Avidly Reads Board Games. Eric Thurm
the Catan mobile app and played obsessively against the game’s AI (with the same vaguely Germanic names as the characters from the novel), trying to hone our skills to the point where we’d be primed and ready to strike at a moment’s notice. We’ve refused to leave the kitchen for the better part of a day. We’ve sneaked away on family vacations, ignoring scheduled activities in order to play with a little plastic travel set. We now have a running spreadsheet tracking who has won each game and with what number of victory points—and though we have yet to produce any significant findings from these games, the important thing is having all of the data, just in case.
I won most of our earlier, prespreadsheet games. Now my brother, who is much more tactically minded than I am, takes home most of the victories. Still, part of the reason we keep playing is that anybody could win any given game. Catan can be complex enough to encourage quantitative gamers—for example, my brother, who studied economics in college and is by far the most consistent competitor in our family. But it can be calm enough to encourage healthy table talk and to allow players to come from behind and win suddenly—for example, my sister, who frequently wins games after seeming to be far behind the rest of us. And it can allow you to be socially devious, to win by getting under the skin of other players—for example, me. If you ask my brother and sister, they’ll say I often complain about being targeted in a game and incessantly try to convince them that I’m losing, only to sneak ahead and win the game in the last stretch. I have no idea how I got this reputation.
Catan’s success is partly about the mechanics, but it’s also about the story and setting: the narrative you’re creating every time you sit down to play. What is Catan actually about? What story were my brother, sister, and I telling five times in one day, besides the story that, as my sister likes to remind us, “Sammy is the best at everything”? Three or four fledgling empires expand across the pristine, newfound island of Catan, competing to establish themselves as the first to claim dominance. That description doesn’t do justice to why Catan is compelling, but I think that’s part of the point: a game becomes compelling because the players make it that way. In this case, the skeleton of the Catan rules is just strong enough for any given game to hold whatever the players hang onto it.
The power of that narrative comes from the players, but it also comes from Catan’s creator, the German game designer Klaus Teuber. A former dental technician, Teuber had originally planned a series of several games exploring early colonization on a grand time line before scrapping the expansive, sprawling project and condensing everything down into Catan’s smooth, streamlined engine. Teuber’s lifelong love of Viking civilization influenced not just the initial incarnation of Catan but also the entire conglomerate that Catan has evolved into—the merchandise, the tournaments, and even the book. (Rebecca Gable, the writer of the Catan novel, is a historical novelist by trade.)
In practice, the most visible vestige of Catan’s origins—and the one that players are most likely to interact with and be influenced by—is the robber, the only native of Catan to appear in the game and the only actual character not under the control of the players. When someone rolls a seven or plays a knight card, they get to move the robber (which blocks off a new space on the board) and take a resource card from another player. Originally a piece of black wood, the piece was eventually changed into a nondescript gray blob, more of a placeholder for the robber of your imagination than anything else.
In Teuber’s telling, as laid out in a blog post on the official Catan website, that blob is actually three separate people: a group of hapless bandits who are forced to move between the different hexagons by the players in an existentially agonizing, unending series of involuntary migrations. This is the story Catan tells itself and one that, apparently, is supposed to be funny. It’s a story that, unsurprisingly, has a lot in common with the story of colonization—people in power telling themselves that their actions don’t have real consequences, because everything they’re doing is a sort of game affecting people who aren’t really people, only pawns. What other way is there to win?
At 2014’s GenCon, North America’s largest tabletop-gaming convention, the game designer Bruno Faidutti gave a largely improvised, tongue-in-cheek lecture titled “Postcolonial Catan,” holding a funhouse mirror up to the game’s narrative. Taking this apparently frivolous idea—that Catan’s abstracted island plays out the narrative of colonialism—Faidutti drew on his own history in the industry, a healthy sense of humor, and Edward Said’s classic work Orientalism, which analyzes the history of Western depictions of colonized peoples, to diagnose a chronic condition in board game design, perhaps produced by an emphasis on the mechanics and rules needed to balance the way players act on a game, rather than the ways the game acts on the players. In the lecture (later transformed into a mildly inflammatory online essay), Faidutti asks gamers to consider another thing that is, ostensibly, happening on the board: the natives of Catan are being steamrolled.
Catan is participating in a common gaming narrative. The “age of exploration” readily lends itself to common ways of thinking about games, positing the player as general or king of an army of forces totally at their control—an approach brought over from classic war-gaming, a genre in which the point of the game isn’t to have fun or engage in play as much as it is to accurately reproduce the conditions of a historical battle. (The most complex war games frequently attempt to capture details ranging from the altitude of specific terrain to the foods soldiers ate to the make and model of their guns.) But this goes beyond the European colonization period—other games use the iconography of ancient Egypt, Edo-era Japan, and even Hawaiian civilization to add “color” (both literally and figuratively) to a game, even when it has nothing to do with what the game is actually about. In other words, you could create a few abstract game rules, spin a wheel of lazy settings, and start selling your product.
As I’ve become more interested in games and learned more about their history, I’ve gotten the sense that debates within the community tend to take on the same character over and over again. Many longtime gamers get into the hobby because they respond to the system of a game—the way the rules structure your interactions with other people, the way they encourage you to marvel at the feat of mathematical construction, and, often, the way they replicate previously existing things like a battle or a particular sort of market. On the other hand, newer players and those less embedded in the hobby frequently respond to novelty, largely in the form of narrative—and, accordingly, everything from the introduction of Magic: The Gathering to Dungeons & Dragons has caused loud debates among game designers and enthusiasts.
For years, these debates caused tension within gaming, only for the upstart to rapidly become assimilated into the establishment. An essay by the designer Rick Loomis, published in a 2000 anthology titled Horsemen of the Apocalypse, tracked several cycles’ worth of conflict in an attempt to identify the phenomenon; apparently early arguments were so intense that war-gamers used to derisively refer to board gamers as “cardboard pushers” who were “debasing the hobby.” The same thing played out again with the introduction of fantasy role-playing, prompting many board gamers to show up at conventions wearing shirts with slogans attacking Dungeons & Dragons. Eventually, everybody teamed up on the newfound success of Magic, which had the gall to be a card game.
I bring this up mostly to set up the day when, half asleep and trying to fit my mouth around an entire mug of coffee, I listened to Faidutti discussing “postcolonial Catan” in conversation with one of the hosts of the popular board game podcast Ludology. Though the host made an effort to engage with what Faidutti was saying, I almost spit out my coffee in shock that he had never really even considered the idea that colonialism—or, less academically, centuries of human suffering—was an ever-present part of the foundations of the games he designed and played and that he had never really considered the possibility that it might be a good idea to try to interrogate why that was and how it could be fixed. You can’t really blame gamers for, as the host put it, “not wanting to think about subjugating people to score points.” But then again, neither did the people doing the initial subjugation. Some gamers do not have the opportunity to ignore what the host referred to as “the native issue.”
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