The rules of *Train *say “Train is over when it ends.” Yeah, there’s nothing stopping you from just getting up and walking away. I wouldn’t be surprised if someone has done just that. But getting up and walking away from a game in progress is a violation of the social contract. Good players don’t just get up and walk away, they stay and finish the game. Being a quitter is being a bad player. So … maybe being a bad player is the only way a decent person can play Train.
On the other hand … it’s easy to get up and walk away from a board game. It would have been much harder to walk away from a job on the Deutsche Reichsbahn in 1943. So maybe quitting *Train *is letting yourself off the hook too easily. Instead of walking away being the best move, maybe walking away is just a cheap out. Maybe the best move is to see the game through and do what you can to subvert it. Of course, subverting a board game is also easy. You’re not risking your life the way the way you’d have had to to stop the trains from running to the camps. So maybe breaking the game is also a cheap out … .
There’s no clear winning strategy to Train. And even if you refuse to play, you’ve still made a move.
I was playing Civ V the other day, and a much weaker neighbor kept sending missionaries into my territory and converting my citizens to his religion. Finally, I got fed up, and declared war on him. “When this war is over,” I declared to myself, “There won’t be a single living Jew on the planet!”
Sid fucking Meier turned me into Hitler.
The problem is, this “Train” game being described is clearly intentionally misleading and designed to make people feel bad. Both of these are immoral. So it does not make a good case for non-fun games needing to exist.
And I say this as someone who has made it clear that I have no problems with games that aren’t fun. I do have a problem with people who find it “interesting” to fuck with other people’s emotions.
I mean, we have a term for this sort of thing. It’s called trolling. And trolling is the one type of art I’d be perfectly fine completely getting rid of.
You want to give someone an “experience,” it needs to be one they opt into.
Nonsense. I’ve read reviews of the game; it’s designed to explore how a game’s mechanics can lead to a particular experience. I doubt that many people who have played Train thought they were going in for a regular game (ferchrissakes, there’s only one copy of it, the board is on a broken pane of glass, there’s a vintage typewriter holding the cards, and if you look closely, the shift symbol on the 5 key is the SS symbol). Instead, people went into it for the experience.
That’s nothing like trolling, any more than a movie with a twist is trolling.
As for breaking the rules, two examples were in the review I read:
One player started hiding the game pieces under the table, saying that he was helping them escape;
Another player unilaterally declared that no, the train was NOT going to Auschwitz, it was going to Denmark.
And that’s part of the experience. Are you willing to violate the social contract in order to change the narrative? In the game, the violation of the social contract is trivial, the consequences for doing so are trivial, but the rewards for doing so are also trivial. In what the game models, it was all life and death.
Nobody but nobody thinks all games should be like this. Personally I never want to play Train. But I love that people are making games like this.
I have a friend who made a great tabletop RPG called Dog Eat Dog. In it, most of the players play Pacific Islanders, and one plays an unnamed colonial power. The colonial power distributes or takes resources and can more or less make all the rules. The islanders can play along, or they can rebel-- a tactic that hurts them as much as the power. I haven’t described the rules very well, but they are simple and elegant in codifying a power imbalance.
It’s an interesting game, and quite a mind trip. The emotional reaction when playing it is visceral and lingers. I think what makes it really clever is it address both colonization, but also the strange power dynamics of role playing games in general.
Yeah, that was linked to either earlier in this thread or in the other one that Jophiel made. Now, Dog Eat Dog I would play because the disturbing aspects are new mechanics introduced as the progresses and the enormity (in the pedantic sense) of what happens is only really available at the end when everyone realizes that whether they ‘won’ or ‘lost’, the natives had been truly fucked from the beginning. That’s an interesting experience.
Yeah, I read about Dog eat Dog yesterday based on this thread, and it’s another of those games that I love that they’re made, I love thinking about it, and I know that I’ve got plenty of angst in my life already without playing a game like that, thank you very much.
Well, both The Hamster King and zweisamkeit said that a number of players didn’t know until mid-game. Which, from the description, seems improbable but then they saw people playing it and I didn’t so I’ll take them at their word.
I have to admit that the various board games listed here would get a response from me somewhere between “Sucks to be you, little wooden peg-people; I’ve got points to score” and “So this game gives a historical experience of the colonization and subjugation of those lands? Neat. Set me up to take as many of you imperialists down in my futile resistance as possible.” I don’t know that I’d experience any deal of pathos from them. I might just disassociate myself from my pixels and game pieces more than the average person though.
We see the same thing happened to other medias now happening to video games. Anything that becomes too popular must suck at some point because it has to please everyone.
I disagree. A good part of the reason why The Walking Dead is so effective is because it’s interactive, and makes you do things. The narrative wouldn’t be as effective if it didn’t make you actually aim the gun at Duck, or whatever else. Maybe you want to split this into two categories: “game” and “interactive storytelling experience” or whatever, but what it did is not something that would have been done as effectively with a movie or a book.
As for exploiting the sympathy for a little girl, I mean, the entire game is wrapped up in themes about parenthood, surrogate parenthood, and life. Clementine is part of that, but it’s simplistic to say all it did was exploit sympathy for a little girl. Especially since in Season 2, IMO the better season, you play as that little girl and by all counts she’s a strong, intelligent person who is no more a victim than anyone else in the game.
I absolutely believe that people were surprised by the reveal–that’s not what I said. I said that they probably didn’t think they were in for a regular game experience. The gameboard and its one-of-a-kind nature almost certainly indicated that it would be an unusual game experience.
I would think it a little hinky to sit down with someone and say, “Hey, wanna play a little Team Fortress with a new mod I found? Cool, fun!” and then five minutes in, Surprise, you’re killing concentration camp escapees! Not cool. But I don’t think that’s what was going on here. Folks almost certainly knew the game was something other than a normal beer-and-pretzels experience. They didn’t know exactly what it’d be, but they weren’t expecting (or shouldn’t have been expecting) light entertainment.
If making you feel bad is his purpose, then yes. However, from what I read about him, he is a political activist, which heavily implies the purpose of his works were to inform people, and ultimately make the world a better and happier place.
If he did it because he felt bad, and he wants everyone else to feel bad due to hatred of the world, then yeah, fuck him. But I doubt that’s true, seeing as you think it’s weird to call him a dick.
This board game, as described, exists because a guy wants to see what it’s like to make people feel bad and watch how they react. He not only doesn’t get their consent, as any ethical experimenter would do, but supposedly lies about the premise of the game just to mislead people.
I realize that there have been later posts arguing against these points, but that’s not what I had to work with when I made my statement.
I do not believe the ethic that you should not decrease the net happiness of the world is controversial. People will argue about what happiness means, but the basic idea is pretty standard. Why do you not do X? Because X will hurt others and/or yourself.
I don’t think he’s all that wrong, really. Things that become mainstream tend to lose a lot of their original edge. It’s why in the gaming industry you have to go to the independent developers to find most new and exciting innovations.
If art is what you are looking for, mainstream stuff does tend to suck.
Sure, “it’s popular, so it sucks” is a ridiculous stereotype, but it didn’t come from nowhere. There is a kernel of truth to it.
ADDENDUM TO MY PREVIOUS POST:
With the new information, I do not see the game as trolling anymore. If you know going in that what you are getting is not a “fun” game, and that it is about the experience, then you have consent. That means these people realize they may become unhappy and are prepared to deal with it. Remember, I’m all for the idea that games do not have to be fun.
It’s an overgeneralization and a defense of poor practices.
Mainstream media can be overly broad and general and not very interesting. Who cares?
That doesn’t mean mind blowing, interesting stuff still can’t exist in parallel. Nor does it excuse, in part or in whole, the behavior of assholes.
So, no, video games going “too popular” doesn’t mean it all sucks now. It’s a passive aggressive defense of assholes being assholes under the cover of supporting some kind of fucked up notion of true art.
…just going back to this post I made earlier in this thread: Dan Golding has come out with a follow up article.
Golding confirms my speculation: with a few pitiful exceptions he hasn’t been a target of harassment. Yet Alexander, who wrote a less vitriolic article than Golding, has been the target of a substantial amount of harassment. Both articles were written at nearly the same time on the same topic. So the question goes back to the people claiming collusion: why was Alexander targeted but not Golding?
