A Tale of Two Clashes of Civilizations -- Twilight Struggle vs. Labyrinth: The War on Terror

What does it mean for a work of art to portray history? For a narrative medium like a novel or a film, the answer may feel obvious. The job of a good work of historical fiction is first and foremost to recreate for the reader or viewer what really happened. If the characters include actual historical figures, their actions must adhere to established fact and their thoughts and motivations must reflect what is understood of their personality. If fictional characters are created, they must be the type of people who could reasonably have lived in that place at that time, and their actions must not conflict with what is known about true historical events, though they may recontextualize and weave themselves around them. The text must be free of anachronisms and counterfactuals. But more than anything, a work of historical fiction must feel like real history, like it is opening up a window into the past. (Of course once you go beneath the surface, deep waters lurk; whose version of history are we actually portraying? After all, history is written by the victors...) However, when the medium in question is that of games or interactive fiction, things change a little bit. Playing a game involves making choices, and choices imply that there are multiple possible outcomes. Thus, when people play historical games, they are not just along for the ride, viewing the unfolding story from the perspective of already knowing how things turned out in the end. They are in the driver's seat; they are living history, and making the decisions that determine what kind of history actually gets made. Therefore, all historical games are inherently works of alternate history, a method of exploring the forces of history through the lens of process.

I am of course playing the dirty pinko commies. I've established a strong presence in Europe and the Middle East, but the Land of the Free is sneaking up on me in the third world.

Twilight Struggle (all screenshots from the PC version) is a grand strategy board game in which players recreate the epic Cold War between the forces of liberal capitalist democracy, as championed by the USA, and the ideology of revolutionary communism that birthed the USSR. The game is played on a world map of interconnected countries, the network terminating in each of the two clashing superpowers. The players compete for control of these countries by building their influence points to a margin exceeding a certain threshold of stability. Each player has a hand of cards which have both an "ops" value and an associated historical event. Play proceeds through either spending those points for defined game actions or triggering the events, which have unique mechanical benefits. However, if a player uses an event card belonging to the opposing player for ops, they must allow their opponent to gain the benefit of the event, leading to a risky and calculating game of cat and mouse. Players may spread their influence slowly but peacefully, or they may take an aggressive posture, launching coups d'état to rapidly shift the balance in their favour. However, doing so may degrade the DEFCON level, reducing your options and making such dirty tricks less desirable, and if it is reduced from five to one the world ends in nuclear apocalypse (technically the player that triggered Mutual Assured Destruction loses, but in a truer sense, there is no winner). They may also compete for scientific and technological dominance in the space race. Players score victory points when cards are played determining the balance of power on each individual continent, with a net score of 20 or the higher score at the end of three phases of the war winning.

Making an aggressive move. I might have been better advised to headline Quagmire to bog the US down and save this card for its high ops value.

Twilight Struggle has a well-deserved reputation as a stellar example of a perfect marriage of mechanics and theme, of using design itself to complement and communicate story and really make you feel as if you're living out the events you're involved in. The slow, cautious war of propaganda, diplomacy, and military brinksmanship shines through in the mechanic of grappling over abstract "influence" and "control", while the possibility of a region scoring at any time demands careful attention to maintaining supremacy on multiple fronts and guessing your opponent's intentions. There is a wealth of real historical information encoded in the event mechanics and the ideological map of cultural affinities and important battlegrounds, but the real meat of the game is in the feeling it evokes of being the men in the War Room, moving little pieces on a worldwide chessboard and scrambling to react to events beyond their control while gambling for the highest stakes imaginable. Winning and losing is usually an abstract matter of scoring points, but this is where historical context comes in; we know what a US victory looks like -- the Soviet economic and political system imploding, Chicago School ideologues going in to impose radical neoliberal "shock therapy", and Russia ending up as a pseudo-democratic kleptocracy ruled by a former KGB officer. And we can easily enough conjure to mind Soviet victory: the overthrow of capitalism by Marxism-Leninism and the spread of the "evil empire" to every corner of the globe.

Attempting a coup in South Korea. Little is said about the political administration I will raise up, or the oppressed masses who surely fought for my cause.

And of course, while it hews closely to real history, Twilight Struggle is a sandbox for creating a counterfactual history of the Cold War. In the tutorial game for the PC version, the USSR attempts a coup in France, which to the best of my knowledge never actually happened. What if Canada went red? What if the ideological struggle in the third world were determinative of victory? What if Fidel Castro never overthrew the Cuban government? Things are necessarily highly abstracted from a narrative based in anyone's actual lived experience, but what the waxing and waning of such ideological regimes as the superpowers struggle for dominance would mean for the people on the ground can certainly be imagined. The players dance on the edge of Armageddon, carefully building small advantages to a tipping point, all while their citizens learn to duck and cover and pray that somehow this too shall pass. Though you are not perfectly reenacting the sequences of actual history, you are gaining some insight into what it must have been like, what it must have felt like, to live through such precarious and politically vertiginous times.

I take an absolute beating in Africa. I guess McDonald's and washing machines are a more enticing inducement than proletarian anticolonial solidarity.

One interesting mechanical note about Twilight Struggle, however, is its relative lack of attention to the actual ideological content of the political forces the two players are manipulating. Though the texture of the events presents different faces, and it is said that specifics of the event rules give the Soviet player an early-game advantage and the US player a late-game advantage, the gameplay rules for the two combatants are almost exactly the same. The tactics through which their political leaders are trying to drive events are what's important, the slow tug-of-war over institutions of power and ideological influence. The divergent methods through which the combatants' political and economic systems operated has no influence on which of them will win. It doesn't ultimately matter much whether you're a bourgeois parasite or a rabble-rousing Bolshevik, whether you believe in central planning or the invisible hand of the free market, whether you determine your leadership through contested elections or through diktat from the Party elite. All that ultimately matters is power.

Back In The Saddle

 Well, it certainly has been a long time, hasn't it? That's right; A Winner Is You is back, and hopefully better than ever! But before we jump back in to the philosophical and sociological examination of games, a quick word about the long hiatus.

Why, after a burst of activity in 2020, did the pace of articles on this blog slow down and then stop altogether? The short answer is, I was starting to feel like playing games was work, and thus to avoid doing it. This is the danger when one tries to monetize one's hobbies. I also got enmeshed in the sinister psychological tendrils of MTG Arena, and spent almost all of my gaming time for several years grinding my daily quests, neglecting the many other games competing for my attention, games which it would require additional cognitive load to git gud at. I fell into a hole from which it was difficult to climb out.

However, as soon as I started playing other games again I started getting ideas for new articles, and hearing the siren call of articles imagined but yet unwritten. So I am tentatively starting the blog up again; I still feel like the work is valuable, even if it has not yet reached a wide audience. I also feel that a couple years of distance have made my writing better and my analysis more thorough, so I'm hoping that in the future the quality of articles improves.

In that vein, I am tentatively committing to one article a month, but I am not going to let myself get into the kind of rut I did before; I will be writing articles as and when the motivation strikes me. I have two ready to go already and a few more in the pipe, but I can't promise to keep a consistent schedule. I have a lot of time commitments, and although I enjoy this work, it is work, and I have a limited number of spoons available. So if you're willing to be patient with me, come on back and hopefully we can engage in some discourse about games together!

You Got Your Card Game in my CRPG! -- Slay the Spire

If you're at all into the PC gaming scene, you've probably heard of Slay the Spire. This indie darling is one of those rare breed of games innovative enough to spawn a whole new subgenre of gaming: the roguelike deckbuilder; a game that almost immediately attracted imitations and riffs. And it did it in an interesting way: by raiding the unique innovations of tabletop gaming and making them its own.

Now, the importation of tabletop games into the world of computers is nothing new. Tic-tac-toe was among the first-ever games programmed on a computer, and every major tabletop game from chess to Monopoly to Catan has been reimplemented in digital form. Attempts to port the OG tabletop roleplaying game, our hallowed mother Dungeons & Dragons, birthed the immensely successful genre of the computer RPG (which itself was probably instrumental in inspiring the move of TTRPG design philosophy away from simulationism and toward the aspect of improvisational storytelling that a purely computerized experience can't yet replicate -- but that's another article...) Even physical sports were an early subject of computer games, though of necessity the approximations of the complex real-world physics and biology exploited by athletes were at best crude and limited. But Slay the Spire did something particularly novel: rather than merely copying an existing physical game, or building on it, or attempting to mimic an inherently physical process with computer graphics and sound, it remixed and reimagined a tabletop game mechanic in a way that maintained something of its inherently physical quality while expanding the possibility space of that mechanic in ways that only a computerized game can accomplish.

But let's back up for a second. Computers are one thing; physical chessboards and decks of cards are something very different. What is it that allows such productive cross-fertilization between the world of the tabletop and the world of pure information? How is it that the same game can exist in both media, and that game concepts from one media can so fluidly move to another?

Another doomed Ironclad sets out to conquer the dungeon. Good games present the player with interesting, consequential choices.

To answer this, we're going to need to start with a little basic ludology. What is a game? What is it that makes a game what it is? This is an infamously difficult question to answer; some of the foundational texts of game studies were attempts to answer it, and it is even the subject of a famous philosophical thought experiment intended to demonstrate the impossibility of purely formal definitions. But of course academic discourse runs on definitions, so let's have a go anyway. If games are a form of art (a question that is itself contentious, though for the purpose of a blog like this I feel like it can be safely assumed), one way to go at it is to ask what defines them as an artistic medium, and I think the key there is an examination of how each different artistic medium is experienced. The literary arts are experienced by reading, the musical arts by listening, the visual arts by looking, the theatrical arts by watching (which might be considered a different process); dance, insofar as one participates in it, is experienced by moving, and one might stretch a bit and say that the gustatory arts (cooking and other methods of food preparation) are experienced by smelling and tasting. But a game is something that is necessarily experienced by playing.

Building my Ironclad's deck. Do I go for a powerful multi-attack, enhance the cards I already have, or debuff my enemies to make future attacks more potent?

Play is of course something that is itself difficult to define, but a classic ludological angle is that play takes place in a metaphorical "magic circle" in which some of the everyday rules of society are replaced with a new set of rules that those who engage in the game agree to follow. While playing chess, one piece must be moved only in one way, a different piece in another. When playing Magic: The Gathering, there are intricate rules regarding what pieces of printed cardboard one may or may not assemble into a deck before one even begins a match. In an athletic sport, physically hitting other players in certain ways may be allowed, while other ways may be called "fouls" and incur penalties. Even in pure make-believe or the calvinball of impromptu children's play, there are rules, fluid and malleable though they may be. The the act of play is the act of following rules, not the rules of everyday society but a set of arbitrary rules which have been deliberately designed to produce a certain kind of experience. It is the act of making choices within the possibility space of what the rules allow, and of reacting to the choices of others within the constraints of the rules one has imposed on oneself. Thus, it is said in ludology that the defining feature of games is interactivity. Most forms of art are pretty passive, although of course the brain is always actively interpreting what it is passively experiencing, but playing a game requires the player to take action, to actively manipulate the game state, and usually to make choices under a condition of constraint.

"Calvinball". Children instinctively create magic circles as part of the process of learning through play.   Copyright 1986 by Bill Watterson; used under fair dealing.

Art forms can also be defined in terms of their building blocks, the fundamental units of which a piece is composed. The fundamental unit of a novel is the word; the fundamental unit of a movie is the frame; the fundamental unit of a visual image might be the pixel or the brush-stroke. In this paradigm, the fundamental unit of a game is the ludeme, an abstract object which might be thought of as an atomic piece of rules. The pawn is a ludeme, and the fact that a a pawn's movement is limited, except under certain special circumstances, to one square forward is also a ludeme, as are the concept of squares and the number and configuration of squares that make up a chessboard. Given these definitions, it becomes easier to see how a game as an abstract system of rules can transcend the bounds of physics and reconfigure itself from the board and card to the computer screen. A game may incorporate artistic elements of many kinds, be they lexical, visual, tactile, or auditory (though few if any games incorporate taste or smell), but none of these are fundamental to what a game is. Every such element of a game may be changed, but as long as the rules themselves remain the same, it is still the same game (and games are in fact quite regularly "reskinned" in this way). Physical tokens can become images on a screen, but if the same rules are being followed, you are playing the same game. This is also what allowed games to take a quantum leap in complexity when people started using computers to make them. Computers are machines the entire purpose of which is to follow rules, so using them to make and play games is as natural a fit as any technological development in art history. Physical tabletop games or sports are limited in complexity by the ability of human minds to comprehend and execute the ruleset. With the computer taking on the task of automatic execution and enforcement of the rules, the possible complexity of game rulesets skyrocketed. It even became possible to program sophisticated rules for the simulation of other players, doing away with the necessity to play the game with other people and greatly expanding the possibility for solitaire game experiences, and even to make the game itself so complex as to be considered an opponent in its own right.

This run I'm going in for big attacks and cards that give extra energy to play more of them per turn. Time will tell if this is a winning strategy.

The rules of a game, the sets of ludemes it employs and the ways in which they interact to create the overall product, are generally knows within game design and game studies as "mechanics". Games are an art form based in mechanics, and so game genres are typically defined in mechanical terms. Now for all its innovation, Slay the Spire's groundbreaking and genre-defining traits are a combination of aspects from two already-existing genres, one of them taken from computer gaming and one taken from tabletop gaming. It's right there in the name: roguelike deckbuilder; it's a hybrid of the genre of games known as roguelikes and the genre of games known as deckbuilders. To understand, then, what is so unique and unprecedented about Slay the Spire, we now need to ground ourselves in an understanding of what mechanical identities define these genres, what genre conventions they typically fulfil. Roguelikes are themselves a genre inspired by tabletop games, initially a subset of computer RPGs, though more recent takes have expanded the philosophy of the roguelike into new mechanical territory. The ur-text of the genre is obviously Rogue, a relatively simple game in which the player explores a dungeon and engages in turn-based combat with fantasy monsters in a quest for loot and experience. The fundamental innovation of Rogue itself, the novelty which made it the founder of its own subgenre, was the fact that the dungeon one explored was randomly and procedurally generated. Rather than being met with a dungeon explicitly designed by the game's creator, every time a player starts a game of Rogue they are met with a new dungeon with a unique layout, a unique set of monsters and items; they must adapt on the fly to the unique challenges that particular run offers. Another aspect of Rogue that became important to the mechanical identity of the genre that would become eponymous with it was the fact that once your character died, there was no going back, no "save scumming" and attempting to get a better outcome; the end was the end, and when the game was started anew, a new unique hero and a new unique dungeon were created, a mechanic that is now known as "permadeath". One does not learn to play Rogue, or any roguelike, by attempting the same process over and over until one succeeds as in many other kinds of video game. Instead, the player must learn how the underlying system works, and use their strategic skills and understanding of those systems to survive and triumph.

Rogue -- the game that birthed a thousand nails-hard die-a-thons.

Now, on to deckbuilders. The deck of cards has a long history as a game piece, a technology for creating complex random outcomes within a certain set of combinatorial possibilities. Probably thousands of games have been implemented on a handful of multipurpose card decks, and new games started incorporating custom decks as printing technology became more sophisticated and less expensive. A revolution in game design occurred with the release of Magic: The Gathering, the first collectable card game, in which individual cards each containing their own set of ludemes from a large and ever-widening pool could be selected and combined by the player into a unique deck of one's own creation, making the player themself a partner in the game design process. But MTG in itself was not a "deckbuilder" as such. The honour of spawning this particular subgenre goes to Dominion, which innovated on the mechanic of building a unique deck with which one plays the game by bounding it and making it an active process within the gameplay itself. While one starts a game of Dominion with a generic deck of preselected cards, one is then presented in the process of play with a random assortment of cards which one may purchase and incorporate into their deck, as well as the opportunity to remove cards that one doesn't want. Through multiple hands from one's growing and repeatedly-shuffled deck, one combines cards to create an overall strategy for winning the game, a strategy that is unique to each playthrough while also responding to the overall system by which the deck is built and the game won. Perhaps now it becomes apparent in hindsight why the mechanics of deckbuilders and the mechanics of roguelikes are so compatible.

Dominion. I didn't buy enough money in the early game, and thus suffered when my opponent started monopolizing the highest-scoring estates.

Thematically, Slay the Spire tells a simple story that is immediately familiar, though of course it is told with its own lore and nuance; a mysterious eldritch being is trapped in the bottom of a dungeon, and sends an infinite series of hapless champions up through that dungeon in an attempt to free itself. The gameplay is composed primarily of turn-based combat of a kind that will be familiar from many a CRPG; the player is given a set of moves to execute in an attempt to overcome an assortment of programmatic enemies. Some moves deal damage, some block enemy attacks, and some apply buffs or debuffs which give the player a future advantage. But the special sauce of Slay the Spire is the fact that your moveset is formatted not as a static menu or as skills with a cooldown as in most such games, but as a deck of cards. Every turn in combat, you are dealt a random hand from this deck which defines your options for that turn. You can only use your most powerful attack if it comes up in your hand for that turn, and if you happen to draw nothing but blocks, well, looks like all you're doing that turn is blocking. Thus, a mechanical style of combat which can easily become stale and tedious is transformed into a set of strategic choices made with limited and random resources. Luckily, enemies telegraph their coming moves, allowing one to make such choices a little more optimally. And as you play through a run of Slay the Spire, you will be building your character's deck in the same way one does in a game of Dominion. Though loot from killing monsters includes the usual gold, potions, and magical relics, every combat won also offers a random choice of cards to add to your deck. Each card has its own advantages and disadvantages, its own mechanical effects, and just as in Dominion, you are building your deck as you play with a strategy as to how you are going to win the game; the mechanics of the cards combine synergistically in a way that is unique to every playthrough, and early choices will influence which cards one wished to obtain later, or whether indeed one wishes to take any of the offered cards at all, given that the addition of new cards which may not fit the strategy will make the deck larger, and thus make the cards that one most wishes to have in hand less likely to appear.

Spending my gold at the merchant. It's important to use the "card removal service" as often as possible.

Importantly, I think it's essential to the appeal of the genre that it maintains the metaphor of a physical deck of cards. There is no inherent reason that the moveset must be presented in this way, that the pieces of printed cardboard that inspired this mechanic could not be abstracted out of the picture. But a deck of cards is something familiar, something legible; almost anyone who has played any games at all knows how one works, and the concept of picking and choosing cards to build one from will also be familiar to those who have played Magic: The Gathering or similar games like Hearthstone, let alone specifically played Dominion or other games of its ilk. The new strategies involved in building a functional deck and successfully employing it in the new context of turn-based RPG combat are thus instinctively understood. But as a computer game, Slay the Spire can iterate on the concept far beyond what physical decks of cards and rulesets held within human minds allow. It can efficiently present you with a much larger pool of cards to choose from, and change the mechanical function of those cards on the fly. It can present you with a larger pool of randomized monsters, and automate the moves of those monsters, reducing the cognitive load of the player and allowing them to concentrate on the strategic choices the game offers. It can add things like relics and potions, a large pool of items which change the game in ways at least as important to your strategic build as the deck itself. It can track the details of your character between battles, and allow you to save your game so that the experience can extend itself until you either die and are sent back to square one or successfully slay the final boss and reach the game's win condition. It can do so much more with a simple deck of cards than something like Dominion ever could.

My strategy has worked out so far, but I'm in a bad state. Something tells me my quest will soon be over. Better luck next time...

And this is what I find ludologically and even philosophically interesting about Slay the Spire. It is a showcase of the way in which mechanics in games both transcend and are embodied in the physical media which are used to create them. There is now a physical tabletop game based on Slay the Spire, but in its digital incarnation it could not possibly be anything but a computer game. And yet its central metaphor is still so stubbornly physical, so obviously still of the world of the tabletop in the same way that the digital implementation of Dominion itself is, and in a way that is so necessary to its identity as a game that those who have followed in its footsteps have largely maintained the metaphor intact. For all that they are implemented in the infinitely malleable medium of cyberspace, a simple deck of cards is so central to Slay the Spire and the genre it has created that it is difficult to imagine how a roguelike deckbuilder would work were this physical object not represented in it -- though of course it needs only the imagination and artistic craft of another game designer to create a fresh take on the mechanics which might even end up spawning a new genre of its own. But if the roguelike deckbuilder were to be transformed in such a way that it no longer required the representation of a physical deck, something essential to the magic and novelty of the genre would be irretrievably lost. How can it be a deckbuilder if you're not building a deck? That is a question that only future generations of gamers and designers can answer.

Concept Is Real? -- Baba Is You

 (This article contains mild puzzle spoilers for Baba Is You. If you have not yet played the game, I encourage you in the strongest possible terms to do so.)

Baba Is You is a critically acclaimed and award-winning puzzle game with a very simple but revolutionary premise. I was introduced to it by a video by Game Maker's Toolkit which goes into a lot more depth, but here's the short version. It belongs to the genre of block-pushing puzzles; a cute pig-like creature, apparently named Baba, must push blocks around to reconfigure their environment until it is possible to make their way to an end-of-level goal. The masterful innovation in this formula is that the properties and relationships of the game-world objects are encoded in word blocks which can themselves be pushed and reconfigured. For instance, there are graphical objects recognizable as walls, a commonplace in such games, and then there are the words "WALL IS STOP", each word its own block, arranged as a sequence which forms a simple sentence. The walls, as the sentence implies, stop the player from moving. But if the word "STOP" is pushed aside, breaking the sentence apart, the walls can suddenly be moved through with ease. If another word, such as "WIN", is then made the object of the sentence, then the wall becomes the goal; touching a wall "wins" the level. And if you form the sentence "WALL IS YOU"... well, I'll leave you that to discover for yourself. Each puzzle in Baba Is You involves the manipulation of these sentences to give to or remove properties from objects in order to create a situation in which progress to the goal is possible. As the levels progress, the constituents of the sentences and their possible permutations become more complex and further-reaching, requiring you to more orthogonally bend your mind to deduce what manipulations of the game's reality are possible. The primary mechanic is literally to rewrite the game's mechanics, to break and reconfigure them to your own advantage.

Things are starting off simple enough as the game teaches us how things work around here.

As a puzzle game in which play with language is so fundamental an element, Baba Is You has some very interesting implications for the theory of language, and in particular for the way in which signifiers, the symbols combined and manipulated in linguistic acts, relate to the signified, or that which constitutes the meaning of the word. The obvious idea here is that the referent of the word is the object in the world that it describes. If I say the word "tree", I am referring to a physical tree that exists in reality. In Plato's famous phrase, language "carves nature at the joints". However, this view quickly becomes problematic. What if I am not referring to any particular, specific tree, but to trees in general? Is there some property in reality that gives a tree its tree-ness, that makes it a different kind of thing from, say, a shrub? Plato reserved this role for the "forms", actually-existing abstract non-physical objects whose properties in some way determine what things such as trees are like. But this view is not usually considered tenable for modern philosophers; it is typically asserted that the definition of a word is purely arbitrary, a human-created convention without a physical analogue. There is nothing that inherently makes one plant a tree and another a shrub other than humans deciding which is which. Further, what of words that refer to things that don't physically exist? What does the word "Superman" refer to? Is it just various portrayals of this character on the page and screen, or is there in some way a real Superman which one is describing when one uses the name? What about things like love, justice, or truth? If one does not subscribe to the doctrine of forms, it becomes very difficult to see what in the world these references can actually mean.

Something is missing here; we're going to have to get creative.

The theory of structuralism solves this problem by divorcing meaning from physical reality entirely. The signified of any given signifier is not an actually-exiting object, but rather a concept in the human mind. Communication is fundamentally a matter of allowing humans to solve problems, and the meaning of a sign is whatever it takes to get the job done. Further, structuralism posits that the concepts defined by words are not things in themselves at all, but exist purely as a negative, a differentiation from all of the other signs in the linguistic system. The purpose of a definition is not to include, but to exclude. A tree is a tree not by virtue of some essential tree-ness, but by virtue of not being a shrub, a herb, or a fungus. Some went even further; the formalists conceived language as a pure system such as mathematics or logic, a system which could theoretically be analyzed without reference to meaning at all. Fundamentally, this is a problem of intentionality -- the manner in which mental states "are about" things or properties of things. One might be an externalist, believing that mental states are about real things in the world, or an internalist, believing that mental states are only about that which is in the mind itself. This further has implications for ontology, the theory of what exists and how. Most people at least believe that physical reality actually exists, but if one is a structuralist or formalist and an internalist, it is not a difficult step to ontological idealism, the belief that the only things that really exist are mental states and ideas. And this is a step that few are willing to countenance.

A sudden, dizzying reimagining of what is possible; it won't be the last.

The world of Baba is You is fascinating in this sense because words are themselves physical objects which are physically manipulated. Each noun has a distinct game-object referent, and each verb has a distinct game-mechanical referent. This might lead us to think in an externalist, Platonist paradigm, but it must be noted that we know what these correspondences are only by reference to our out-of-game understanding of human language. We know what "WALL" refers to only because we know what walls look like, though it could be argued (absent genre conventions) that we know what "BABA" refers to only through the onscreen definitory phrase "BABA IS YOU". However, the ability to break up and re-form the sentences that define the relationships between these objects and properties means that in a sense, the definition of each word is arbitrary -- and even more than that, the definitions of words don't just represent reality, nor are they neutral with respect to reality, but in fact actually create that reality. Definition simply is reality, and vice versa. This is a delightful ambiguity between internalist and externalist, Platonist, structuralist, and formalist paradigms that calls every intuition and theory we have about language into question, and in so doing creates an expansive play space that questions the boundaries of what a game can be, and how the relationship between game, language, and reality should be bounded and defined. This is what makes Baba Is You one of the most philosophically interesting games I have ever played, and an absolute masterwork that radically expands the possibility space of its genre.

I Owe My Soul to the Hot Steam Core -- Frostpunk

Frostpunk is a resource management sim set in an alternate-universe Victorian era where radical climate change has lead to a new ice age. As civilization collapses into chaos amid hunger and mass death, parties of colonists have been sent out to the rich coal fields of the Arctic to build makeshift settlements huddled around massive steam-heat generators in a desperate bid to ensure the survival of the human race. (We'll just gloss over the utility of sending your last hope to the coldest place in the world when the climate is getting colder; games, as we well know here, operate according to their own internal logic.) As "Captain" of one of these settlements, you must provide your citizens with food, shelter, and most of all warmth, gather resources and build out a functioning city, research new technologies and decree new laws to adapt to the frozen hellscape, explore the wilderness to try and make contact with other cities, and make hard decisions in a situation where one wrong move can spell disaster.

As befits the timeline of the setting, Frostpunk is a decidedly industrial-revolution dystopia, and that doesn't just extend to the coal-powered steam cores and disturbingly gangly automatons. In most games like this, when you build some installation to provide you with a resource, it just keeps autonomously operating on its own recognizance; it is assumed that there are workers in there beavering away, but you don't really get to know them except perhaps as abstract and interchangeable citizens. In a way, this is a very feudalistic view of production. The peasant is attached to their workplace, and lives their entire life and dies doing the same job. But labour in Frostpunk is granular to a degree that I haven't encountered in any other game. Each worker in your settlement has a name, a face, a family, and their own wants and concerns. You must actively determine the staffing levels of almost every workplace, and many of the decisions you will make revolve around how to best employ your limited workforce and pool of skilled labour to fulfill your immediate needs while also making progress on your long-term goals. The Last City functions according to the rhythms of the factory time clock; workers work set shifts, and must be given time off for sleep, meals, and relaxation, making it paramount that you plan ahead to ensure you have enough coal on hand to feed the generator through the long, cold night.

It would be tempting to label this mechanical identity as distinctly capitalist. After all, the Victorian era was the height of unrestrained capitalism. But capitalism is tricky to portray in a video game, and the dogma that it creates the most productive civilization is far from Frostpunk's mind. There are no free markets or private property in capital in this world. Rather, it is the Captain who must decide who works where and when, how to most efficiently employ resources, what laws to decree and how to enforce them. The Last City is a planned economy from top to bottom. It could best be described as a communist state of the kind that existed under Stalin or Mao. Each works according to their ability, and each receives food, shelter, and medical care according to their needs.

However, your rule as proletarian dictator of this tiny worker's paradise is not ironclad or absolute. As in every real society, authority does not rule if the people do not consent to be ruled. Your settlement is hardly a democracy, but you must actively manage your population's hope and discontent. And again, these things are made more than just abstract bars that go up or down. Individual citizens will make their opinions about your policies known with pop-up comments that you would do well not to ignore, as they are a valuable measure of the temperature of the population. If the people's needs are not met, they will make demands, and if those demands are not met, you will be made to viscerally feel their displeasure. You can often ignore these problems with no immediate cost, but if you do so, they will begin to fester, and the impact will just be greater down the line. As the situation grows more and more dire, resistance to your regime will mount, and if you let hope die or discontent grow to uncontrollable levels, you will be overthrown and exiled, with the implication that without effective leadership, the Last City is doomed.

Now, "Frostpunk is Stalinist" is a bit of an unfair leap. But it does evince a certain philosophy about how it is necessary as a society to meet extreme challenges. Every choice in Frostpunk is a hard choice, a tradeoff where something must be sacrificed, and nowhere is this more apparent than in the game's Laws system. Laws are branching paths, and while every new law you decree brings benefits, many are problematic choices where the "morally good" option is not necessarily the best decision, if there even is a good option. Do we bury our dead in proper cemeteries, thus giving up a potentially valuable resource, or just throw them in a snow pile to freeze and preserve them for later use, making the people unhappy? Do we embrace the mechanisms of authoritarian social control to keep public order, or do we weaponize faith, the opiate of the masses, to keep the population in line and foster hope for the future? Is it appropriate to build a fighting pit for the people's entertainment? Not only do choices have consequences in the short run, but the new possibilities provided by each branch are obscured so that you don't always understand the long-term implications of your decisions. The extremely high stakes of the harsh setting combined with the realities of the historical context can lead you, even encourage you, to implement policies that would never be tolerated in the developed world in the 21st century, from child labour to 24-hour emergency shifts to using dead bodies as mulch for your hothouse. And Frostpunk seems to be telling you every step of the way that such sacrifices are justified because civilization itself is on the line.

Is that the conclusion we are supposed to draw from this? Do extreme challenges require us to become hard, to embrace authoritarianism and amorality? Are freedom, human rights, and democracy weaknesses, luxuries we can't afford when the going really gets tough? No, I don't think that's the intended message. After all, those "good" options are still there, and presumably one can still win while embracing them. Taking the high ground can give your community its own kind of strength. And the people are ultimately still sovereign in the Last City. True, they have given up their autonomy because that seems to be what is necessary for survival, but if the regime does not allow them to thrive, they will take that power back. I think the real point that Frostpunk is trying to make is that someone, whether it's a unitary leader, a command structure, or an entire populace, has to take responsibility. When things break down, the Captain is the one who ultimately takes the hit. When the hard decisions are let slide too long, there will inevitably be a reckoning.

The allegorical implications for our own era of rapidly accelerating climate change are starkly clear. We are facing hard, life-or-death, existential choices as a society, and part of the reason those decisions are not being met head-on is because they are in the hands of a passive and stupefied populace who allow themselves to be led by greedy and incompetent cronies of the pampered elite trying to preserve their own power and luxury at the possible expense of the existence of humanity as a species. The answer, I would hope, is not dictatorship; as Frostpunk makes clear, even that is not is an effectual solution if you can't give the people what they want and need. But what we're doing right now is not working, and if we don't find a way to change our course, catastrophe is on the way.

Come Drink in my Tavern, Said the Spider to the Fly -- Lords of Waterdeep

 Lords of Waterdeep is one of a host of board games set in the Forgotten Realms campaign setting for the popular tabletop roleplaying game Dungeons and Dragons, although I will be referencing the computer version for the purposes of this post. Players take on the personas of the eponymous Lords, the shadowy masked members of the ruling council of the premiere trading city of the Forgotten Realms, as they compete for prestige and control. It is a fairly basic worker placement game, considered appropriate for newcomers to the genre; players send their agents to various locations in the city to recruit adventurers and to the Cliffwatch Inn to claim quests which they then send these adventurers to complete for victory points and other rewards. They can also construct various buildings which provide more attractive options to all players at the cost of giving free resources to the player that owns them, and finally, may send agents to Waterdeep Harbour to play intrigue cards with a wide variety of game effects. Skilled play lies in predicting and playing around other players' strategies, managing continuously decreasing and expanding options, and building a foundation that will serve you well in the late game.

A mere hint of personality for my hidden scoring card - a strong, independent woman with the cunning to swim with the sharks and the learning to fly with the eagles.

As Lords of Waterdeep is not a particularly deep example of the Euro-style game, a lot of the appeal lies in the Dungeons and Dragons flavour and the evocation of the theme and world of the Forgotten Realms. Quests range from the relatively mundane -- lure dwarven craftsmen to the city, domesticate owlbears -- to standard fantasy-adventure fare -- raid an Orcish outpost, expose a hidden temple to the demon-goddess Lolth -- to underhanded political subterfuge -- destroy a rival criminal organization, infiltrate Waterdeep Harbour with a spy. Intrigue cards also evoke a variety of espionage tactics, from innocuous actions like calling in a favour or offering free drinks at your tavern to lure away opponents' adventurers to assassinations and other dark double-dealings. Thus, every game tells a story of who betrayed whom, who saved the city from the rampaging beholder, who was a glory hound, a craven blackguard, a wheeler-dealer on the make. And players literally construct the city of Waterdeep, making it their own with iconic locations that players versed in the lore of the world will readily recognize. The combination of theme and mechanics does an excellent job of evoking the idea of influential eminences grise manipulating events behind the scenes and pulling the strings of power to their own ultimate benefit.

A mid-game board state. Often you must make choices that are sub-optimal for your game plan and still come out ahead.

And this is kind of fascinating on a number of levels. In the typical Dungeons and Dragons campaign. the focus is on heroic adventurers on a quest for glory, striving to set wrongs right and save the world from destruction at the hands of dangerous tyrants (or alternatively, the focus is on murder hoboes, depending on the nature of your gaming group). Those at the behest of whom the player characters take on these mighty deeds, the humble merchants, village mayors, lords, kings, mighty wizards, and more exotic denizens, definitely play second fiddle, usually given the status of "quest givers", an entire person with their own hopes and dreams reduced a plot contrivance. In the hands of a good Dungeon Master, these characters can become much more fleshed-out and three-dimensional, and a really good one can evoke the background of power and influence which lie behind the feats of derring-do required by the plot. But ultimately, these people are necessarily secondary characters in someone else's story, accessories to the heroes' need for dragons to slay and princesses to rescue.

Lords of Waterdeep flips that script right onto its head. Adventurers here become mere wooden cubes, nameless and faceless pawns to be used in the plots and counter-plots of shadowy benefactors they might never even know the identity of. The glorious quests they undertake become moves in a game of power, radically recentered from those that undertake them to the much more interesting individuals that sponsor them. It is not even known if the adventurers live or die when confronting the foes of Waterdeep or engaging in skullduggery for their hidden masters. It brings to life the sub-rosa world that lies beneath the surface of the simple and straightforward heroes' journey in a way that is very difficult for a standard tabletop roleplaying campaign. And in so doing, it reveals some interesting things about the nature of political institutions in the setting it portrays.

The final score. My Lord has come out on top - this time. But there will always be another game.

Everyone is the hero of their own story, but all of us are caught up in the network of institutions and power relations that make up the social world. In Lords of Waterdeep, adventuring and questing itself seems to be an institution; adventurers are defined types with an infinite supply waiting around in taverns to be recruited in a standardized process of undertaking dangerous deeds. This is not an uncommon social structure to exist in role-playing games, but it is interesting in the way it subverts classic heroic fantasy tropes in which the characters are exceptional individuals destined to make their mark on history. And the game also says some very enlightening things about institutional power in Waterdeep. The very fact that such people as tavern keepers, real-estate speculators, and hidden doppelgangers must take up the reins of power and send their hired mercenaries to do what must be done to keep the city running is indicative of the nature of government in this unstable and constantly threatened city. It is a city-state of canonically weak central authority, more like a Renaissance Italian city than a classic medieval-fantasy kingdom, a continual power vacuum of constantly shifting factions and alliances, as is appropriate for a setting in which players may be challenged by webs of intrigue and deception. And although in this story the wealthy and powerful take centre stage, in such a setting even they are caught up in a web of competing interests, condemned to play an eternal power game in which the final scoring round is never truly reached.

Press X to Not Die, #GirlBoss -- Tomb Raider (2013)

 Within the first several minutes of Tomb Raider, Lara Croft is nearly drowned, impaled on a spike, and has to fight off a man that, if you are not quick-thinking and agile, will kill you with a handmade axe in an intensely intimate fashion.

For a male action hero, this is all in a day's work. We would not even blink to see a man subjected to this kind of violence in a movie or video game. But when it's a woman -- especially a frightened, disoriented woman inexperienced in facing violence -- things get a little more complicated.

I'm sure that Tomb Raider needs no introduction. This critically acclaimed reboot of a franchise going back to the 90s shows the origin story of famed archaeologist Lara Croft. While striving to live up to the legacy of her dead father, Lara and a boatload of comrades are shipwrecked in the Dragon's Triangle and wash up on an island which is the former home of an ancient Japanese god-queen, and the present home of an insane cult hoping to resurrect her. Mechanically, it's set firmly in the grand tradition of its forebears, a third-person adventure game involving traversal, shooting, puzzling, collecting, and of course the inevitable quick-time events. Priority is given to immersion; there are no health bars, precise gear loads are obfuscated, and the inevitable RPG elements are cloaked in a descriptive veneer to hide their naked mechanical advantages. It's a pretty linear experience, predating the open-world live services that are popular these days, and it has a difficulty level that makes it accessible to even a filthy casual like me. All in all, I'd say it deserves its reputation as one of the best games of the decade; I had lots of fun with it.

Facing off against a squad of cultists. Some things never change.

For years, Lara Croft was held up as the icon of Feminism in gaming, a badass chick that could hold her own against the likes of Doomguy and Duke Nukem. There was even talk of how playing as a strong female character like Lara could serve as a role model for girls and make teenage males steeped in the toxic macho culture of gaming more sympathetic to the plight of women in society. But in recent times, the discourse around female characters in media has changed, and the designers of Tomb Raider quite plainly took some of those ideas on board when reinventing this iconic gaming franchise.

The most immediately apparent difference between 2013's Lara Croft and her 1990s namesake is that she's less... she doesn't have such... she isn't as... there's no polite way to put this: her boobs aren't as big. Not A-cups by any means, but not pornstar-sized either; reasonably proportioned. That's hardly the most important change, but it does seem to encapsulate the direction in which the devs have chosen to go when reinterpreting the character. Lara has also lost a lot of the sass and wisecracking nature of her hyper-competent forbear. She's hardly a shrinking violet; in addition to being a trained archaeologist, she's athletic and competent with a bow, able to easily climb rock faces and leap off of crumbling bridges. She also has an innate survival instinct, translated mechanically into the ability to highlight important environmental objects, that will serve her in good stead in the coming trials. But here at the beginning of her career, Lara is not the flippant and frankly mannish globetrotting superstar of the franchise's earlier (and later) outings. She has emotionally vivid relationships with other characters, and projects a kind of vulnerability that makes the terrible things that are happening to her deeply threatening in a way that games rarely really accomplish. She is just a relatively normal young woman who finds herself in a bad situation and has to do whatever she has to, learning to kill and to survive under the harshest of trials.

It would hardly be Tomb Raider if you didn't get to raid some tombs, now would it?

And that's kind of a problem, because mechanically, the game doesn't really keep up with this change in mood. One minute Lara is almost puking after having to shoot a man for the first time; the next she's gunning down armies of cultists with practiced ease. She wails and gasps at every new terror, yet takes dozens of bullets with barely a wince. She is motivated by her interpersonal relationships to pursue goals with deep urgency, yet is willing to take time off at any given moment to track down collectibles and infiltrate ancient ruins -- her deep scientific curiosity getting the better of her, I guess. This makes for a rather schizophrenic experience, as the story the devs want to tell about an average woman having to overcome adversity and survive against all odds butts up against the gamer fantasy of going HAM on an island full of bad guys. I'm not saying it makes the game bad, but it does kind of undermine the idea that this is a new Tomb Raider for a new generation of women gamers, that this Lara Croft is a realistic portrayal of a female character with a deep interior life, that the bad old days of a woman built like a stripper cracking one-liners with a gun in each hand are gone.

My wife absolutely loathes Lara Croft and Tomb Raider. She hates the fact that for years, such a blatant sex object was pointed to as proof that the industry and gaming culture was not sexist -- let us remember that Lara's infamous bustline was the result of a programming error that was loved by adolescent playtesters -- and she has told me that the aftertaste of years of seeing women in gaming portrayed this way has permanently soured her on the franchise. She is not going to play the new Tomb Raider; she is not going to experience the growth in the way the developers think of women as characters. When you make a bad enough first impression, it's not good enough sometimes to make amends and beg forgiveness later. The damage has been done.