"Men are born for games."

June 25, 2009 5:17 PM

At the recent Games for Change conference, Brenda Brathwaite debuted her game Train. The WSJ blog Speakeasy interviews her: Players load boxcars with tiny yellow figurines and are asked to move the trains from one end of the course to the other. They pull cards that either impede their progress or free some of the characters. Once a train reaches the "finish line," the game is completed and it is revealed

that the destination of the trains is Auschwitz. Nobody "wins.". Abe Stein comments on playing.

posted by j.edwards (49 comments total)

I See What You Did There.
posted by mikeybidness at 5:41 PM on June 25

I don't really quite get the message. It doesn't really seem to say anything new about the Holocaust (I assume that's not a spoiler, based on what's written above), or the fact that people can contribute to horrible things without their knowledge. Is there something I'm missing about the game? It seems to me I'd be expecting a twist like that if I were at a "Games for Change" convention.
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:42 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

I mean, there are messages about complicity and ignoring the bigger picture floating about, but hey, people play games to have fun or get some positive feedback. This pulls them in and then kicks 'em square in the nuts and hell, once it's played, the gimmick's shot.
posted by mikeybidness at 5:45 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]

I don't mean to turn this into an argument about what games should be, but I think the "message" games, as a medium, work best when they are used to demonstrate a counter-intuitive idea or economic principle to a person in a way that appears irrefutable, since most games are about finding the best strategy anyway. Ayiti, for example, showed that it takes more than just hard work or education to do well in a developing nation.
posted by mccarty.tim at 5:53 PM on June 25

What is the message? That, if the people driving the trains to Auschwitz had been totally kept in the dark, like the players of the game are, then what they did wouldn't have been quite as bad?
posted by The World Famous at 6:06 PM on June 25

For her next show, she'll put the winner of a game of Candyland into a diabetic coma and reveal that chess is actually about a race war.
posted by adipocere at 6:09 PM on June 25 [15 favorites]

You know who else herded Jew into boxcars?

That's right.

You did.

AND THUS GODWIN'S SPELL WAS BROKEN.
posted by GuyZero at 6:14 PM on June 25 [13 favorites]

Is this a scene from the upcoming Bruno movie?
posted by ignignokt at 6:30 PM on June 25

Does it mean anything that I figured out what this game was about half way through the description, and the players should have as well...

So now the message is.....????
posted by HuronBob at 6:32 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]

I appreciate their intentions (and who knows, maybe the games are good), but that conference features some game titles that sound like they're from a Mike Judge script:

3rd World Farmer
A Seat At The Table
Budget Hero
Climate Challenge
CONSENT!
Darfur is Dying
Debt Ski

And more!
posted by ignignokt at 6:41 PM on June 25

Did she, by chance, work on the Kings Quest series? That shit suuuuuuucked.
posted by basicchannel at 6:45 PM on June 25

Shadow of the Colossus tackled the idea of withholding knowledge of what the player was actually doing and its moral implications far more subtly, artfully, and tastefully.
posted by Ndwright at 6:45 PM on June 25 [8 favorites]

Of course, anything removed from enough context and abstracted can become a harmless game to anyone. Many people have argued before that is a major reason for environmental destruction or the ease with which we can not feel bad about sweatshops or animal farms.

Games where you DO have context, like Dog Eat Dog or Steal Away Jordan work really well in highlighting human behavior even more, because you go in thinking you'll "be smart" and "do the right thing" and then the games force you to make choices and mistakes and suddenly, you realize how easily we get the human interactions and, sadly, tragedies, that we do.

I think both games make the issues of complicity even more clear, since you're very often also oppressed by the system and yet encouraged to join in the kyriarchy. A lot more nuanced and teaching than "ZOMG GERMAN GUARD" type stuff.
posted by yeloson at 6:50 PM on June 25 [3 favorites]

This was also the big reveal at the end of The Little Engine That Could.
posted by Astro Zombie at 6:53 PM on June 25 [22 favorites]

Spiel macht frei!
posted by Greg Nog at 7:03 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

So, there's not a lot of replay value.
posted by box at 7:23 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]

> Use Molecular Disruption Device

Target?

> Bugger planet

Congratulations. This was not a game. You have eliminated the entire Bugger race.

> ... WTF?
posted by Durn Bronzefist at 7:24 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

Wait, was I supposed to feel bad when I won as the Germans in Squad Leader?
posted by FuManchu at 7:29 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

You know, having seen an episode or two of the twilight zone this is going to come off as highly predictable or so damn abstract (putting unidentified little marbles in an unidentified box) that I'm not going to much care if, theoretically, the blue ones are Jews and the Red ones are Poles and the yellow ones are Homosexuals and so on.

I mean if you condition people to behave heroically, maybe, when the chips are down, they will. If, on the other hand, they're stuck at a table loading 12 million people onto a train to take them strait to the fucking ovens, what exactly are you trying to teach them?

Once I figured out what was going on I'd probably decide it was my turn to teach someone a lesson and start salting every sentence with lots of bad Nazi dialog and master race references.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 8:00 PM on June 25

Wow, talk about your bass-ackward marketing strategies. If you want to be the next Parker Brothers, Brenda, you're really gonna have to learn a little something about target demographics.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:03 PM on June 25

Somehow I knew those would be the words I would see after the jump. The tip-off was "or free some of the characters."
posted by JHarris at 8:07 PM on June 25

This to me sounds like that whole "you aborted Beethoven!" game. I also think it's just as pointless. It doesn't make you think as much as just raise your dander.
posted by dw at 8:16 PM on June 25

If you actually RTFA, you will see that it's not just a gotcha thing. The designer talks about working to get the atmosphere right and never using the word "game" in the rules, and she also talks about how some of the most key moments are when someone does figure out what's going on, and starts trying to work against the other players (within the rules). To be honest, the way she describes it, it sounds like it's less about the holocaust and more about people's understanding of it today.
posted by No-sword at 8:27 PM on June 25

This seems like an interesting art piece, and it's interesting to see how the story around a game can be so powerful. The mechanics themselves don't have emotional content, but the story can affect the players and make them uncomfortable playing the game. Subtle hints of the story during the game can pre-shadow the big twist at the end for even greater emotional impact.
posted by demiurge at 8:29 PM on June 25

No, don't you see? This makes us all complicit in the holocaust! WE would have done the same things as train conductors, as the game shows! Stupid humans just following rules not thinking for a second that other lives were at stake.

the game is completed and it is revealed

that the destination of the trains is the Soylent Green factory.
that they were taking PONIES to a GLUE FACTORY.
that one of the players is a cylon and "freed" characters are actually killed.
that they're playing a bad board game.
posted by graventy at 8:44 PM on June 25

It's infuriating, but only because it works under the assumption that we are stupid people.
posted by DoctorFedora at 8:49 PM on June 25

that the winner is stoned to death.
posted by Sys Rq at 8:51 PM on June 25

WSJ: Not all players have the same experiences. I understand that someone who played the game compared it to “Halo”?
Her, a bit later in the interview: The “Halo” player brought us a stronger point, I think. That point is that there’s still a lot of work to be done in educating people about what happened.

Yeah, that's it. Or someone realized what a manipulative 'work' your game was and was toying with you.
posted by graventy at 8:52 PM on June 25 [2 favorites]

This reminds me of a years-old magazine piece somewhere by a Jewish writer who lost relatives in the Holocaust gazing on as his son and a friend play with green army men. "I want to be the Nazis this time!" his son crowed. The guy decided not to say anything, but naturally, being Jewish, felt guilty about that.
posted by dhartung at 8:57 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

You're probably right graventy. And now my "make lots of master race comments" strategy just seems clumsy and hamfisted. Of course they don't seem to be taking the hint, so maybe hitting them over the head with it is the right answer.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 9:04 PM on June 25

mccarty.tim, So I tried a few rounds of that Ayiti game, and the only message I'm getting is that Haitans are a fragile, fragile people who cannot work or study or even rest at home without their health seriously deteriorating, even with decent living standards.
posted by FuManchu at 9:22 PM on June 25 [1 favorite]

This continues to infuriate me as I think about it, because it simply does not work on any meaningful level. It isn't a game so much as just pulling cards and reacting to them (so I guess on par with Candy Land). It doesn't have any sort of meaning beyond WHOOPS HOLOCAUST, particularly because the idea of the whole thing here is to have "meaningful" games or something. It's so bad that I'm actually inclined to say that it makes The Golems of Gotham look good by comparison, and that is something I am generally loath to say.

This is the work of someone who thinks they're brilliant and deep, which is generally a hallmark of someone who is neither.
posted by DoctorFedora at 12:25 AM on June 26

It was the "boxcars" that made it immediately obvious to me what the game's secret was. Not passenger cars. They clearly weren't going to Disneyland.

Utterly meaningless.
posted by WPW at 12:39 AM on June 26

I've read the linked pieces and watched the video interview on the WSJ, and I still don't see how the game is supposed to reveal deep truths about the holocaust. If you know what the game's about going in (i.e. anyone with a modicum of historical knowledge), then you can either play it to win like the 'Halo' player, or you try and subvert it - but your choice says nothing about your position on genocide, because the game is so shallow. From what I can gather about the rules, there is neither enough length nor depth to create a players investment in it commensurate with that of a Reichsbahn employee in the 1940s, and so any 'lessons' taught by the game are meaningless.
posted by Jakob at 2:36 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

[Self-post-pimping] Brenda has been in the blue before.
posted by thanotopsis at 3:18 AM on June 26

It doesn't have any sort of meaning beyond WHOOPS HOLOCAUST
Train -- a game that railroads the player.
So it looks like this game is too facile to support its intended message, but on the other hand, games are supposed to be easy to pick up and play. Considering the construction of the board and pieces and how mass production-unfriendly they are, you might have only one chance to play this. The typical response by people who have played is that once is enough.
Anyway, while we know what the cards do, we don't know what's actually written on them; there might be some powerful flavor text there. I'd be interested in playing the game just to see if there's a Companion Cube moment hiding in there somewhere (I guess it would have to be on the cards because I saw no hearts on the Jew pieces).
posted by vaghjar at 4:18 AM on June 26

And now it's time for BRENDA BRAITHWAITE AND SPATCH PLAY CLUE^*

SPATCH: I think I've deduced the killer! It was Professor Plum in the dining room with the rope.

BRENDA BRAITHWAITE: I'll check the envelope... oh, no!

SPATCH: What? What?!

BRENDA BRAITHWAITE: Professor Plum didn't do it. None of the suspects did. It was a suicide all along!

SPATCH: You are the M. Night Shylaman of board games, Brenda Braithwaite.

BRENDA BRAITHWAITE: Hooray!



NEXT WEEK:
Brenda Braithwaite and Spatch play Scrabble!



* NTSC version. The PAL version is entitled BRENDA BRAITHWAITE AND SPATCH PLAY CLUEDO.
posted by Spatch at 5:52 AM on June 26 [6 favorites]

but on the other hand, games are supposed to be easy to pick up and play

Since when? The best recommendation for an air combat game I know of is that it was designed in answer to a call by the Air Force as a way to teach pilots strategy, but the Air Force took one look at it and decided pilots weren't smart enough to figure it out.
posted by Kid Charlemagne at 6:10 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

It looks like Adolf Hitler Campbell has a videogame for this year's birthday.
posted by dances_with_sneetches at 6:14 AM on June 26

Dammit, I hate it when I'm making fun of someone and I spell their name wrong.
posted by Spatch at 6:37 AM on June 26

Been done. Ender's Game.
posted by QIbHom at 7:37 AM on June 26

Kid Charlemagne: Sure, there are exceptions. But as a general rule the most long-lived games with the largest and most stable communities over time have been built around very simple concepts that can explode into elaborate strategies: chess, backgammon, go, (international) football, and foot and vehicle races.
posted by KirkJobSluder at 8:24 AM on June 26

I'm with Jakob -- I still don't understand. This game seems immediately obvious to me from her use of the yellow markers (the stars of David were yellow) and the train cars (boxcars, not passenger cars). Is there somewhere we can see some of the rules or at least see how the gameplay progresses? I'm trying to get some idea of how this can be so disturbing to the players, but I am left cold.
posted by fiercecupcake at 9:50 AM on June 26

Power Grid is an excellent game in general, but also ended up teaching me a bit about the issues of capitalism vs. environmentalism in the process:

In the game you're a power company, and you are trying to end up serving the most cities and people- to do so, you have to invest in building lines and buying powerplants of different types. The game has an in built economy system for resources- coal, oil, nuclear materials, and even trash.

I stuck the green route as much as possible, which means you pay nothing or next to nothing on providing energy- this gave me a ton of extra cash through the midgame and I was doing well.

Come endgame, though, the most powerful powerplants were massive oil and coal factories- they were able to buy up the resources, store more of it and stockpile (size of plant gives you storage space), drive up the prices and knock out their competitors. Meanwhile I dropped in around as a mid player because I couldn't move into the market.

So, green might save the planet, but size wins the market... and, the game didn't include the other factors like buying up the competition, pushing policy on the government or how many jobs your factor produces, but's it was still pretty damning to see how the game worked.

(and it's still a great strategy game!)
posted by yeloson at 10:52 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

How about the game where the gameplay means whether or not you get to your destination or not. But the destination is determined by subtle cues or hidden clues...so you wind up in Disneyland...or Auschwitz.

Then there is the board game that comes with a gun. The kid who owns the game gets the gun ahead of time, when he opens the game box and discovers the gun. Nobody else knows he has the gun. When he invites his friends over to play, they roll dice and pull cards, like Monopoly. But one of the cards is "You get shot!" Then the kid with the gun pulls it out and shoots the lucky kid. There could be variants where, say, the first kid to buy a hotel gets shot. Or the second kid to land on Marvin Gardens. We could call it "Russian Monopoly".

Or Illuminati - the card game where, if a kid leaves the room to go to the bathroom, it's actually in the rules where you can rifle through his cards.

Or I know, a boxed game that just has anthrax spores in it. haha!
posted by Xoebe at 10:55 AM on June 26 [1 favorite]

With that singular “Halo” exception, no one has ever wanted to play again.

Of course, this can only be because the game is too emotionally powerful.
posted by grobstein at 1:05 PM on June 26

Process does not necessarily imply conscience. Nor should it.
posted by Area Control at 8:30 AM on June 27

This game sponsored by General Motors—Enjoy the Freedom of the Open Road.
posted by klangklangston at 9:10 AM on June 27

Er...so, if you can draw cards that free characters, and then it's revealed that the destination is Auschwitz, couldn't one win by drawing enough cards to release all ones characters? I know "Nobody wins" sounds better than "It's really statistically unlikely to win", but accuracy trumps punch, right?
posted by Bugbread at 4:03 AM on July 2