Sphinx

For all that I spend quite a lot of my time critically analysing the deficiencies of modern claims to ‘learn’ from Thucydides, or simply throwing rocks at them, I do firmly believe that his work has enormous potential as a source of insight into the way the world works, not only in the past but today. There are continuities as well as dramatic changes in human behaviour across time; we can draw from Thucydides’ account understanding of the ‘human thing’, the way that people think and behave. Yes, I tend to think of this in terms of tendencies and persistent mental habits rather than ‘laws’ of ‘human nature’, but it’s part of the same general project to read the work as Thucydides’ intended it, a ‘possession for ever’ from which readers can learn valuable things for the present.

The challenge is to draw out such insights in a way that’s accessible to more than a tiny number of people. Thucydides’ work is long, often difficult, often incomprehensible without a substantial amount of contextual knowledge, and frequently dull unless you’re really, really committed to it. This is clearly the attraction of the widely-shared quotes (genuine or not) and the snappy slogans (Thucydides’s Trap, the idea of the Melian Dialogue as Ur-statement of Realism): the idea that Thucydides’ wisdom can be shared by those who don’t have the stamina or inclination to slog through the whole thing, and even by those who find the name off-putting rather than instantly recognising it as authoritative.

But that approach to making Thucydides accessible and meaningful works, when it’s not simply making stuff up, by stripping out all the ambiguity and complexity that I think is the whole point – Thucydides isn’t about slogans, he’s about the problem of slogans as a way of trying to engage with a complex world. You can’t abstract the speeches from the rest of the narrative without losing something vital; you can’t abstract individual lines from the speeches without ditto; you can’t treat the Athenians’ statements in the Melian Dialogue as Thucydides’ own views without saying something Really Stupid. And suddenly we’re back at the position of insisting that only a full reading of the entire work – and obviously there will be a test afterwards – is an acceptable basis for drawing any lessons from it.

A further problem: even if it were possible to develop some version of Thucydides that was accessible and yet somehow remained true to this spirit of complexity and ambiguity, why should anyone care? It’s the perennial issue for academics, especially but not only humanities academics, seeking ‘impact’; so often our proposed contribution is some version of “actually things are more complicated than you think”, which may seem a vital insight to us, but isn’t necessarily what anyone else is looking for. Thucydides’ insight, in my view, is the way that people are often really bad at thinking about things; if that’s so, how many of them are likely to sign up to be told that?

The solution – and I owe this to various discussions over the last year or so with people at Kaleider – is that you have to offer your target audience something they want, as a means of giving them something else that they didn’t know they wanted. The ‘choose your own adventure’ version of the Melian Dialogue that I began developing last year (yes, I am going to get round to creating the Melian version as soon as I have any spare time) was the first iteration of this: the pleasure and challenge of playing a game as a way into highlighting issues around counterfactualism, choice, chance, and ancient and modern assumptions about justice and morality.

So, when I was prodded into writing a proposal for a Thucydides-related event for the annual Being Human Festival of the Humanities, further gaming developments seemed to be the way to go. The theme of the Festival was ‘Lost and Found’, which didn’t really offer any obvious links to Thucydidean stuff or issues of ‘might and right’ – unless I took a cue from the traditional ways of reading Thucydides via decontextualised quotes, got people to think about isolated lines, and then put them back into context through a performance of the latest version of my Melian Dialogue adaptation… Yeah, why anyone found this proposal coherent or persuasive is a mystery to me, and there have been times over the last six months when I have cursed my apparent ability to write convincing proposals on the basis of a few random thoughts; but, having found myself committed to delivering such an event, I had to sit down and start designing the actual games (rather than simply asserting their future existence); with the help of Andy Wood, one of Kaleider’s residents with interests in storytelling and gameplay, and colleagues and students who helped with play-testing and the evening itself, the process was a lot more productive than I feared at the start…

Game One: The Strong and the Weak

The icebreaker. On arrival, everyone was given an envelope some cards, some clothes pegs, a lengthy feedback questionnaire from Being Human central command, and the following instructions…

Welcome to the world of ancient Greece, in the fifth century BCE; the world described and analysed by the Athenian writer Thucydides, whose ideas continue to resonate today and to inspire debates about power, justice, war and peace.

In the fifth century, Greece was made up of hundreds of little city-states, some of them democracies and others ruled by aristocrats. Each ‘polis’ (this is where we get the word ‘politics’) was fiercely independent and jealous of its neighbours, always suspecting them of plotting to seize their territory or undermine their constitution.

For the next fifteen minutes, you are one of these states, struggling to survive in this anarchic world. In the envelope you were given, you have three strategy cards to choose from: War, Diplomacy, and Plotting to undermine your rival’s political system. War beats Diplomacy, Diplomacy beats Plotting, and Plotting beats War. Yes, it’s basically an ancient version of Rock, Paper, Scissors….

You issue a challenge by holding out a strategy card, face down, towards someone. If they accept the challenge, they too choose a strategy card and hold it out face down, and on a count of three you both turn them over to see who wins. After each challenge, move on to another – unless your rival challenges you back.

In your envelope you also have some tokens (clothes pegs!), showing your city’s resources: these should be displayed with pride. If you win a challenge, you take one of your opponent’s tokens; if you lose, you have to hand one over. If you are reduced to zero tokens, you must follow your conqueror around for the rest of the game, cheering them on – and if they are conquered, follow the new victor.

However, there is justice only between equals: if one player has more tokens than the other, they win challenges where both play the same strategy card, which would normally be a draw. Beware of the emerging imperial powers, reducing everyone else to slavery!

The crucial addendum to the final point: a few players started with more clothes pegs (five) than everyone else (three), so began the game with the advantage of the stronger – and they were the ones who finished with fifteen or more pegs, and little entourages of conquered opponents.

This game worked really well; simple, easy-to-grasp mechanics, demanding that everyone gets involved and interacts with lots of other people, trivial enough that no one was going to get really upset at losing – and definitely helpful that they were given something to do even after they’d lost (another of the ideas that Andy contributed to the enterprise). If/when I do this again, it would be worth having a quick discussion before moving on to the next game – if only to see if anyone realised that the whole thing was rigged from the beginning…

Game 2: Justice Only Between Equals

The second game is more directly connected to the Melian Dialogue; partly through the inclusion of quotes on the playing cards, and mostly because it is an adaptation of the version devised by Yanis Varoufakis for his game theory analysis of how people behave in a situation of unequal advantage…

War is never predictable. In the heat of battle, the outcome of confrontations between two armies can be much more uncertain and more complex than a simple win/lose result – and you have the opportunity to learn from experience and develop your strategy accordingly. But the field of conflict is rarely level; advantage almost always lies with the stronger.

You play this game in pairs, one with Red cards and one with Blue, which you’ll find in the envelope. Each of you selects a move, Attack, Hold or Retire; play your cards simultaneously, and then then consult the table to see the results of the confrontation – whether each of you gains or loses points. Keep a running total of your score on the scoresheet, as it’s your position at the very end that matters.

After every game, swap cards, so that if you played Red in the last round you now play Blue. Play six games in all, three as Red and three as Blue, and we’ll move to a discussion of a few issues.

The point – which smart players pick up very quickly – is that the scoring table is rigged, in three ways; there is a solution (both players Retire) which leaves both of them in an advantageous position, but the consequences of playing Retire and the other player playing a different card are seriously negative; the least risky choice is always Attack; and in almost all situations, Red has an advantage over Blue. The numbers could certainly be tweaked further (indeed, part of the point of Varoufakis’ experiment was to see what happened when they were tweaked, but that seemed like way too much fiddling about for this sort of event).

Most importantly, the round of games – giving everyone an equal shot at Red and Blue, so that no one had to experience constantly being on the weak side – was followed by a discussion of the issues raised: How did people feel about playing the game? Did they spot the unfairness? How did it affect their strategy, depending on which role they were playing? How far did they feel compelled to be more aggressive, whether they liked it or not? Did anyone get the result that benefits both sides, e.g. if both of them play Retire?

Can they think of analogous situations, in which one side of a confrontation clearly has greater power than the other? Can they see similar patterns, with the stronger or the weaker behaving in different ways?

Game 3: Gods and Mortals

This was the most interesting and also the most challenging of the games – challenging in part because, having finalised the concept, I was still desperately writing the text the night before the event, and so the people acting as facilitators hadn’t had a proper chance to practice. I won’t, therefore, give the full text here (also, it’s long), but will sketch out the idea.

This is a cross between an improvisation game and a role-playing game – no fancy dice (shame, but not really practical or appropriate), but each player being given a character (hero, monster, ruler, child, citizen or deity) and taking it in turns to say their piece in the context of a developing story – and each time having to work an appropriate quote from Thucydides into what they say. The story offered a series of dilemmas focused on issues of might and right, justice etc., via a mash-up of the Oedipus and Perseus/Andromeda myths, and ideally players could ham up their roles to the nth degree (one reason why I eventually settled for a scenario where one might hope many if not most people would have some idea of the cultural archetypes they were called upon to play).

Ideally, this game picks up on the issues of the strong versus the weak raised by the previous game, and the various real-world analogies that might be imagined. Indeed, early in the development I toyed with the idea of creating much more realistic, meaningful scenarios: a family scenario, for example, playing out the relationships between parents and children, siblings, husband and wife etc. But on reflection a neutral, more entertaining scenario simply seemed safer – without entirely excluding the possibility of engaging with some powerful, thought-provoking dilemmas.

The two main things I need to do for future iterations are (a) make this less dependent on me to work 100%, and ideally make it self-sufficient rather than requiring a facilitator who’s had some guidance and practice beforehand; (b) work out how best to get people into the swing of acting, rather than reading out their instruction sheets. In both cases, this is going to require more extensive rewriting of the scripts.

And After…

As mentioned above, the three games were followed (after a welcome break for refreshments) with a performance of my adaptation of the Melian Dialogue, with the idea that people would recognise lines they’d encountered earlier and could think about how they fitted into the wider context of the arguments of the Melians and the Athenians. (The evening concluded with a short lecture by me, talking a bit about Thucydides and how his work has been interpreted in the modern world.

The first time this was performed, in 2013, the Dialogue was framed by a television report to provide context, followed by the Athenians and Melians confronting one another across a conference table. This time, for various practical reasons (lack of time to learn lines…), we went for a political chat show set-up, with me moderating (in a minimal manner) the argument between guests. This could be definitely be developed, if I decide to pursue such an aesthetic in future. Having heard a fascinating talk from my former Bristol colleague Emma Cole on Australian post-dramatic adaptations of Greek tragedies, I’m currently more inclined to go for something a bit more exciting (I have visions of a version in which the Melian is progressively stripped naked or covered in paint…) – but I do appreciate that this might be less effective in connecting things up to the games and the issues they raised. Time to make some videos…

Conclusion

This has been a really interesting experience, even if it left me pretty well wiped out for the rest of term. It was interesting to return to the world of games once again, and to think about what makes for a playable, enjoyable game that can nevertheless raise interesting questions. It continues to be productive to be forced out of my comfort zone, to think of how to engage people with ideas and experiences in ways that go beyond my default “let’s have a seminar discussion” mode. The games themselves are, I think, worth persevering with, making some changes and then trying them out with new audiences as a basis for exploring what I still think are important issues about power…