 a race like it's it's a blank slate as far as white settlers are concerned yeah it's a blank slate like the the positionality of like of like the game is very explicit about who is a settler and who is not right the settlers of katana 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 hmm yeah i mean the name is pretty blunt like you are like you know there's no i don't know 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. And it's kind of interesting because in the first edition printing,

they're all kind of medieval, but in later editions, they're like colonial America. I don't think it's like... It requires some very deliberate obtuseness to miss that this is what is going on. So anyway, that was released like 20-something years ago. I find it very funny that Settlers of Catan managed to win Game of the Year awards in both 1995 and 2005. Wow. It hasn't changed much.

I don't know. Yeah, and those are different years. What's going on? I mean, Boots is definitely, yeah. They did add Boats. They did add Boats. That's's true you're not wrong about the boats you don't have boats come on that's true I actually don't have two

it's funny my neighbors have a boat I do not have a boat because I'm a regular person who doesn't live next to a lake oh 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 i i developed a desire to have a boat last year because i yeah yeah i was in spain and i met a spanish guy with a boat

and that does seem like the life but but that's neither here nor there. You're a horrible descent into turning into some sort of Hemingway adjacent character. Yeah. Just, just, I mean, it is,

it is nice to be drunk on a boat. Um, it's also very expensive to have a boat, so maybe I'll get drunk on an inflatable raft instead. Yeah. I just get a sunfish and just flip it over every 30 seconds. Um, the working man's boat. Yeah. The working man's boat.

Yeah, the working man's boat. But yeah, and so from there, I kind of, what has happened is, unsurprisingly, that, you know, board games are actually kind of a somewhat demographic art form compared to video games because all you really need is some paper. Like, really, that's all you need. You need some paper, and you can make a board game.

If you have tabletop simulator, you just need tabletop simulator. You're already done. And then you just need to be able to bully people into playtesting your game. And that's really the hard part. So this means that people will iterate on things pretty quickly. It's a very fan fiction environment. People will iterate rather quickly on your ideas and develop them further. And so I looked through some of the other games that I've played and liked. And I actually tend

to like pretty much all the games that I studied. Splendor is one that is very fun, very casual, very easy. And it just has this art that bugs me. this art that really bugs me, where it's about being a gem trader. And it very much seems to be based on Renaissance Italy or Renaissance Antwerp. And for some reason, you don't see people in mines. It's very weird. There will be pictures of mines. It's like, OK, you bought this emerald mine. And there's nobody there, which is very weird. All of the, there'll be pictures of mines. It's like, okay, you bought this emerald mine. And there's like nobody there, which is very weird

because I have seen pictures of pre-industrial. I've seen pictures of mines from the 1980s, 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. You only start seeing mining become

capital intensive 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

sorting the gems. So they're skipping the the slavery part yeah exactly exactly the part they are skipping yeah yeah 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 gem yeah yeah yeah you're going straight to you know i've you know, I've got my pretty purple cell phone, you know, and the part where, you know, there was, you know, pretty much a war in the Congo fought over it. And then they had to install suicide nets in China. It gets completely

glossed over and all that stuff goes into this phone. uh you know to me it's just kind of a necessary hunk of plastic and metal for surviving in america um and i i you know i'm not entirely i don't want to be too hard on the designers here it's very easy 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 casual game and like be confronted with slavery? Uh, but at the same time, like.

But make the game about something else. Yeah. You, you really tried 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 involves slavery. Well, I mean, there are, and there are people who do that, you know, it's like not that hard to find people making games about theme parks.

Or haunted houses. Haunted houses. Or weird utopian arcologies and stuff like that. People make these things. But this colonialism keeps on coming back. And part of that is, I guess, 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 shereen uh capitalism uh it's time for an ad break welcome i'm danny thrill won't you join me at the fire and dare enter

Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern-day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Shadows

as part of my Cultura podcast network, available on the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you get your podcasts. And there's still more capitalism but that'll be more capitalism that's true that's true different capitalism yeah right now we're we're in like more early capitalism uh and uh so the the the game that like really stuck in my crawl 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. It's a game called Mombasa.

And Mombasa 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. And the ways in which the mechanics of this game are messed up, 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 just be like, yeah, cool. So I still have to admit that this is 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 liberal economists fucking love talking about. Great thing to do with a game. But the way you make your company valuable is like, it's pillaging Africa. Like, it's pillaging Africa and 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. It has diamonds that you can pick up.

It has, like, there are books, which it's unclear if that represents, like, you write an adventure novel, like King Solomon's Mines, 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. And what always struck me as so weird is that the territory is just, when you enter the

territory, you just take everything. You just pillage it. It's not like territory that you hold and really make more productive. You don't develop it. At least it's honest about that. To a certain extent, at least it's honest that the Europeans were lying about any of that development, civilizing mission shit.

They were there to steal. But what is so, so weird to me about it is that there's no resistance. There's no risk to expanding across a continent. There's no negotiation. The only other characters at all are the other players,

the other Europeans. You know, this continent that at the time had hundreds of millions of people, many of whom had legitimate kingdoms that in some parts of Africa had full gunpowder militaries, just totally glossed over. Just totally not mechanically represented at all.

Well, it's like they're portraying the only future that is possible. You know what I mean? This is how you become a civilization. There's no other... There's one path. There is one path to being a civilization, and it does involve a lot of taking other people's shit, to be fair. No, I said that ironically, Robert.

I know. I said in their mind, there is one path. Oh, yeah. Yes. I do feel like I've got to read this out from the rulebook because it was like so eye-popping to me. This is from the rulebook. This is the start of the rulebook, the opening. Quote,

In Mombasa, players acquire shares of chartered companies based in Mombasa, Cape Town, St. Louis, and Cairo and spread their trading paths 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 chapter in human history, global colonialism. This period lasted roughly from the 15th century to the middle of the 20th century and is associated with exploitation and slavery. Although Mombasa is loosely set within this time frame, it is not a historical simulation. It is a strategy game with an economic focus that roughly refers to historical categories

and places them in a fictional setting. 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 1800 to present by richard j reed uh end quote so they fucking knew like they fucking knew that this was some evil evil shit that they have made into a game and they want you to know that they knew that you knew that you were going to call them out 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 by the way

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 bizarre. And how many people even read this stuff? Like, generously, one person out of every four reads the rulebook when you're in a board game. Like, very generously.

Like, I'm just a huge nerd who likes reading this stuff. And I just, like, read this and 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 10 seconds

you realize like oh we're just like subjugating and massacring people but it's also like the the art style is like themed off of candyland or some sort of shit like maybe but even then you're probably more likely to just get people enjoying it unironically 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 is 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 monopoly yeah well monopoly for example and i mean i was going to take a slight turn away from board games uh i grew up with uh redwall books. Oh, gosh, yes. Yeah, the Redwall books,

even though stoats are not a race of people in real life, they are a type of weasel, holy shit, those books managed to be incredibly racist. It really is racist against different types of weasel, but they portray this very cutesy world of uh you know animals you know mice and badgers and stuff and they're just committing genocide left and right and it's just portrayed as like totally okay it's just like someone who has no idea what you're talking about this is crazy yeah these are popular children's series in like the 80s and 90s yeah no

i i read these books it was like yeah it's like you flip back and forth between like yeah here is martin the mouse and he's a 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 the redwall feast bot by the way is like a really good twitter follow uh where it just posts excerpts from the food descriptions. Those are incredible. But the reason why I kind of made that turn is that one of the games I considered that I actually really liked is something of an anti-colonial game called Root. And this is part of what I was kind of witnessing as I was studying these. There is a bit of a discourse, a bit of a development over

time. And two of the games that I highlighted, Root and Spirit Island, are fairly anti-colonial. And Root is a kind of horrifying game, but with very cutesy appearances. You play as mice and and cats and birds. The birds are horrifying aristocrats. You're like a feudal, militaristic dictatorship. The cats are trying to turn the entire forest into a giant woodcutting factory and subjugate everybody else under the boot heel of industrial capitalism. You can play as just the concept of revolution.

There's a woodland alliance who win the game by provoking revolts of the civilian population to overthrow the other two. It's very weird. It's a very violent game by comparison. It's very hard to eliminate a player in it, but it was kind of interesting to me to see that you can do...

It's kind of almost the exact opposite, where it's just like... It doesn't have... It has this very obviously horrifying and graphically violent mechanics. You know, revolutions and subjugation. But with like... The characters look cute. revolutions and subjugation. But the characters look cute.

All the character art is very cute. You've got little mice making punji traps and stuff in the artwork. It's very odd. I kind of jumped a little bit ahead here, but I don't know that we need to go through everything I did in this paper. That's a little bit ahead here, but I don't know that we need to go through everything I did in this paper. That's a little bit boring. And also, we need to leave things for the readers. And actually, Root is a little bit based on a game series

that I think would be particularly appealing to Robert and possibly the listeners. There's a company called GMT Games. Has anybody else heard of them? These guys are interesting. Continue. No, I haven't heard of these guys. GMT Games make games

like Cuba Libre, a four-player asymmetric warfare about the Cuban Revolution. Oh boy, that could go a couple of ways. Yes, yes. I won once as the Mafia, which was an interesting side of ways. Yes, yes. Multiple endings. I won once as the Mafia, which was an interesting side to play.

Oh, nice. An interesting series of interests to have. You know, I could not build an army for shit. I just had to count on the fact that other people didn't think it was worth destroying casinos because they were too busy trying to stamp out revolutionaries.

Or they were revolutionaries trying to stamp out revolutionaries. Or they were revolutionaries trying to stamp out fascists. And it was a... They're a very... The reason why I think they're a very weird company is that they have games like Cuvée Libre, Twilight Struggle, A Distant Plane, which is about the war in Afghanistan.

But they also are... These guys are like Quantico psychos. They actually... They are the guys who make the actual for real war games that the Pentagon uses. 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 shit. I'm talking about like border patrol feds or or shit i'm talking like uh fucking cia motherfuckers yeah the capital f feds yeah isn't the cia's like training facility there yes and i think the fbi also has a facility in quantico capital f feds yeah yeah agents all the agents are there yeah yeah don't think of

like like your osha inspectors here yeah yeah i mean look and 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 shit you know yeah i will say though if if we gave osha like cia powers the world would be an enormously better place i think we hand them the nukes i think we hand them the nukes and a mandate to use them if security 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 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. Hence the deployment of our nation's nuclear assets. Do you know what else is collective punishment? Capitalism? Yes. Listening to ads.

Yeah. So let's all endure it together. Welcome. I'm Danny Thrill. Won't you join me at the fire and dare enter? Nocturnum, Tales from the Shadows, presented by iHeart and Sonora. An anthology of modern day horror stories inspired by the legends of Latin America. From ghastly encounters with shapeshifters,

to bone-chilling brushes with supernatural creatures. I know you. Take a trip and experience the horrors that have haunted Latin America since the beginning of time. Listen to Nocturnal Tales from the Sh as part of my cultura podcast network available on the iheart radio app apple podcast or wherever you get your podcast oh we've been collectively punished. Solidarity to all of us who must endure advertising. Yes. But yes, I have been rambling a lot.

And yeah, like I said, I find this question of who gets to be an agent to be very important. Who gets to be a player? Who is even given the choice of winning? You know, if you're not a player, you're completely ridden off from the possibility of ever winning. And, you know, this is something that, like, 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? debates around this. Civilization is an infamous one for this. Who even gets to be a civilization?

Why are some civilizations civilizations and some city-states and some barbarians? And it does shape your thinking. Games are very valuable for how they create empathy. A game that can really immerse you, can really teach you a lot of very creative and powerful empathy for groups of people that you might never have the chance to interact with. And then when you keep on creating games that ask you to empathize with the colonizers...

Yeah, you think it's just the normal way of things. This is what happens. This is the succession of events that leads to humans. Yeah. This is a succession of events that leads to humans. Those who do not participate simply die out. This is adaptation. So it's like low-key brainwashing. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it is. It is. And I mean, the same could be said of all culture. But I think it's worth being informed and critical consumers. And, I mean, I actually do, you know, I actually, you know, I know you want this to be an uplifting episode,

and I'm going to be optimistic here. I, you know, it's not just that we're talking about stuff where the stakes are not literal deaths. The stakes are, you know, getting mad at your friends over a board game. But also, I do think that we have seen positive development of people looking at these games. There's a game developer who said about some of the games he was playing, what do the locals think about these colonizers?

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 that even just through the sheer iteration of somebody looking at a game like Settlers of Catan and going, well, how can I do this differently? You know, I can't just release the same game every single year. I need to do something new.

And even just the simple one of just reversing who is the players. Simple enough. Even that has been creating some iteration and some additional complexity, which has caused people, I have seen people go back and reexamine, even if they're not people who have any sort of education, any sort of formal education in anthropology or post-colonial theory. They'll look at like, oh yeah, I was playing this game where you're

the colonized, and I played this other game where they reversed the roles and I was like, I was the bad guys earlier. Yeah. I mean, I think portraying the other side and maybe winning means you kick them out or destroy them.

I would like to see that play out versus the alternative. That is Spirit Island. That is what Spirit Island is. The players cooperate to destroy the colonizers or to terrorize them into abandoning the island. Weird game. Weird game. I think there's some good execution in there

and I've got some criticisms of it. It is my favorite, but it does do some things a little bit patronizing. But yeah, that's something I think is worth seeing. And I think it's something that, admittedly, maybe I just really enjoy this space of the world, because if you look at very mainstream video games, for example, you get kind of bored of the same five games get released every year.

Give me some texture. Give me something new. Also, I think that I think that there's some cause for optimism for people critically examining the art that they're building, the art that they're consuming, and the art that they're creating. 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 uh the people living in the favela while call of Duty is happening on in the background? Just counting on the randomness of that happening. Might not be as fast as people want. I wish. I wish. Oh, yeah. There was a game called, I think it was called

This is War? Maybe. Oh, it was called This War of Mine. That's what it was. That's a good game. That's a really well done game. Yeah. I'm excited to see the future of all this stuff and excited to see where people go with this.

Well, Chris, I have a question. Why did you decide to even bring on Kyle? What is it about this topic that you think is prevalent today? What can we take away from this well i think i don't know i i think one of the things that i got was reading the article is about like one of the ways like what one of the things you see in how settler colonialism gets perpetuated and I think why am I now forgetting the name of the

yeah decolonization is not a metaphor it 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 the settler move to innocence and that strikes me as like the sort of is the the settler move to innocence and that strikes me

as like the sort of it's the kind of like 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 the way you break that and then the way you start to get actually that actually looks like decolonization 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 could actually like be very helpful because you know like most and most mostly like 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 sphere 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 sailors of katana 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 like famous territory and well because yeah they present it as default innocence and also just like exciting to there's no backstory

to how you get the wood or the ore 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 deem that as normal. so broadly, you know, that 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, you know, from, you know, cowboy movies to just like the way the New York Times will write about who

owns land and who has a viable claim on owning a piece of land. All of that, we get reinforced in our fiction and our non-fiction every day. I guess, again, that's part of why I was drawn to board games in particular for this because it's so transparent.

It's so transparent how all the propaganda works. It's so transparent how all the propaganda works. It's not... There's no movie magic. Yeah. The rules are all there. It's pretty much... I don't know. But yeah,

you sympathized with... You empathized with the colonizer because they're who you are. Yeah, you want to win! You want to win! You want to win. You want to win. I'm very competitive. You want to win.

And the people who made it get to have this kind of discourse, this kind of badge of like, oh, yeah, we made the friendly board game. They're comparing themselves to making Monopoly, where there's like a 50-50 chance of a divorce happening every time somebody finishes a game of Monopoly. And they get to portray themselves as the nice ones and it's like yeah, we're the nice ones because

all the people who we're being mean to don't get a voice at all. I just can't believe we made a game about paying rent. I really cannot believe that. Do you know the history of it? Because it's very funny. I skimmed in your article 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 Landlord's Game by Elizabeth Maggie. She was a Georgist activist in the early 20th

century. It blows my mind. Fucking Georgism. I mean, Monopoly being the most relevant contribution of Georgism to world history is somehow incredibly fitting. That's all I took away from it.

Brutal. The number one selling economics book of American history that's all I took away from it brutal the number one selling economics book of American history reduced to a very bad board game I can't say it's unfair and I guess that's really what I've got I think it's still very valuable

to be a critical consumer and Mombasa maybe went over the line but for the most part these games haven't ruined my ability be a critical consumer. Mombasa maybe went over the line, but for the most part these games haven't ruined my ability to enjoy them. If my friends wanted to play a game of Settlers of Catan, they might just get an annoying lecture from me. But they're going to get an annoying lecture from me anyway. It just would be about something else.

It's like any media. It's like film, TV, or whatever. You're going to realize eventually that you should be conscious of what you're consuming. I'll still get into arguments about all of those things except for podcasts people should blindly consume our podcast oh I mean yes podcasts are the only

true proletarian art form that's right as Karl Marx said listen to this podcast like and subscribe share us on Facebook. And then eventually one day podcast will wither away and abolish itself. Yeah, that's right. That's right.

That's right. Classic Marxist podcast theory. That's right. That's right. Is that the episode? Well, Kyle, where do people find you? Yes. I personally am notoriously hard people find you? Yes. I personally am

notoriously hard to find on the internet, being a person who doesn't have any social media whatsoever. Good on you. Absolutely the right call. I have been off of Twitter for a couple of days. I'm taking a break. And best decision you could make. Get away from all of it.

Our publication is at strangematters.coop. We worked hard to get that.coop registration. We just published a couple days ago Love as a Verb, an article reviewing and expanding the possibilities of Bell Hook's

2000 book All About Love, which is worth reading, both the review and the book. Yeah, I actually just finished it four hours ago. Oh, yeah, I read it for the first time during the pandemic. It was... It's an enlightening read. We tend to have a lot of

really insane economic stuff. If you want to read some truly insane shit about money, about where money comes from and what money is and what we can do about money, we've, oh boy,

we've got you covered. We have a profile of Robert where we have rendered him as Baron Munchausenen very flatteringly. Oh, yes. A really wonderful review of three different cyberpunk works by the wonderful

anti-fascist author Elizabeth Sandifer. Yeah, so please come check us out at strangematters.coop. We are taking new writers all the time, and we've got submission guidelines on there. And if you want to personally send me hate mail for besmirching the good honor of Settlers of Catan, I can be reached at kyle at strangematters.coop.

Yeah. Oh, and we do have a Twitter for the company. What's the Twitter for the company? It is strange underscore matters. Perfect. Thanks, Kyle. Check out Strange Matters. Contribute to their fundraiser. I can't

recommend doing anything on Twitter, so I simply show up. Thank you for having me on again. It was a lovely time. Thank you for coming. Again, as with every episode go with christ it could happen here is a production of cool zone media for more podcasts from cool zone media visit our website coolzonemedia.com or check us out on the iheart radio app apple podcasts or wherever

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