I started out as a nerd. Even when I got better, I was never ashamed of my nerdy ways! Board games and wargames were the final masculine holdout against the forces of Woke, holding longer than even pro sports and gendered restrooms, either because we nerds were that dedicated to our hobbies…
…that participatory in our hobbies… those sports-watching Grillers are case studies in learned helplessness…
…or because feminists couldn’t endure us creepy autists with four-digit IQs long enough to thwart our true loves.
It’s victory each way, so HA!
But it didn’t last. We had too much discretionary income to be ignored… income that we possessed, ironically, because we were ignored. Income, and happiness.
There were warning signs, of course. One was Goth chicks infiltrating D&D. Another was vampire LARPs. And another, was the cooperative board game genre.
SJW: “You can win without competing against each other!”
Nerd: “You mean, like, forming military alliances? We’ve already been doing that.”
SJW: “Uh… yeah, except everybody can be on the winning alliance.”
Nerd: “You mean, like, adventuring parties? We’ve already been doing that.”
SJW: “Why are you creeps making this hard? It’s… uh… imagine if everybody gets to be a winner, AND there are no bad guys.”
Nerd: “You cannot tell a story without conflict. The seven literary elements are plot, tone, theme, setting, conflict, characters and point of view. No conflict means you have, at best, an open-world setting in which the plot is as constrained as a railroad locomotive.”
SJW: “Nerd!”
Nerd: “Yes, we are nerds here. Hello!”
SJW: “Maybe if I show you an example…”
Nerd: “Okay, that makes sense now. It’s a board game in which the plot is curing a global pandemic, the characters you play are various medical specialists, the setting is modern planet Earth, the theme is man versus nature, the point of view is third-person omniscient, and the tone is… um…”
SJW: “Climate change. Err, I mean, everybody cooperates and there’s no loser.”
Nerd: “But the disease loses, correct?”
Pandemic the board game was released in 2008, so it was unlikely to be a gloat regarding Covid. You play one of several medical specialists from researchers to dispatchers, and the goal is to cure 4 plagues spreading across the planet before too many cities die. Because nobody plays a bad guy and you can win ONLY be playing as a team, it was called a “cooperative” board game.
That word ‘ONLY’ distinguishes it from other games that allow varying levels of cooperation on your personal road to victory. Diplomacy, for example.
h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diplomacy_(game)
Diplomacy is a strategic board game created by Allan B. Calhamer in 1954 and released commercially in the United States in 1959. Its main distinctions from most board wargames are its negotiation phases (players spend much of their time forming and betraying alliances with other players and forming beneficial strategies) and the absence of dice and other game elements that produce random effects. Set in Europe in the years leading to the Great War…
Diplomacy was the first commercially published game to be played by mail (PBM); only chess, which is in the public domain, saw significant postal play earlier. Diplomacy was also the first commercially published game to generate an active hobby scene with amateur fanzines; only science-fiction, fantasy and comics fandom saw fanzines earlier.
Sure, you can ally with your neighbor, but you better have a good reason for trusting him to not betray you.
Pandemic was a huge success, particularly with women, as I noticed at the time. Which was fine, women can enjoy games too, but the faint odor of participation award left me disinterested. Besides, the industry had already released the cooperative game Arkham Horror that was more my style.
SJW: “Want to try a game?”
Nerd: “Sure!” sits down at the table “As the designated quarantine expert, I immediately stop all air travel to China and Southeast Asia.”
SJW: “Um… you aren’t allowed to prevent migration.”
Nerd: “But quarantine is the first step in preventing any disease from spreading, and most global plagues come from East Asia.”
SJW: “You are totally overthinking this. You racist.”
Nerd: “I’m a nerd, not a racist. Remember our chat a moment ago? Meanwhile, when does herd immunity kick in? There should be a chance for regions to overcome the disease without international government intervention.”
SJW: “Just play the game. You can change stuff afterwards.”
Game gets played.
Nerd: “Okay, yeah, that was fun. You’re totally on to something here! I’ll just make a couple minor changes…”
h ttps://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pandemic_(board_game)
Pandemic: Contagion is a card-based version of the game, first released at Spiel 2014, that puts players in the role of the diseases and, unlike in the base game, the players do not cooperate. The object of the game is to eradicate the human race by spreading infections.
Nerd: “FUN!!!”
SJW: “That was as fun as executing homosexuals for blasphemy against God.”
Nerd: “I know, right?”
SJW: “How about a nice game of Climate Change?”
Bored game: New woke game asks players representing US, Chinese governments to work cooperatively to solve climate change
h ttps://www.theblaze.com/news/bored-game-new-woke-game-asks-players-representing-us-chinese-governments-to-work-cooperatively-to-solve-climate-change
By Cortney Weil, 31 May 2023
A new board game that will soon hit the market asks players representing otherwise opposing global superpowers to work cooperatively to solve climate change.
The new game, Daybreak, was developed by Matteo Menapace and Matt Leacock, the same designers who created the hit game Pandemic in 2008. In 2020, when interest in Pandemic returned because of COVID-19, Menapace and Leacock once again joined forces to develop a game that would “explore systemic, high-impact solutions to the climate crisis” without being “preachy,” Menapace wrote in a blog post last September.
I won’t say that Pandemic was an intentional effort to discourage masculine competition in favor of Narrative agendas… but /eye roll/ this is my shocked face. It’s almost like a certain personality type will inevitably reach a certain destination.
The result of their efforts is Daybreak, a game that, according to its website, “presents an optimistic vision of the near future, where you and your friends get to build the mind-blowing technologies and resilient societies we need to decarbonize the world.”
In Daybreak, which was originally called Climate Crisis, players act as a governmental power representing various countries or regions in the world, including the U.S., China, and the European Union, though other, less wealthy areas are also represented as well. “The last thing we want is for people to be treating their populations of vulnerable folks as hitpoints, or things to trade off, or resources,” Leacock said.
Because it would be too honest? “Humanity shall be limited to 500M headcount” was on the Georgia Guidestones, remember? Existing populations aren’t even hitpoints, they’re liabilities.
The only two things you need to know about Climate Change, are 1. you must make government-directed sacrifices today in return for a better tomorrow, and 2. tomorrow never comes.
Player-governments then negotiate with one another to reduce greenhouse emissions. Should one government-player achieve net-zero emissions, that player is the winner, but if one government-player has too many communities in crisis, everyone loses. In addition to carbon levels, all government-players share one other common enemy: time. Once time expires, the game is over.
How does that not create a hostage situation? If there’s five players then you have a 20% chance to win… or with a simple change in strategy, a 100% chance to not lose. At least, to not lose worse than anybody else.
Not having played the game, I cannot answer. Hmm… nobody else has played the game, either. It’s still in development.
Thus, Daybreak encourages player-governments to team up and work cooperatively for the good of the whole planet. “Each one of these powers has different abilities,” Leacock explained. “… You’ve got this global responsibility to figure out how to contribute in some way.”
[GunnerQ imagines those different abilities]
China can ignore all treaty-imposed carbon limits.
The United States can replace the real-life players at the game table.
The European Union has no player, automatically accepts every offered negotiation and never acts on its own initiative. Competing foreign demands cancel each other on a 1-for-1 basis.
All wars are carbon-neutral if they benefit Israel.
If time runs out then Africa wins. Africa cannot win any other way.
“The United States may be very good at research and development,” Leacock said. “China may have better control over its economy — direct control — and so on.”
But even though the game includes adversarial superpowers like the U.S. and China, it still encourages them to work cooperatively, seemingly turning player-governments into quasi-globalists. “I think that it’s an important message to get across with the game, that people really do have to cooperate,” Leacock said. “That just looking at it through this nationalistic, zero sum lens is not going to get us anywhere.”
That’s a design flaw. The game’s governments can be called literally anything, right? So, if using their existing names is problematic with players then just call China “Buddha Land” or “Eastasia”, or something. (Hmm, maybe not Eastasia, either.)
But they won’t change it. They can’t. They must be seen supporting the Narrative. The Narrative doesn’t want Cydonia and Olympus Mons cooperating to terraform the environment of Mars. The Narrative wants Climate Change forced upon the existing national governments, and peoples, of the world.
This game Daybreak is meant to be a morality play of Totalist victory upon specifically named enemies of the State, and the proof is in the choice of conflict: you, versus ‘everybody who wants to be left alone’.
“In Pandemic, players easily assumed that the diseases were naturally occurring, universal threats… never mind that four such diseases appear & spread at the exact same time, with no single points of origin… but in Daybreak, not all players easily assume that humanity must be enslaved to a world government preaching an impossible utopian vision in order to justify its massive social and economic cruelties. We blame White-recorded history for misinforming them and are silencing our critics as quickly as we can. IT’S NOT WHAT IT LOOKS LIKE! REAL COMMUNISM HAS NEVER BEEN TRIED! TURN IN YOUR GUNS ALREADY OR THE PLANET GETS IT!”
“Matt, you’re doing the hostage thing again.”
In true woke fashion, Leacock and Menapace are still attempting to make Daybreak even more inclusive. To that end, they are asking “folks who have experience in climate advocacy, policy, science, engineering, art, or games” — especially folks “based or rooted in the Global South” — to become part of their team.
In true Woke fashion, Peacock and Menopause are selling their utopian product before it exists, because it’s never going to. I tried to find images of the game board and such, but all I’m finding… even on the designers’ dedicated web site… is the year 2020 concept box art. Which is every bit as ground-breaking and creative, as the scientists who are so close to inventing pocket-sized clean nuclear fusion power plants that they’ve already green-lit the planned destruction of all hydrocarbon & nuclear infrastructures that exist outside of their paymasters’ control.
Making climate change look good is such a hard a sell that, after three years of selling it, Peacock and Menopause are begging Africa for help.
And for good reason.
When time runs out, Africa wins again.