There’s an anecdote that I remember sifting through when I was doing games-related research. The story is purported to describe an event near the American revolution or civil war, and may have involved a president. Or someone on their way to the presidency. Or simply powerful and ambitious. Anyway, you get the idea. So our hero—or proto-hero—is playing cards with a man with whom he’s supposed to do a deal the next day. It’s a friendly game, and our semi-anonymous protagonist (seriously, if the story seems familiar to you, please tell me), he catches his buddy cheating. Buddy laughs it off, and all seems good.
But the next day, when the buddy goes to the business office to do the deal, our hero says, “Nope. Deal’s off.”
“Why?”
“You’re a cheat.”
“Dude,” buddy says (or the 18th or 19th century equivalent of “dude”), “It was just a card game. A friendly one at that. Who cares?”
“Just so. If you were willing to cheat me when nothing mattered, I can only imagine what you’d do when the stakes were real.”
Nice story, right? But what in the name of Hoyle does this have to do with this project?
Play games aren’t art. They don’t ask you to explore or reveal your deepest self or demand your penetrating insight into the human condition. But games do ask you to test yourself against others, to build a shared narrative space in which the game takes place. In that space, during that test, you reveal a great deal about yourself. Are you willing to take risks? Push your luck? Do you hold back until the last minute? Are you hyper-competitive? Do you simply want to explore how the rules interact?
A lot of different ways to play.
And then there’s the meta-game. And for this you might want to consider poker. Generally speaking, poker’s not that interesting a game. You make some choices based on odds, but there’s not a lot of strategy beyond that. You can’t develop a resource engine, deploy workers, wait for an opening in the pawns. The game exists between the players above the cards. Betting, bluffing, reading the other person across the table. Or beside you. And hope they’re not peaking at your cards like I used to do with my little brother when we played Clue back when we were children. You can develop a poker face, but even that practice reveals something about you, not least is that you were willing to put in the work to develop a poker face.
So as this month of gaming goes on, I’m interested to see how Dana and I shift our understandings of each other. Other people will come and go as the projects progresses (living in town? want to stop by? give us a ring or an email), but the greatest number of games will be between Dana and me. Even the willingness to play will be something to track and may well reveal something about each of us.
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