'War on Terror' accepted into the Bodleian Library

You think we make this stuff up, don't you? If it's any consolation, it's hard for us also to get used to the surreal reach of our first board game. So it's true - War on Terror is now part of the John Johnson Collection of Printed Ephemera at the famous Bodleian Library in Oxford.

The Bodleian libraries are among the most renown and celebrated in the world and the John Johnson collection is one of the most important collections of printed ephemera in the world, so it's a bizarre honour to have War on Terror under their roof.

The John Johnson collection is a relatively new addition to the Bodleian but even from the start the original library was more than a collection of books and manuscripts - it has always housed objects of "scientific, exotic or historical interest". We'd like to think War on Terror is filed under 'exotic'.

Not sure where we go from here. War on Terror is proving a difficult beast to top - but we're working on it.

TBG at the BBC?

What's this? Us? At the BBC? Whatever could we be doing? Pitching the board game equivalent of 'Partridge Amongst the Pigeons'? Unfortunately nothing that good. But there could be something exciting on the horizon. Then again, maybe not. And we'll promptly pretend this blog entry never existed. Carry on.

At Last, the Perfect Opportunity to send Hugo Chavez a Game

It feels slightly taboo to say you support Venezuela's famously populist president, Hugo Chavez. At best you mark yourself out to be a hopelessly gullible idealist and at worst some kind of child-eating communist. But from what I know, I'd take Chavez over any of our party leaders here in the UK.

We've been meaning to send Chavez a War on Terror since Day One but we lacked a solid pretext except to say, "We think you're alright; here, you might like this". Not that we need a solid pretext, but in Chavez's case, it seemed requisite.

Well today we have our pretext and unfortunately it's a negative one. Last year, Venezuela passed a law that comes into effect this week, banning the import, sale and promotion of violent video games and toys.

Video and electronic games with violent content will be banned, as will toys that mimic any number of tools of violence - guns, knives etc. Additionally, toys that "stimulate aggressiveness or violence" also come under the ban.

Trying to ban violent video games or violent movies is about as pointless as trying to ban violent art or violent books Not only are the contraband items rather vague and general, but the application of this new law is equally broad and open to all manner of subjective interpretation. For example, the "promotion" of one of these toys is now unlawful and punishable by up to 5 years in prison. What constitutes promotion however hasn't been defined.

Why is this so bad? For a start, even if the law were laudable, it's hard to imagine how it will be effectively enforced. Modern history is littered with failed attempts to try and ban x or y genre because of its supposedly degenerative effects. It never works. And it shouldn't. Censorship isn't the answer. Trying to ban violent video games or violent movies (the two most common entertainment forms under attack) is about as pointless as trying to ban violent art or violent books.

More importantly, even if you accept that violent games really do have a negative effect on society, any blanket, extreme measure like this wipes out too many entirely valid games and toys because not everything that deals with violence and aggression is bad. Of course, War on Terror encourages a violent, short-sighted and aggressively greedy disposition to succeed (most of the time). It demands this attitude because the game is, at its heart, an exercise in role-playing and through that process you reach a greater understanding about the world and the forces that drive it.

Acknowledging then that some toys and games are "acceptably violent" raises the even trickier question of who decides what is an isn't valid - hence the need for the extreme blanket measure in the first place. This approach, while absurd and unfair, is far preferable to the minefield of subjective whim and fancy that would follow a case-by-case evaluation.

The reason that Chavez and the Venezuelan government have got this so disastrously wrong is that this ban is the answer to the question: "How do we reduce violent crime in our society?". Providing opportunity and reducing inequality, along with effective policing and education are the key tools for reducing crime. Never has it been limiting access to the Playstation. If this were the case, the most violent countries would be those countries where children played the most games.

So we finally have a good reason to send Chavez a War on Terror. I'm still debating whether to include a lengthy, reasoned argument or simply the single line: "Surely, you don't want this banned too?" The latter would be a lot easier to translate into Spanish.

We'll be sure to update you on any response we might get.

On Game Development, Irrationality and Cheating

We've been a bit quiet of late. That tends to mean one of two things - there's a tax return to complete, or we've drunk ourselves into a pre-foetal state of comprehension and are unable to do much except wallow in our own pool of dribble and vomit.

Well, as of right now, there is a third explanation. To be more accurate, this third explanation replaces the 2nd explanation above, since - let's be honest here - we're simply too old and boring to get that drunk these days. So that means there are still only two explanations, but just one of the explanations has changed - which in itself is an exceptionally convoluted way of declaring that we're designing a new game!

In anticipation of the avalanche of questions from the world's media and bloggosphere, we can't unfortunatley give much away except to say it's in very early stages. We have a prototype that is currently being played and blankly stared at in equal measure. We are, however, very excited. This one's more in the vein of War on Terror than Crunch in terms of size, ambition and theme. That will probably make a lot of people happy, but it also means development is slooooow.

What's particularly exciting for me personally is that I've been drawing a lot of inspiration of late from counter-intuitive behaviours and other psychological oddities. To this end, the current game is benefitting (well, that may be debatable) from the wisdom contained within books like "Irrationality" by Stuart Sutherland, "Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb" by William Poundstone and "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely.

Using actual psychological forces and behavioural patterns to inform game mechanics fits perfectly with our desire to use games to comment on the real world and to use existing human tensions, relations and interplay as the basis for in-game player interactions. This works so well across the spectrum, from Realpolitik to Keynesian economics, that we're genuinely surprised that no one else seems to be embracing it as a way of designing games. It could be that a lot of designers are overly focussed on the holy grail of "elegance" and "simplicity" giving way to deeper gameplay (chess and Go are the spectres behind such obsessions). However, the chaos of human behaviour is far more interesting for us: harder to manage in terms of game design, but much more rewarding.

Of the books mentioned above, I can recommend "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely as a particularly enlightening-but-easy read.

To start you off, check out this TED lecture of Dan's on cheating and our irrational moral code. The real meat starts at around 4 minutes and 20 seconds in:

The implications here for game design should be obvious. Think for a moment about what he says about the actor who cheats wearing different college sweatshirts - cheating as a member of one group can make another group (collectively) more honest. Amazing! There are many games that use cheating as a mechinism, but few really unearth the human drives behind this common behaviour - they just chuck it out there as something you have to do. A game that was really based on cheating would have these remarkable, counter-intuitive outcomes: players may make themselves honest; most likely they would end up creating their own (internal) rules.

I actually have to force myself to stop reading now in case our prototype turns into a behavioural economics classroom exercise instead of a game. But still .... it's all research.

Three new reasons to leave the country

In the absence of much else happening, a triumvirate of bad news for your digestion:

1. Flying Robot Spies UK police are planning to use 'military spy drones' to hover and criss-cross the skies of Britain in an attempt to better control and spy on people fight crime. You can bet that as this hits opposition, some nasty terrorist plot will be 'foiled' just in time to show how necessary it is. Too Orwellian for words.

2. Secrecy is the Order of the Day Lord Hutton, the man who exonerated the government of any wrong-doing in the death of Dr David Kelly has now decreed that details of his death, including the post mortem, be kept secret in the "interests of national security" (somehow) for the next 70 years. Any semi-functioning democracy holds as one of its core tenets the necessity for independent, public autopsies and coroner reports. Apparently in the UK, this requirement (like many other basic human rights) are subservient to 'national interests'.

3. We Knowingly Facilitated Torture (and Benefited From It) In a parallel universe, where world leaders are held accountable for minor indiscretions like the pointless massacre of a million people, someone has the guts to state once-and-for-all that we knowingly facilitated the torture of terrorist suspects being flown around the world by the CIA and that we happily reaped the 'benefits' that this barbaric practice brings. Oh hang on, that person is Craig Murray. There's hope yet ... (EDIT: More hope here, if you can call it hope).

In slightly (OK, very) unrelated news, War on Terror got a glowing review in the Morning Star the other day. As you know, we're commies at heart, so this made us right proud.

P.S. This month marks FIVE YEARS of TBG blog posts. To mark this quite unlikely achievement, let's, you and I, take a little spin in the TBG time machine and revisit that very first post. The time is January 2005; War on Terror is emerging from a rather rocky period of development, while the real war on terror is going from bad to worse...