Guy Debord’s Situationist Board Game | Hacker News Reader

Guy Debord’s Situationist Board Game

dangerousminds.net

Looks like an interesting article but was unable to navigate it on my iPad. Seems like some touch events were hijacked but I lost patience trying to figure out what was going on.

A computerized version, with online play, would be excellent. The weakness I see is that the presence of a terrain is assumed (i.e. the board) when, I think, it needs to be determined first. This seems crucial, following the social, historical, premises of the theory behind the game, because such determination is already a move in the war that is to ensue.

Another alteration may be to not assume there are only two opposing sides in the war.

mind. blown. how would you go about determining if there was a third+ adversary?

Well, I haven't had an opportunity to go over the complete rules to this particular game. But many other strategy games have a traitor element. It can work in a two-player game by having a chance that a move will backfire and help your opponent rather than yourself. The third party is a NPC whose actions are randomized.

A computerized version was indeed developed but ran into legal trouble. The web site still exists [1]. Perhaps someday they'll be allowed to host the game again.

[1] http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php

Trademark is just war by other means.

Thanks for the link. Will watch.

and if you go to archive.org and look at their version of http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/ on e.g. January 2014, you might find an old downloadable beta...

Hmmmm. Clausewitz and Situationism is not a connection I would have imagined.

The article's first paragraph is poorly written. A game known as Kriegspiel has a much older heritage: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame) and it appears that Debord's game was either a reinvention or merely a variant of it.

While Clausewitz and Situationism might be disconnected, Debord himself often called on Clausewitz.

Here Clausewitz is mentioned in the opening paragraph of Debord's autobiography 'Panegyric':

http://debordiana.chez.com/english/panegyric.htm

and:

"The world of war presents at least the advantage of not leaving room for the silly chapter of optimism".

> "Terrain is transmuted into psychogeography"

While I understand what the above sentence is saying, I would like to explore and interrogate the geopsychology of its author in order to understand what led her to formulate her spatial epistemology using this odiously unnecessary verbiage.

Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

From the Wiki page

>defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the emotions and behavior of individuals."

>"a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."

The essential tool here being overlaid maps of say San Francisco & http://xkcd.com/256/ or a topographic map such as [1]

[1] https://theblackbox.ca/project/mapping/DSC02355.jpg.html

> Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

True but some communities go out of their way to obfuscate and complicate. I think you might become immune to this stuff if you'd studied related subjects at university but when I hear any of a set of particular words and phrases I begin to get the red mist and start reaching for my favourite book on the Sokal Hoax.

> Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

True, but a more subtle observer might point out that the jargon can serve more than one function simultaneously. In fields like organic chemistry which is famous for its compound names that sometimes extend beyond the page limit, the jargon is unavoidable, well defined and categorized, and serves a narrow and specific role (though true, learning that jargon would signal your competence within the field, so perhaps it's a dual one, where the secondary function is to serve as a barrier). In a number of other fields, specifically the social sciences (and even more specifically, the social sciences after they inhaled a large dose of Frankfurtian critical theory), the jargon serves a far more complex role of (1) naming a concept, (2) signaling to peers from other disciplines the "scienciness" of what could (sometimes justly) be criticized as a non-empirical field, and (3) signaling to peers from the same discipline the "political in-groupness" of the author, that is that the author shares their political beliefs.

One could even argue there is a 4th role, where you subtly signal (to potential recruits from the student body): "See how much non-empiricism we can get away with? Join us, and you can get away with it too! Free degree, if only you agree!"

I wonder if it's at all similar to go, which is considered by philosophers like Gilles deleuze to be the "war game" part excellence. Go, at least, closely resembles che Guevara's recipe for winning a guerrilla war: to encircle and to not be encircled. Definitely going to look deeper into this!

Debord's Kreigspiel isn't very interesting as a game (clearly derived from chess & less involved) or as a conflict simulation. It's an incredible artifact!

I'm a fan of military history, but the video at the end of the article is awful. It doesn't clearly explain the game because it gets lost in historical pretentiousness.

The video is only superficially about the game and more about the political philosophy of Debord. It is hosted by the Class Wargames website[1], with a subtitle of"Ludic subversion in the bureaucratic society of controlled consumption". Personally, i"m not clear as to whether they are trying to make a political point or if it is just a tongue-in-cheek website about a few board games.

[1] http://www.classwargames.net/

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