In the vein of other fictional games such as ‘The Giant’s Drink’ or war-games of Ender’s Game, or the many quests of the primer in The Diamond Age - Azad is a game that is more than just a game. For the multi-thousand year old stagnant and hideously cruel imperial culture of the same name (The Azad), it is a religion, a placement test, a philosophy, a wargame-simulation of the real world, and an tool of learning. Talent and victory in Azad determine who holds political office. Successful strategies in Azad tournaments influence political decisions. Games are played for stakes of immense wealth, or over bets of violence (looser undergoes X specified horror at hands of the victor).

Azad is not composed of bits and visuals, nor a table-sized board, but of life sized bioengineered pieces, which are moved around a landscape-board on the scale of a basketball court. I imagine it as a bizarre bio-punk rendition of the life-sized chess game Ron plays in Harry Potter and the Sorcerer’s Stone, only that the pieces evolved and change with play and time, and the board is larger and more complex.

The protagonist, Jernau Morat Gurgeh, is a member of ‘The Culture’—a vastly more life-respecting and technologically advanced civilization managed by immense artificial “minds”—is sent on a diplomatic mission of ambiguous intent. He is a renowned game player, skilled at varied games collected by The Culture from civilizations it  has encountered or absorbed, but suffers from a sense of depression and ennui at the games’ lack of stakes. A friend invites him to try out a sort-of Call of Duty or Halo-made-real team game (think futuristic, highly realistic, paintball-esque game - similar to those that Ender and his peers compete in), but he finds it unfulfilling.

With this context, he enters the Azad tournaments - which determine the subsequent several years of political rankings - as a diplomatic guest. Here, it begins to feel a bit like Soviet-American chess games or perhaps Kissinger’s Ping Pong Diplomacy. Jernau’s daily life has some of the feel of A Gentleman in Moscow. He resides at a hotel, largely insulated from Azad society, except for occasional escapades facilitated by others (one being a floating-mechanical travel companion and the other being “The Culture’s” ambassador to the Azad.

Despite the brutality and rigidity of the Azad society, the game is generally proven out as a useful simulation of cultural competition by the end (though not in the way the Azad rulership wanted). Indeed, the stagnation of the society doesn’t seem to be the fault of the game, but of the Azad’s rigging of it.

Reactions

Unsurprisingly, the aspect of the text I find most compelling is its elevation of games. It’s visible in both fictional cultures. In “The Culture,” games serve as an enriching pastime or educational tool for the members of a leisurely society of inconceivable abundance. They have a range to choose from and play them in some combination of academic and casual or salon-style contexts (much like Chess or Go today - though with much more variety and, in some cases, more chance). The Culture also has it’s physical recreational war-game like options as well. In a world with everything, these seem like worthwhile, enriching activities. If anything, I found the fictional games played in The Culture a bit narrow or unimaginative given the complexity and far-future fantasticality of the rest of the world, though this also seems to be something of a statement about the nature of The Culture. Notably, in one intense chapter of Consider Phlebas, Banks highlights another game in this universe (at a different time) called "Damage" which is approximately as dark and bizarre as Azad. In both cases, I find myself wanting the game-design creativity applied towards a more positive end.

Years ago, just out of undergraduate, when a friend was starting a startup, he shared the observation that his time spent playing open world RPGs in his youth was bearing fruit. In such games, one has to manage resources in a complex world to optimize for quantitative and qualitative goals. Quantitative goals in the game might be money, health, points, et cetera. Qualitative might be like stylistic choices, social credibility, or knowledge of the world. The options are wide ranging and you have to figure it out. For him, this was surprisingly similar to running a company.

I quite enjoy this idea, though I suspect it varies somewhat based on personality and approach to the game & real life (e.g. whether it’s a supplement or a replacement in the player’s mind). People were once worried about novels being bad for people (e.g. 1, 2). Now they're integral to learning and enjoyment alike. I hope & suspect that games go much the same way (to what extent have they already? I’m not sure). Perhaps there will be more moralizing over the types of games one plays or the way one plays them (which seems appropriate), but I hope the medium itself becomes quite neutral in this.

In reading, I find myself wanting to use some of these fictional templates to inspire my own broader thinking about games as both recreative and developmental tools (for now, I’ll leave developmental age / stage open ended, but it’s safe to assume I’m trying to think of things I would like now or a bit earlier in my own life). Of course, focusing on fiction is hazardous as a limitation (see Exorcising us of the Primer), but perhaps still useful as an initial source of variety and creative provocation. I.e. this is a starting kernel intended as generative, not a framing exercise intended as conclusive.

Now, I probably have some information wrong in the table below (it’s been a few years since I last read Ender’s Game), nonetheless:

Azad

Azad’s interesting because of A) it’s complexity and B) it’s relationship to the real world. The horror of the society in which it’s embedded makes it seem grotesquely dystopian, but it provokes some interesting ideas. What if games were higher stakes? NCAA athletes can now make salaries, which I assume changes how people approach the sport. Alpha school has a points system and ‘store’ that enables students to transform learning progress into items like a sweatshirt. Notably, these are more like wages (not wagers, as are often also made in Azad). Still, I recall a couple years of summer camp (maybe 8 years old?), during which we would would gamble (over varied outdoor games) using our nightly milk and cookie rations. It was fun.

Azad is also treated as a kind of political simulation (winner’s political views were weighted more heavily the more they win in the games). This is a bit more of a leap - e.g. I definitely wouldn’t allocate city council positions based on skill in chess. However, I might recruit students to an officers school who were particularly successful in digital or physical war-game simulations, or hire someone who was capable in some kind of economic / trade simulation, etc. Does participation in model UN in high school count favorably towards e.g. an internship in international affairs? Of course, these games couldn’t be the only criterion, but I do wonder how e.g. someone’s relative performance over a week playing an new & unfamiliar game similar to Runescape or the like could be used as a leading indicator of some strategic ability, or how the game might be re-designed to cultivate a useful skill. Perhaps making the game more realistic in useful ways + slowing down the instant gratification & instead motivating by some tangible real-world benefit (like a chance to deploy your skills in the operation of a real world business), would be beneficial.

Ender’s war

So, spoiler, but in the second half-ish of the book, Ender plays something he thinks is a competitive war-game using a computer interface which is, in fact, giving orders to real pilots fighting real battles in space. This is used to trick Ender - who is young, strategically brilliant, and highly empathic - into fighting a real war, but perhaps there are more positive versions of this idea possible.

Several times, I’ve heard the recommendation to stop and look at my own life as an RPG video-game featuring a character (me) with skills, development or quest opportunities, resource opportunities, etc. It never quite clicked for me, though I imagine it’s a useful way of gaining perspective.

What other real world scenarios could we create game-like interfaces for, or game-like simulations of? E.g. could you use a Dungeons and Dragons format, but for some recent historical economic, military, or political circumstance - overseen by a historical expert? Or is it preferable that games remain fantastical and detached from reality in some respects (if only cosmetic) to preclude students from thinking that the lessons will apply neatly?

As an alternative, I imagine different companies uploading real strategic problems that they’re facing (perhaps anonymized if necessary) to some platform / marketplace. Students write down their approaches to the problems or execute on them in the simulation, and perhaps get paid for providing useful advice or ideas. The point would be to create a seamless, regular flow of real challenges as part of the student-day (vs as something like a extracurricular research project or part time internship).

Battle School Games

Also in Ender’s Game, we have the battle rooms, in which teams of military students compete in something like zero gravity laser tag. There’s something similar in the Red Rising Trilogy. In both cases, the games aren’t really games - or at least not bounded in the same way. The games move beyond their purported scope to include politics and violence.

Is this what sports are? I’m skeptical that most sports afford strategic enrichment alongside athletic development in the same was as happens for Ender. For one, a coach is often calling the strategy. An athletic league where only students can call the strategy or manage the team & training schedule would more closely resemble these fictional examples, and would be really pedagogically challenging. Secondly, most games with consistent fields or courts don’t seem as complex as either fictional game - perhaps unexpected rule changes or unfamiliar, non-uniform terrain would provoke more strategic innovation from players.

I imagine that military schools have a variety of actual war-game approaches, which might be a more useful basis for brainstorming in this direction, but I’m not familiar enough (at all). Also, I have no idea how this would look for non-adversarial, non-zero sum games, but that seems quite important / much more broadly useful.

A Battle that is Not a Battle

That is, the unnamed but realistic team war game played in the opening scene of A Player of Games. This is only a brief scene - Jernau and a friend trudge across a coastal dune landscape clad in armor suits and helms, and equipped with some kind of gun. They seek to evade and return fire from small ‘missiles’ which fly around like a flock of birds. The larger context of the game is unclear, save that they are trying to survive and return fire together. The grounds are quite beautifully in description, and the game sounds like some futuristic, highly realistic version of paintball or laser tag, set in some vaguely alien landscape. When ‘hit’ by a missile’s fire, Jernau’s suit freezes up, immobilizing him, and helpfully informing him “you are dead,” before allowing him to exit the field.

This sounds fun. I would candidly love it if it became normal for adults to play laser tag or paintball without being completely juvenile (though Jernau voices the same critique of this futuristic verison). I suspect there’s ways to make this more extreme, such as by playing on large ridiculously beautiful ‘maps’, in battles that are part of a larger ‘war’ / competition that demands some tactical and strategic creativity and perhaps blended with ‘discovery’ of different tools/technology, terrain, objectives, or tactical knowledge along the way (as in scavenger hunts and the like). It’d certainly be a fun way to keep in shape - better in that respect at least than analogous video games.

I’m not entirely sure how this could be a useful pedagogical tool (outside of military tactics) - it simply seems more like a mentally and physically engaging form of recreation. One question is, could this same kind of ‘in-depth real-life simulation’ be applied to other kinds of games (e.g. Civilization or Skyrim or the like).

I think yes, sure. LARP and Renaissance Fairs seem to do something adjacent or analogous, attract some highly committed players, and create really complicated experiences. The LARP focus on medieval politics and warfare (so I hear, at least wrt to the UK) again seems quite narrow (just another form of potentially enriching recreation, perhaps edifying if constrained to historical realism, though that seems less fun than more fantastical renditions).

I think the harder question is simply: what is the desirable game/simulation to set up? What is best done physically alongside others rather than digitally alongside others?

The Giants Drink

One more reference from Ender’s Game— “The Giant’s Drink” is a sort of arcade-game (a video game) that adapts to challenge the player. It’s bizarre and fantastical in its depictions, and is played against an adaptive AI. This fictional case is partly tricky to reference because the game is eventually influenced by an outside factor (aliens) trying to communicate with Ender. It’s also not totally clear what the pedagogical objective of the game is in the first place (prior to the outside influence). This does seem like something that is newly possible to create with AI, though I’m not sure what the benefits might be. Worth trying for myself.

Alternatively, perhaps the useful kernel here is in the idea of using a game to communicate. One person plays the game, the other contributes key scenes or easter eggs, trying to get a fairly complex message, idea, or sentiment across (but says nothing directly, and perhaps only speaks a different language and lives in a different culture or part of the world). The AI creates the game-space intermediating between the two, perhaps by augmenting some default gameplay track based on inputs from both users (player makes decisions, messenger plants seeds or scenes in the world).

The Primer

Andy Matuschak’s writing is more helpful on the primer, and I will not try to tackle the entirety of The Primer here. What I am interested in is particular and only loosely Primer-inspired, namely: having to solve real-world problems in order to progress in a game (Mel is taught programming by having to solve puzzles that embedded in scenes of the evolving novel).

This already exists in plenty of RPGs - you had to mine and smelt and fish in Runescape, which afforded players some sense of the process that produces tools of different metals. Why not just push this much further to include more technical components of the process? And expand the range of producible goods to include everything we make in factories or laboratories today? Obviously, the complexity increases quickly if you do this for every part of a game, but my question is simply, what would any such game look like if you pushed the realism & need for industrial literacy by 50%?

One way of setting this up is allowing the player to build anything into the world that they could build in real life. In other words, the resources available in a game are broad and fixed, but the processes ‘fish’ ‘smelt’ ‘mine’ ‘cook’ are nearly completely open ended. You have to describe aloud the task you want your RPG to undertake. The game checks if your description tracks with the real world wiki-how and, if so, let’s you do it. If you can accurately describe how to create a fishing net from twine you found, then you have a fishing net (perhaps a poor one if poorly described). If you can then get to some water and describe how to fish, you catch some fish (more or less depending on accuracy). The same process holds for the Bessemer process or designing a chip or a program.

‍