Elegy for the American Imagination

Sophie Turner as Lara Croft

Amazon Prime Video has released first-look promo art for their announced Lara Croft: Tomb Raider TV series. Irish actress Sophie Turner (Game of Thrones) has the lead, and appears remarkably like the video game character, though her measurements look more realistic. Turmer becomes the third live-action performer to depict Lara Croft, after Angelina Jolie and Alicia Vikander. Amazon also becomes the third studio to control the adaptation rights.

I’m sure Amazon’s production will be fine. The mere fact that previous adaptations have received lukewarm reviews and middling revenues, before descending into development hell for the sequels, proves nothing. And audiences’ overwhelming indifference to video game adaptations like Super Mario Brothers, Resident Evil, and Street Fighter tells us nothing worth knowing about yet another adaptation’s likelihood of commercial success. I’ll keep an open mind.

But seriously, who wants another Lara Croft adaptation? What market niche demanded we try this again? Streaming TV services require truly massive audiences to ensure manageable amortized budgets, so Amazon certainly expects enough viewers to show interest. Their willingness to invest in a thirty-year-old franchise, which hasn’t released a new game in eight years, says they want something audiences can snuggle into, like a favorite blanky.

My friends know where I’m going with this, because I’ve said it so frequently. This is another reiteration of Hollywood’s persistent fear of innovation. Tomb Raider joins Frank Herbert’s Dune, Stephen King’s Carrie, and Marvel Comics’ Spider-Man as franchises which have been adapted three times, not counting sequels. Second adaptations are looming for the Twilight and Harry Potter novels. TV networks keep resurrecting shows like Battlestar Galactica and Hawaii Five-O.

Alicia Vikander as Lara Croft

This partly reflects changes in the media landscape. Sarah Kendzior writes that, as networked computer technology makes it possible for writers and designers to work from anywhere, the Big Five studios have become unreceptive to portfolios from applicants who don’t have a Los Angeles-area return address. Giblin and Doctorow describe how consolidation between studios, agencies, and distributors turn creativity into a package deal, not an artistic exploration.

But recent events have convinced me something deeper is afoot. Those who control the levers of power have so much riding on their decisions that they dare not attempt anything imaginative or risky, because they have too much to lose. The creatives controlling Hollywood, Broadway, and Nashville are highly visible, because we expect their inventive stories to charm our intellect. But the same moribund imagination plagues our politics and economics.

Democratic politicians run on promises to resurrect past economic promise. From President Obama’s “Change We Can Believe In,” to President Biden’s promise of a post-Taco Republican “Epiphany,” to the very existence of  Hilary Clinton, Democrats keep yearning for a storied past, probably in the 1990s. Meanwhile, President Taco’s “Make America Great Again” slogan, locates greatness in a lost era, like King Arthur or Pecos Bill.

Violence is always a failure of imagination. The violence we’ve witnessed this month in Venezuela and Minneapolis reflects a power structure terminally allergic to compromise and innovation. Just as Hollywood can’t imagine new blockbusters, forcing them to revisit Star Wars and Batman, our leaders can’t imagine governance without burning cities like General Sherman. Faced with disagreement, the administration’s deputies can only imagine gunfire on unarmed minivan moms.

Angelina Jolie as Lara Croft

Eidos Interactive released the first Tomb Raider game in 1996, the same year President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, which denied federal protection to same-sex marriage, and the Personal Responsibility and Work Opportunity Reconciliation Act, which placed work requirements on federal poverty protection. There is no causal relationship between these, of course. But Lara Croft’s return definitely calls back to another time when America’s government attacked the defenseless.

Put another way, Lara Croft, Lucasfilm, and the Department of Homeland Security all promise their audiences that they don’t have to think. They allow Americans to subsume themselves into a property they’ve always enjoyed, whether it’s a game, a movie, or a lily-white national complexion. But to maintain that promise, the execution must become increasingly extravagant: more explosions, bigger confrontations, louder guns.

Business, media, and government leaders can’t imagine new approaches—at least without jeopardizing their chokehold on power. They offer the same loud, but ultimately disappointing, options we’ve purchased before. Challenging the monopoly is too costly for working creatives, no matter how imaginative, to even try. So we repeat the same dull, unimaginative techniques, hoping the outcome will somehow be different.

Somebody must be first to break the cycle. But without guaranteed returns, the establishment will remain too scared to try.

Tic-Tac-WHOA!

Blaise Müller (game designer), Quarto

Have you ever wanted to recapture the speed, simplicity, and ease of Tic-Tac-Toe, without the annoyance of knowing from the get-go who’s going to win? Swiss mathematician Blaise Müller apparently shared this desire, because he invented Quarto, a similarly themed grid game which shares the goal of creating a straight line of symbols. Then he added one complication: your opponent picks your symbol.

Müller gives you sixteen pieces, and a playing board with sixteen round “squares.” The pieces divide into four pairs: pale or dark finish, short or tall, round or square, dimpled or not-dimpled on top. Your goal is simply to create a line of four pieces across the board, where all four pieces have some quality in common. But you don’t get to pick which piece you set from move to move, oh no. Your opponent hands you your pieces.

I’ve recently become a fan of games like Onitama and Pylos, with simple boards and few rules, which nevertheless admit multiple forms of strategy. Quarto, manufactured by the German company Gigamic, which also manufactures Pylos, has rules filling less than one page of the included instruction booklet. Yet once you start playing, you realize the game admits hundreds of possible interpretations. Minutes to learn, they say; years to master.

You need to think strategically, just like in Chess or Connect Four, not only in placing your pieces, but in how you block your opponent in placing theirs. But you get the added complication that you relinquish control, allowing your opponent to make some level of decision about the choices available to you. Think of it like a metaphor for the capitalist economy: you both are, and are not, in control of your decisions.

Most games run under fifteen minutes. Like in Chess, players often make early moves hastily, almost arbitrarily, then slow down as the game’s middle forces deliberative strategy. Then at the end, you find yourself moving lickety-split again, as the conclusion becomes inevitable. And when it’s over, you’re ready to play again, because you’re awash in heady excitement of new discovery.

Or is that just me?

15-Minute Egyptian Chess

David G. Royffe (game designer), Pylos

We sometimes hear the phrase “three-dimensional chess” as a metaphor for complicated thinking. But most attempts I’ve seen at creating actual three-dimensional chess variations have fallen short. I like the idea of a game that forces players to think both vertically and horizontally: it increases the complexity while remaining within the bounds of human comprehension. With Pylos, I’m one step closer to finding real 3-D chess.

The board is slightly less than twelve inches on a side. The pieces are small spheres, each slightly larger than a shooter marble, fifteen each in light or dark colors. Players arrange these thirty spheres in a pyramid shape; the winner is whoever places their sphere at the apex. The rules are so brief, they fit on one page. Sounds simple, right? Well, like Go, the simplicity conceals layers of nuanced strategic thinking.

Promotional photo

Sadly, that Go comparison only carries about so far. The much smaller board and fewer pieces result in much more circumscribed options for strategy; with practice, I would assume your greatest advantage comes from learning to read your opponent. Trying to anticipate another player’s moves in three dimensions creates more subtlety than the pieces. Therefore, I suspect this game would make for good family game nights.

I have mixed feelings about this game. I’ve enjoyed playing it, and it does have enough complexity to unfold in different ways and create several variations. However, speaking as a beginner, it doesn’t feel like it takes “a lifetime to master,” as promotional literature claims. Having played it a few times, I find my hands falling into a comfy place. Unlike chess, Go, or Onitama, this game has a finite feel that I cannot quite shake.

Overall, I enjoy playing this game; it’s quick but complex, easy to learn but difficult to master. But like poker, I suspect the greatest complexity comes from the other player, not the game itself. This isn’t a criticism; I certainly don’t intend to stop playing anytime soon. It’s just a recognition that the board places limits on the game. The real challenge is your perceptions, not really the game.

The Pixel Revolution

Jamie Woodcock, Marx at the Arcade: Consoles, Controllers, and Class Struggle

Why should Marxists care about videogames? Perhaps even better, why should videogamers care about Marxists? The digital play world has gotten along spectacularly without interference from a cadre of po-faced academics who interpret the world through an industrialized economic lens. Yet Dr. Jamie Woodcock, Oxford University researcher and lifelong videogamer himself, decided to approach his two passions together. The result is surprisingly uplifting.

Woodcock approaches videogames from two angles. (And he spells “videogame” thus too, as one word. It looks weird to me, but let’s stipulate his spelling for now.) The first and longer section considers how games are made. This sounds straightforward, especially given recent revelations about the near-sweatshop conditions games studios famously maintain. In the latter section, Woodcock looks at how we play games—which proves more difficult and loaded.

Discussions of videogames often begin with Atari and “Pong,” introduced in 1972. But Woodcock cites an early mainframe computer designed especially to play simple games as early as 1940. Is that, he asks, an example of a videogame? Which leads us into questions of definition, like what exactly is a videogame? What even is a game? These questions prove more difficult than you’d expect, and also more rewarding.

Games of various kinds grew alongside computers, which means they inevitably grew alongside the American defense network. This relationship between videogames and the military-industrial complex recurs throughout Woodcock’s book. But Woodcock notes early programmers devised their games as ways of resisting the regimented hierarchy of military contractor life. So early hacker culture was deeply controlled, yet simultaneously anarchic by nature.

This contradiction spills into game-making culture. Hackers and coders, being innate individualists, refuse to unionize. But without collective bargaining abilities, games workers are routinely exploited by management, who demand high-handed control, marathon hours, and few contract benefits. Woodcock isn’t the first to notice the contradiction between “individualism” and individuality; without a union, hackers get reduced to cogs in the machine.

Not that hackers take management demands quietly, no. Woodcock describes various ways programmers have written anti-capitalist messages into their videogames. Much of Woodcock’s book expounds upon a side mission written into Assassins’ Creed: Syndicate, where the player has an opportunity to join Marx himself in organizing textile workers and sabotaging management. The metaphor is too spot-on to be coincidence.

Dr. Jamie Woodcock

In a later chapter, Woodcock explores a recent development: Game Workers Unite (GWU), a hackers’ grassroots activist… um… event, where several game-makers banded together to expound, for lack of a better term, class consciousness. It isn’t a union really, not yet, but Woodcock admits events are progressing so rapidly, he can’t keep abreast of them; by now, hackers could, after two generations, finally be organized to fight the system.

Woodcock’s second section, dealing with game play rather than game creation, runs shorter. It also has a different tone from his first section. Where Woodcock interviews several game-makers, including forward thinkers engaged in organizing the industry, he doesn’t much speak to fellow game-players. Though he occasionally quotes reviewers, he mostly just analyzes the game experience, similar to Michel Foucault.

What he analyzes, though, is remarkable. In my youth, moralistic elders criticized videogames as isolating and lonely, stealing youth from communal outdoor play. But since around 1997, videogames have become increasingly team-oriented, a shared experience. This has only become more so as improving internet technologies make streaming games worldwide realistic. Games have elaborate, cinematic storylines, detailed graphics, and a team experience more nuanced than football.

This doesn’t make games socially neutral, though. Many games, particularly first-person shooters, tend to glorify war, and travel hand-in-glove with American military imperialism. Woodcock even describes how, with only minor modifications, the military has repurposed popular videogames as recruitment tools. Games cannot shed hacker culture’s roots among military contractors, apparently.

But that doesn’t make games relentless war machine propaganda. Since around 2010, an increasing number of first-person shooters have emphasized war’s futility. Early games stressed World War II, where American GIs fought an explicitly evil enemy, or the Cold War, where evil was implicit. Recent games have shifted focus to World War I, Vietnam, or the War on Terror, foregrounding war as interminable, degrading, and bleak.

In games, as in game-making culture, Woodcock sees potential for social engagement and expanding consciousness. Marxists, he admits, have often avoided addressing issues of play, and what the proletariat does after hours. But videogames are increasingly the way people organize themselves into communities and groups. Coupling his sophisticated research with plain-English writing, Woodcock opens games as a legitimate forum for social analysis.

Zen Chess for Beginners

Shimpei Sato (game designer), Onitama

New board games coming from mainstream publishers anymore tend to be too complex, require huge teams, or tie themselves to lucrative media properties. I seldom see games like chess or Go, timeless exercises of strategy, spatial reasoning, and friendly competition based upon trust and agreed-upon rules. And I especially see few with rules straightforward enough to savvy in one sitting.

Japanese game designer Shimpei Sato designed this game to mimic the experience of a traditional martial arts tournament. The game arrays one master and four pupils across a limited space, and gives them the goal of capturing opposing pieces. It requires players to think several steps ahead, which isn’t always easy. And unlike similar board games, it provides multiple ways to win.

Superficially, Onitama resembles chess, in having a geometric board and pieces. The board measures five squares by five, and each side has five pieces (ten altogether), so one-fifth of the board is occupied at the beginning of the game. But unlike chess, moves aren’t circumscribed by pieces’ nature. Available moves are determined by cards, which are dealt out at the beginning of the game, and which resemble traditional martial arts moves.

Any piece can move according to the cards players have available to them: many of the same basic lateral or diagonal moves that characterize chess. Thus there’s no memorizing which pieces can make which moves. However, here’s the trick: once you make one particular move, you remove that option from your choices, and pass it to your opponent. Any action you take, will become your opponent’s option on their next turn.

The game has sixteen possible moves available for players, but only five get used per game. I still haven’t seen all sixteen options yet (expansion packs are available). This means that every game has a distinct set of moves available, and one game won’t resemble the next. Like proficient martial artists bringing their unique skill sets to competition, this game changes every time you play it. Most board games can’t say that.

So the comparisons to the two obvious choices I’ve already mentioned, chess and Go, make sense. Yet it’s also a different experience, because the elegant simplicity of the rules (it took about two minutes to read the rulebook aloud) and fairly small board mean the game goes fast. It’s certainly possible for timid or deliberate players to drag the game by overthinking each move, but in practice, each individual game runs around fifteen minutes.

Some readers may find my repeated comparisons to chess and Go off-putting, because these games require a long learning arc, and an attention span many players lack in today’s success-oriented culture. I can’t stress enough: you can learn this game in mere minutes. You can play it before your coffee gets cold. Yet you can do this without exhausting its seemingly limitless ability to adapt to you.

The Onitama starting position (left) and in play (right)

Licensed from designer Sato for American production by Texas-based Arcane Wonders, the game design consciously channels images of Japanese beauty and Zen tranquility. The “board” is a scroll, actually printed on a non-skid vinyl mat, similar to a mousepad. The art resembles sumi-e painting, featuring woodland temples and disciples practicing standard moves. This design is somewhat stereotyped, though given the martial arts theme, that stereotype is perhaps earned.

The whole game folds into a box slightly smaller than four-by-eleven inches, smaller than most games manufactured by better-known companies like Milton Bradley or Parker Brothers. That makes it ideal for stuffing into a backpack or attache case and taking it around town. I’ve played in a coffee shop, a bar, and a restaurant, because it’s small enough to travel, and light enough to set up in a public place.

This combination of portability and simplicity makes it a good sharing game. Unlike Go, which can last for hours and involves hundreds of tiny stones that can become easily lost, Onitama has few parts and goes swiftly. Given time, I suspect that playing Onitama in a coffee house may become as popular as playing chess in the park, a boilerplate of good-minded people sharing an experience without spending money.

With very simple rules that make for easy learning, but the ability to evolve from one game to another, this makes an ideal all-ages game, a bridge to learning more complicated traditional board games which may require intense concentration students sometimes lack. I must admit, people playing Onitama against me have repeatedly cleaned my clock. Yet I keep coming back for its simplicity, strategy, and grace.