On Abstraction. Brian's Designer Notes for Uprising and Army of Shadows
Once again my blog has been hijacked by a more capable mind than mine. Today Brian Train discusses his views on abstract games, specifically Uprising and Army of Shadows, the games in Yaah! #2. And without further ado, walking across the stage, Mister. BRIAN. TRAIIIIIIIN!!! Give it up folks.
Thinking
About and Through Abstract Games
by Brian Train
Benjamin
Franklin loved Chess. He was always
up for a game. In the illustration, the year is 1774 and he is playing with
Caroline Howe, sister of Admiral Lord Richard Howe and General William Howe,
who would command British forces during the American Revolutionary War. (Not sure who the dude on the laptop is. -Mark)
He
loved Chess so much that in 1786 he
wrote an essay on it, called “The Morals
of Chess”:
"The
Game of Chess is not merely an idle amusement; several very valuable qualities
of the mind, useful in the course of human life, are to be acquired and
strengthened by it, so as to become habits ready on all occasions; for life is
a kind of Chess, in which we have often points to gain, and competitors or
adversaries to contend with, and in which there is a vast variety of good and
ill events, that are, in some degree, the effect of prudence, or the want of
it.
By
playing at Chess then, we may learn: 1st, Foresight, which looks a little into
futurity, and considers the consequences that may attend an action ... 2nd,
Circumspection, which surveys the whole Chess-board, or scene of action: - the
relation of the several Pieces, and their situations; ... 3rd, Caution, not to
make our moves too hastily...."
In
this short piece, I would like to talk about Army of Shadows, Guerrilla Checkers and Uprising as examples of abstract games to discuss in light of the
points Ben Franklin raised, and their value in developing other skills.
But
first, some history: in 2011, I was invited to visit the Naval Postgraduate
School (NPS) in Monterey, California to discuss a project to develop part of a
website that would support the Regional Defense Combating Terrorism Fellowship
Program (CTFP). Under the CTFP, officers of foreign militaries attend training
and courses, both in their own country or at centres in the United States, to
give them the capability to build, manage, and sustain their own
counter-terrorism programs.
One
challenge with any training is to make it stick with the student and make the
student stick with it. Programs like the CTFP are intended to build an
international and constantly developing network, and it is vital to keep alumni
talking and in contact with each other. The NPS, as a major centre for delivering
training under the CTFP, was developing the Global Education and Collaboration
Community Online (GlobalECCO) website, to support students and alumni of the
program. Besides print and visual resources on various aspects of combating
terrorism, the website would feature a gaming portal. Current and former
students and faculty of the CTFP would be able to play strategy games online to
foster camaraderie through friendly and competitive play, and broaden and
improve specific thinking skills. It would also be a resource for faculty to
use to supplement their classes.
The
first principle of game-based learning is that the game used should teach
simple, basic principles and dynamics quickly, in an interesting way.
Everything else is either additional detail or gets in the way of this. In
discussing with faculty and staff of the NPS what sort of games to develop for
the website, we felt that by providing a combination of simple games with deep
strategy, we would have the best chance of creating experiences for the players
that would let them get on with the mental contest. We did not want them to
struggle with the language of the rules, or a difficult and detailed user
interface for an attempted “simulation” that could also be carrying unintended
ideological or cultural baggage.
We
chose Guerrilla Checkers for the site
because it combined two well-known classical games with simple mechanics into
something new, with surprisingly deep strategy. I designed this game in 2010. I
had been working with some other people on an Afghanistan game, and about
oh-dark-I-don’t-want-to-look-at-the-clock one morning I was staring at the
ceiling and thinking about the insurgents and counterinsurgents there.
Both
sides, while occupying the same section of the world at the same time,
nevertheless approached the physical terrain (ridges, gullies, roads) and the
human terrain (villages, tribes, relationships) in completely different ways.
Why not have a game where the two sides are playing with quite different pieces
working in quite different ways, but are using the same board with the same
ultimate aim of neutralizing the enemy? There are not many abstract games like
this, but I liked the idea of
asymmetry between players, and Army of Shadows and Uprising would follow on with this concept.
 |
| Army of Shadows |
We
also agreed we wanted a game for the site that highlighted the essential
mismatches between the antagonists in an insurgency: low information vs. high
information, and low power vs. high power. I discussed this with Michael
Freeman, a faculty member at NPS, and went away to create Army of Shadows and Uprising-two
very different design takes on this general idea.
Both
games have some common threads between them:
•
First,
the concept of the board as an empty symmetrical surface, with the ultimate
objective at its centre. The Nexus and Capital represent a concentration or
“peak” of power or legitimacy for the State, and so have to be defended;
meanwhile, the rebel or insurgent moves in from the political/organizational –
not geographical - “hinterland” to occupy it through processes of stealth and
growth.
•
Both
games are forced to a climax if the Rebel player is to win; in Army of Shadows, he has to dominate the
space around the Capital, and in Uprising
he must declare the Revolution and dismantle the State (by eliminating all
Agents).
•
Both
games are “single-blind” games where the Insurgent player can see all and make
moves accordingly, and the State player can discover information only through
Interrogation and probes.
•
The
essential asymmetry of forces – few but unkillable State pieces or Agents (that
is, until the Revolution), and numerous but fragile Insurgents – is also
emphasized in both games. An uncommon touch is giving the State player a choice
of what to do in both games when he captures an Insurgent piece. He can either
kill it right away, removing it from the game, or keep it prisoner, which will
give him some additional advantages – though there is a slight chance that a
prisoner will escape!
Army of Shadows was implemented for the website
under the name Asymmetric Warfare. Besides
Guerrilla Checkers, the site also
features InfoChess (a Chess variant designed by John Arquilla,
another faculty member at NPS) and several less abstract games on the spread of
ideologies, financing of terrorist networks, and the stability vs. legitimacy
dilemma faced by governments confronting domestic insurgencies. Meanwhile, I
continued to give away copies of Guerrilla
Checkers and Uprising I had made
myself, at game conventions and conferences I went to.
 |
| Uprising |
Value of
abstract games
Now,
let’s get back to Ben Franklin. He understood that games help us to think about
how the world works in new ways, and to change perspectives. Every society
plays games; play itself is a universal human experience. This is one reason
why games give us so many metaphors in every language.
Games
are there not just to amuse; they are used to instruct, teach, and otherwise
mould brains. Abstract games have been used as teaching tools and intellectual
exercises for military students and professional officers, for centuries. And
in civil society, developing skill at Chess,
Go or other “deep” games was once considered part of a gentleman’s
education.
There
is an established body of research on cognitive development and improvement
through playing Chess and other
abstract games. The quote by Benjamin Franklin illustrates three of the
abstract thinking and cognitive skills developed by Chess: foresight, circumspection, and caution. The same could be
claimed, to a greater or lesser degree, by nearly any abstract strategy game,
and to these I would add other skills such as:
·
Strength of memory, pattern
recognition, and pattern manipulation. The game of Go is one of the world’s oldest games. It features undifferentiated
pieces and an empty board that has pieces placed on it during the course of
play. Guerrilla Checkers of course
borrows from this for the Guerrilla side, and from Checkers for the mechanics of the COIN player’s movement and
multiple-capture ability. To play either of these classic board games well, you
have to be able to recognize classical patterns and arrangements of pieces,
just as much as you have to learn combinations in Chess. Meanwhile, Army of
Shadows requires memory skills on the part of the State player.
·
An ability to create and reason
through alternatives, and to take action without complete information. During play of any of these games,
there will always be a wide choice of possible moves, and you have to exercise
your judgement about which one is optimal. Army
of Shadows and Uprising are games
where incomplete information is central to play: players must exercise their
decision-making skills with this limitation, to discover or deceive the
opponent. (Oddly enough, no one seems to have thought of retrofitting the idea
of hidden information to classic Chess
until “double-blind” Chess, also
known as KriegspielChess, was
introduced about 1895.)
·
The mental flexibility necessary to
appreciate asymmetry in situations, that is, to be able to flip roles mentally
and play from another’s perspective. All three of these abstract games rely on an
asymmetrical balance of forces at the beginning, and in each game the players
win in different ways. The teaching point is to demonstrate that battles are
seldom if ever symmetrical, in force structure or objective. They also play
quickly enough that within an hour you can play one or more pairs of games
where you switch roles.
All
of these skills are critical to creative problem solving. What more could you
ask of the development of a leader, analyst, or other decision maker – or for
that matter, your own brain?
Anyone interested in exercising their brain with the second issue of Yaah! Magazine may order it right here.
Comments
Some, if not most, abstract games can be played at a variety of levels. I liked Chess but I never felt the desire to spend enough time and effort (and seek out enough players) to become really good at it, to anticipate and counter every possible outcome as you say. Instead, later on I was drawn to Go, which is much less of a combinatorial exercise and something more like duelling fields of influence and ideas of indirect approach through "flow" of pieces. Of course Go has sets of combinations of plays to be conducted in the corners of the board called joseki, but this is more in line with tactical combinations you use to move the game along and shape your overall strategy - Chess does not have quite this kind of thing in my view because there's so much less elbow room.
Anyway, Go scratched the particular itch I had better than Chess, and not only that it allowed me to play for fun through its handicapping ability... even when playing against someone with quite different skill and ability there are still interesting problems to work through and lessons to learn, where a game of Chess between two quite different players is just a bore for both of them.
Army of Shadows and Uprising are quite "thematic" in their way, the former much more so than the latter, with its differentiated pieces and changing powers it's easier to imagine a story while you are playing - it's really more like a simple wargame, though it (and Uprising) go off in a quite different direction from most wargames due to the heavy emphasis placed on limited information (unfortunately, or perhaps fortunately, this means you will have to scare up a friend to play it with!).