Isegoria

The ironically named Monopoly Live takes some of the human element out of the (in)famous board game, by having a computer adjudicate all the rules — something Dark Tower did in 1981, when computers were novel.

So, it takes away the dice and play money, but it adds some things, too:

It sprinkles in random events, like a horse race where players must bet on winners.

The computer also tracks how fast or slow play is going, and may intervene to make it lively. If, say, very little property is getting bought, it will announce an auction in the middle of turns.

Monopoly was intended as an anti-monopoly propaganda piece — specifically an anti-land-monopoly piece — but the interviewed expert doesn’t seem to know that:

Mary Flanagan, a game designer and distinguished professor of digital humanities at Dartmouth, said that games tended to reflect the societies that they were played in. For instance, the original Monopoly, issued in 1935 by Parker Brothers, now a subsidiary of Hasbro, reflected “American ingenuity, the sense of needing to have hope, and reinforcing capitalism in the face of real economic despair,” she said.

Every Friday night, from eighth grade, in 1979, through his senior year in high school, in 1984, Ethan Gilsdorf played Dungeons & Dragons. He stopped playing when he went off to college, but he rediscovered his hobby years later:

When I hit 40, I discovered my cache of D&D rule books and dice some two decades after I’d last laid eyes on it. Stirred by nostalgia, I wrote “Fantasy Freaks and Gaming Geek,” a travel memoir/pop culture investigation that records a year spent “re-geeking” myself and reintegrating D&D and its ilk back into my life. Thanks to the widespread acceptance of gaming and fantasy subcultures — from “Lord of the Rings” to “Harry Potter” to MMOs (online role-playing games) like “World of Warcraft” (aka WoW) — that re-geeking was easier than I expected. I emerged from my hobbit hole and saw a kinder, more tolerant world. A real world where it’s safe to make peace with one’s “inner geek” without risk of reprisal from the jocks. And I’m not the only one making piece with my 20-sided die. “Your story is my story,” countless men tell me.
[...]
“D&D is intrinsically nostalgic,” Tavis Allison told me in a recent e-mail. Allison, 40, is a fundraiser for a hospital in New York City and an avid D&Der who also moderated a panel discussion called “Dungeons & Dragons in Contemporary Art” at a New York City gallery this fall. “The art in the oldest books is weird and crude and like a medieval manuscript; even when it was new it reeked of some strange past, and part of the appeal of fantasy in general is this longing for a past that never was. Can you be nostalgic for something you never had?”

Yes. Yes you can.

Pure and simple, for many, D&D represents a lost age: It was an individualized, user-driven, DIY, human-scaled creative space separate from the world of adults and the intrusion of corporate forces. As Allison rightly noted, D&D recalls that day “before orcs and wookiees were the intellectual property of vast transmedia corporations.” Back when you had lots more free time than money — before girlfriends, job, kids. Life.

Shigeru Miyamoto, Nintendo’s man behind Mario, is the closest thing there is to an autobiographical game creator:

His experience with his family’s pet Shetland sheepdog, and, more to the point, with other dog owners, gave him the idea for Nintendogs, a popular game in which you create a simulation of a pet and look after it on the DSi.

And Pikmin, a game featuring tiny creatures that have stalks protruding from their heads and that live and travel in pods called Onions, arose out of his time puttering in the garden.

When he turned forty, he decided to give up cigarettes and pachinko and get in shape. He took up swimming and jogging, and began weighing himself every day on a digital scale. He hung graphs of the data, down to the gram, on the bathroom wall. “Once the graphs I’d recorded started to pile up, I started to feel a strange fondness for them — regardless of whether I was gaining weight or losing weight,” he said a few years ago, in a Q. & A. with Nintendo’s president, Satoru Iwata. All this became, for his wife and his daughter, a source of curiosity and amusement, and an idea occurred to him. “This could be a nice trigger for conversation,” he told me. “If I could make it into a game, it could probably help isolated fathers get more association with their daughters.” He brought the notion to the team of designers developing games for the Wii. They were skeptical, but eventually they came out with Wii Fit, a fitness game, which has since sold thirty-seven million copies worldwide.

It suits his view, and the industry’s, that introducing an element of play to a transaction or a task can get people to do things they might not normally do. In the commercial sphere, this is called “gamification,” or, more gratingly, “funware”: make something a game, in a supermarket or on a social network, and Homo ludens will play it. “It’s a shame if we narrowly limit the definition of video games,” he said.

Tim Harford (The Undercover Economist) visits the enormous board game convention in Essen, Germany:

Settlers [of Catan] is the game that brought “German-style” or “Eurogame” board games to the attention of an English-speaking audience. The board game market in Germany is more like the book market in other countries: several hundred new games are launched there every year — typically either at Essen’s Spiel convention in October or the Nuremberg Toy Festival in February — and each year, at least one new game will sell hundreds of thousands of copies, perhaps millions, as Settlers has. There are evergreen games, briefly fashionable sensations and flops.

“There are two schools of thought as to why the Germans love board games,” says Martin Wallace of Warfrog. “The Germans are of the opinion that it’s down to their superior education system. We English are of the opinion that it’s because German TV is shite.”

There are, in fact, many more than two schools of thought about why Germany is the world’s board game superpower. It could be the enthusiasm of the citizens. In a country such as Britain, it is downright odd to pull a board game out of a cupboard and offer to teach it to friends alongside after-dinner coffee. In Germany, people do that and more. They discuss old games and act as evangelists for new ones. Naturally, the games are better as a result.

The cause could also be Germany’s pluralistic gaming tradition: most countries play games, but German gaming has never been dominated by a single game — unlike Japan (Go) or Russia (chess). But it could also be the influence of a single pioneer, Erwin Glonnegger. Born in southern Germany in 1925, Glonnegger joined the publisher Ravensburger after the war, where he became its first board game “editor”, working with designers through the 1950s and 1960s to produce a series of elegant games now considered timeless.

By the late 1960s and early 1970s, German newspapers were running columns about “family games”. There may have been a social motive — board games were, and still are, regarded as a wholesome activity — but the columns reflected the genuine enthusiasm of mainstream journalists who persuaded their editors to let them moonlight as game critics. In 1978, those enthusiasts decided to create an award, the Spiel des Jahres (Game of the Year). The first prize was handed out in 1979, to Hare & Tortoise — ironically, an import from England.
[...]
In a makeshift office tucked away behind one of the stands, I met Jay Tummelson, who has done more than anyone to bring Eurogames to the rest of the world. A likeable, fast-talking and opinionated American in his mid-sixties, Tummelson owns the company Rio Grande Games. Its stand is almost as large as those of the industry giants, the Ravensburgers and Mattels, but there are no 20ft signs, stages, or gantries.

The stripped-down approach is emblematic of Tummelson’s business model, which is to produce a vast range of gamer-friendly, no-frills translations of German games for the English market. He does business with all the major German publishers, accepting their game design and artwork, sharing their production costs and adding his own English print run to the end of theirs — typically producing 2,000 English versions on top of the 5,000 German originals. Tummelson throws these games into a growing market and reprints at much larger volumes whenever he has a hit on his hands. And he’s had quite a few hits. Before founding Rio Grande Games, Tummelson imported Settlers — and he is responsible for producing the English versions of most recent Spiel des Jahres winners.

(When I met him, Tummelson was launching his first non-translated product, a fast-moving card game called Dominion. It was the talk of Essen and this English-language import promptly won Spiel des Jahres 30 years on from Hare & Tortoise.)

When I suggest to Tummelson that he has, almost single-handedly, brought German games to the rest of the world, he demurs. “I played my part, but the internet was by far and away the most important thing.” German games’ successes may depend on personal recommendations, but in the UK and the US, gamers are spread too thin to speak to one another directly. Ironically, rather than wiping out board games, computers have provided the connections for once-isolated games in the UK and US to swap ideas online and meet up over the gaming table.

(Hat tip to Bryan Caplan.)

Being rather pedantic, Aretae sticks with the actual definitions of the words atheist and agnostic:

Theism and Atheism are positions about belief in a god. Gnosticism and Agnosticism are positions about whether you can know things — and usually talking about the ability to know about God.

I, like 95% of all the other atheists I know are Agnostic Atheists. We do not believe in a god. And we do not believe that such a thing is knowable. And mostly, we think that the question is silly, along with the question of whether you are an A-Thor-ist, an A-Faerie-ist, or an A-6-dimensional invisible blue banana-ist. Yeah, whatever.

(If you’re trying to promote skepticism, I think the 1st edition AD&D Deities & Demigods book may be the best inoculation ever.)

The evangelical Christians were so afraid that D&D would convert nice little Christian children into devil-worshipers, when it really did something far worse; it turned them into non-worshipers.

Actually, it didn’t do that either. If you’re not genetically predisposed, the inoculation appears totally ineffective.