Sphinx

There is no divide between people who play games and people who don’t; we all play games, or at least have played them in the past. But there clearly is a divide between people with varying amounts of experience of different sorts of games, and hence different expectations; between those, let us say, who flick through the rulebook for the Buffy the Vampire Slayer Board Game, thinking “okay, straightforward underlying game mechanic, minor tweaks to bring it closer to the TV series, questions about the best strategy to adopt”, and those who look at this slim 20-page booklet, in fairly large font and with quite a lot of illustrations, and respond with “blimey, that’s a bit big and complicated”.

Now, I am very much not dunking on my wife here, despite the fact that after half an hour I was actively trying to hasten the apocalypse just to put us all out of our misery without making this too obvious to our neighbour (who was the one who really wanted to try the game). It’s not that she doesn’t like games, just not this sort of game – I should have guessed, from the fact that we can no longer play Scrabble or Monopoly together, that there might be an issue with grasping the idea of a cooperative game in which we work together against to beat the system, rather than seeking to annihilate one another.

Indeed, given that she alternated “this is absurdly complicated and was clearly designed by a male teenager with too much time on his hands” and “but a vampire can’t just enter the Summers residence without an invitation, that’s stupid, it’s not like Angel entering the high school because it’s a public place inviting in everyone who seeks knowledge, we need a different rule”, clearly in a different timeline she was a born AD&D rules lawyer.

Part of me is a little sad, as I do like games – ideally, cooperative rather than competitive ones – but don’t have the time or energy to go any distance in search of them; I will just have to content myself with reading rulebooks and sketching out scenarios and painting a few miniature figures (as a mindfulness exercise, honestly). But mostly I’m just reflective, as I do like using little games in some of my lectures as a prompt for discussion – and am now feeling slightly nervous that, as far as I can recall, no student has ever actually commented on this.

For example, I tend simply to assume that the ‘choose your own adventure’ principle of Twine-based games is completely intuitive and thus – since they are very easy to create – the ideal format for a quick lecture interlude. It was interesting, when I mentioned a week or so back that I was creating a basic ‘I, Caesar’ Twine for the last class of term (here, if anyone’s interested), to be directed towards Reacting to the Past; fascinating stuff, but the sort of thing that needs an entire class to explain the rules and set everything up, not least because they’re aimed at highlighting the complex interaction of lots of different factors whereas my games are usually designed to hit people around the head with a single historical principle.

Maybe I’m underestimating the ability of my students to get quickly into something complex and interactive – or maybe I’m overestimating the straightforwardness of the Twine set-up. I’m reminded of the first time I did a session of different Thucydides-based games; the one which was a complete flop was the modified role-playing one, where more or less nobody seemed to have the foggiest what they were being asked to do, and so the fact that it was vastly simpler than any conventional RPG, even Fate, had no effect…

The good news this morning is that I saw our neighbour, whose first words were “I’ve been thinking about how we should have approached our strategy, with more cooperation and focusing more on the overall goal rather than getting distracted by all the vampires, so can we try that again?” Result!