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Rob Zacny

Episode 233: Enemies Within and Twilight Struggles

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Firaxis designer Ananda Gupta joins Rob, Troy, and Bruce to discuss his upcoming expansion to XCOM and his storied design career in PC and board gaming.

 

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Interesting to listen to Ananda talk about his reluctance to put somebody in Hitler's shoes, but didn't seem to have the same problems putting somebody in Stalin's shoes. It's a strange contrast.

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Interesting to listen to Ananda talk about his reluctance to put somebody in Hitler's shoes, but didn't seem to have the same problems putting somebody in Stalin's shoes. It's a strange contrast.

 

I don't think there's a contradiction there.  In the case of a game where you were playing the Nazi party attempting to take political control in interwar Germany, you'd be very directly put in the role of a character whose path to victory involves racist demagoguery that eventually leads to the deaths of millions.  The choices you'd need to make in playing pre-war Hitler are directly related to bringing about some very ugly bits of history.  The game designer would have to choose between making a historical game with a lot of ugly decisions and an ahistoric game where you have the option to play Nice Hitler.

 

I haven't played Twilight Struggle, but unless I misunderstand the game you may well be playing Stalin (at least at the beginning), but the focus of your game isn't the gulag and the purges, it's foreign policy and diplomacy.  You may well be cast in the role of a man responsible for millions of deaths, but your decisions aren't focused on bringing those deaths about.

 

By the same principle, most (though not all, it must be said) wargamers are relatively comfortable playing Nazi Germany at most levels of scope, but that comfort would evaporate for most people if the game mechanics included pogroms.

 

That said, it's a strange time now; Hitler is about to pass into history. Anybody who was 16 at the end of WW2 is now 84; the number of people who saw the war first hand is dwindling. We're probably less than two generations away from Hitler (and Stalin, for that matter) being like Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Alexander; some great leader from the past who did some stuff and there was a big war, but it's not really relevant because we're modern and people were primitive and foolish back then. Even the historians who care to read and understand the stories are going to experience them at a distance; time takes the edge off of even truly massive atrocities.

 

Even then, though, I don't think people will be comfortable simulating racial extermination programs; events fade, but the morality that gave them weight sticks around. So even a hundred years from now I don't think we're likely to see people playing a game based on bringing the Nazis to power; the game may well be made, but I doubt most people would be comfortable playing it simply because of the policy decisions they would be making.

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Terrific podcast - I thoroughly enjoyed it.

 

I must say I was quite surprised when I made the connection between one of Twilight Struggle authors - even my girlfriend loves it, yet I must say she's got a degree in Political Science - and the guy who was taking the interviews for the upcoming X-COM Enemy Within. My bad: in this day and age I should have checked on LinkedIn or something, and the mention in the Designer's Notes to Twilight Struggle to Chris Crawford's classic Balance of Power should have rang a bell :-) Couldn't help smiling while listening to the comments regarding Terror of the Deep - I think it's a vastly overrated game. Yet I wouldn't mind seeing an expansion to Firaxis' X-COM featuring very restricted environments.

 

Really looking forward to both Enemy Within and Imperial Struggle. The latter totally sounds like A Few Acres of Snow brought to a world-sized stage :)

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We're probably less than two generations away from Hitler (and Stalin, for that matter) being like Napoleon or Genghis Khan or Alexander; some great leader from the past who did some stuff and there was a big war, but it's not really relevant because we're modern and people were primitive and foolish back then. Even the historians who care to read and understand the stories are going to experience them at a distance; time takes the edge off of even truly massive atrocities.

I don't think this is the case. The Holocaust has such iconic status that I find it hard to believe that it will pass out of the forefront of knowledge so quickly, especially given how much WW2 is in the focus of games and media still. Plus the continued availability of footage etc. which has not been largely the case for atrocities wars predating WW2.

The 'edge' will be off but the knowledge will not (I expect) be as vague as you say. Still, an interesting point to make.

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I don't think this is the case. The Holocaust has such iconic status that I find it hard to believe that it will pass out of the forefront of knowledge so quickly, especially given how much WW2 is in the focus of games and media still. Plus the continued availability of footage etc. which has not been largely the case for atrocities wars predating WW2.

The 'edge' will be off but the knowledge will not (I expect) be as vague as you say. Still, an interesting point to make.

 

Speaking as someone teaching a lot of incoming college freshman, the Holocaust is understood by them more as "something bad that happened to the Jews, maybe?" At least in America, most primary- and secondary-education teachers seem to be uncomfortable devoting many of their classes to the horrors of Hitler's Third Reich, so by the time their students get to me, it's already been internalized as a bad thing we all don't really talk about, at best something like great-great-great-granddad owning slaves and fighting for the Confederacy.

 

I don't have trouble believing that, given a generation for these kids to become teachers themselves, the Holocaust will come to be discussed in completely different terms. But this is off-topic for the podcast itself.

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For the US I guess it's different. I'm talking from the perspective of having the Anne Frank house in my country :P

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I don't think there's a contradiction there.  In the case of a game where you were playing the Nazi party attempting to take political control in interwar Germany, you'd be very directly put in the role of a character whose path to victory involves racist demagoguery that eventually leads to the deaths of millions.  The choices you'd need to make in playing pre-war Hitler are directly related to bringing about some very ugly bits of history.  The game designer would have to choose between making a historical game with a lot of ugly decisions and an ahistoric game where you have the option to play Nice Hitler.

 

I haven't played Twilight Struggle, but unless I misunderstand the game you may well be playing Stalin (at least at the beginning), but the focus of your game isn't the gulag and the purges, it's foreign policy and diplomacy.  You may well be cast in the role of a man responsible for millions of deaths, but your decisions aren't focused on bringing those deaths about.

 

I don't know, there are cards in Twilight Struggle like Red Scare/Purge, Latin American Death Squads, Reagan Bombs Libya and a whole host of others referencing various atrocities and wars.

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I've been mulling over this topic for a few days now. I think there is distinction to be made between what Twilight Struggle is asking the player to do as a player controlling the Soviet Union, and a hypothetical game that asks a player to control the Nazi party in between the World Wars. That distinction comes down to the goal of the game. In Twilight Struggle your goal is to win the cold war (whatever that means exactly), and both sides historically engaged in some morally odious behavior in the process of that ideological struggle. The goal itself however, become the world's dominant superpower, isn't what a lot of people would call intrinsically evil. By contrast, the German's player goal in this hypothetical game is to fulfill what we recognize as a great historical evil. That goes a step further than something like Axis & Allies or various other WWII strategy games where the Axis player(s) are attempting to reach a goal that was not accomplished in history, but would have been a great evil had it been achieved (also it is of course worth mentioning that even this is too much for some people, Troy has mentioned that he does not ever want to play Germany in WWII games, and he is most certainly not alone in that feeling. I would not be surprised if there are Twilight Struggle players that only want to play as the United States...)

 

All of this is to say that there is a reasonable argument to be made that a designer might be comfortable designing a game that allows you to engage in morally reprehensible behavior, as so many games do allow, as long as the goal is for some greater good (arguably XCOM and Twilight Struggle both fall into this category), but would be uncomfortable with a game where that higher minded goal is found to be lacking.

 

I try to be pragmatic about all of this. Ultimately people have different levels of sensitivity and comfort with regard to these issues and what they are able to tolerate in game spaces (and other media as well of course), and I would never criticize someone for feeling uneasy because of one subject instead of another. 

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But the Nazi party's goal was just the same as that of the US and USSR in the Cold War: become the world's dominant superpower, like you said. The end for which they desired to gain that power might be questioned, but in my mind, as soon as "become a superpower" is your goal, power has become an end in itself. Germany, the US and USSR all sought power and they all did reprehensible things in service of that pursuit.

 

I'm not blaming Ananda for not wanting to design a game where a player is put in the shoes of a Nazi. But I do believe that it's important to look at the things that make us squeamish and those that don't and analyze the reasons why. I think it's probably the case here that popular culture exposure to the atrocities of Nazi Germany and the association of the Nazi with clear and irredeemable evil makes us more likely to want to disassociate ourselves from them, while we've been less exposed to (or differently exposed to) the atrocities of the Cold War and therefore don't have the same problem with them.

 

The mythology of World War II has characterized it as a "just war" with clearly defined sides of good and evil, so we don't want to force a player to play as the evil side. The Cold War, however, is considerably murkier and much harder to define in terms of good vs. evil. We therefore have no problem playing either side, because both sides are nebulous greys, so neither is reprehensible. I think, however, that is the wrong way to view it. First of all, there are many more shades of grey in World War II than most people like to admit. Second, the lack of bad guys in the Cold War shouldn't make us feel comfortable; rather, the lack of good guys should make us feel all the more uncomfortable.

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I'd rather not get into it as I feel like that involves getting into a pretty in depth discussion of history and foreign policy that could easily go off the rails, but I basically disagree with your claim that power has become an end in itself for all three nations, and I don't believe the historical evidence can back up such a claim. Suffice to say, the three reasons for these nations pursuing hegemony were for different sets of circumstances, and I think those circumstances are important enough that drawing moral equivalencies between the three is unwarranted, even granting all the different shades of gray and nuance.

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I personally think that a small-scale systemic game about different political factions vying for control of postwar Germany, with the only disincentive for extremist tactics and rhetoric being the player's own moral revulsion, would be an interesting insight into the narratives and values of power.

 

Well, until the press and public would blast it into oblivion. If Paradox leaves out all mention of Judaism from Crusader Kings II, fearing the bad publicity of a game where you can borrow money from Jews and then kill them, I can't imagine anyone ever having the stones to make a game where you can be Hitler (or even a Nazi). Fifty or a hundred years from now, maybe. But it's a shame, because I kind of agree with tberton that pretty much the only reason Stalin isn't up there alongside Hitler on the monument to genocidal monsters is that Stalin was our ally at one point and that we couldn't claim to have taken him down.

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To be clear, I agree with Gormongous that Stalin the individual was just as evil as Hitler. Notably in TS you aren't Stalin, you are the Soviet Union which I believe is a somewhat meaningful distinction although I can understand why others would disagree.

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I'd rather not get into it as I feel like that involves getting into a pretty in depth discussion of history and foreign policy that could easily go off the rails, but I basically disagree with your claim that power has become an end in itself for all three nations, and I don't believe the historical evidence can back up such a claim. Suffice to say, the three reasons for these nations pursuing hegemony were for different sets of circumstances, and I think those circumstances are important enough that drawing moral equivalencies between the three is unwarranted, even granting all the different shades of gray and nuance.

 

Fair enough. I didn't actually mean to emphasize the moral equivalency thing as much as I did. To clarify, I do not think the US in the Cold War was as bad as Germany in WWII. However, I do think that both committed atrocities (and heck, the US and the Allies committed atrocities in World War II as well) and I think it's interesting and informative for us to question why some atrocities are more acceptable to us than others. Unfortunately, I think often the answer is "these ones were committed by people like me and those ones weren't."

 

To be clear, I agree with Gormongous that Stalin the individual was just as evil as Hitler. Notably in TS you aren't Stalin, you are the Soviet Union which I believe is a somewhat meaningful distinction although I can understand why others would disagree.

 

Maybe I misunderstood what Ananda was saying in the podcast, but it seemed like he was suggesting a game where you play as Germany in the interwar period, not as Hitler himself, which would be the same distinction, no?

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Maybe I misunderstood what Ananda was saying in the podcast, but it seemed like he was suggesting a game where you play as Germany in the interwar period, not as Hitler himself, which would be the same distinction, no?

 

My understanding is he was talking about a game in which you are specifically playing Hitler, leading the Nazi party to political power.  IIRC it was a hypothetical offered as "here's a game I wouldn't be comfortable making".

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Fair enough. I didn't actually mean to emphasize the moral equivalency thing as much as I did. To clarify, I do not think the US in the Cold War was as bad as Germany in WWII. However, I do think that both committed atrocities (and heck, the US and the Allies committed atrocities in World War II as well) and I think it's interesting and informative for us to question why some atrocities are more acceptable to us than others. Unfortunately, I think often the answer is "these ones were committed by people like me and those ones weren't."

 

I think we're in agreement here. The U.S. used atomic weapons, and took American citizens of Japanese descent from their homes and kept them in internment camps... and those are just the most well known episodes. That doesn't compare to a campaign of genocide in my mind, but I would never deny it was a dark episode in American history. Unfortunately your insight that "actions committed by people more like me are more acceptable than ones by people that are not" as a sort of typical guiding moral compass seems to be absolutely correct.

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I think we're in agreement here. The U.S. used atomic weapons, and took American citizens of Japanese descent from their homes and kept them in internment camps... and those are just the most well known episodes. That doesn't compare to a campaign of genocide in my mind, but I would never deny it was a dark episode in American history. Unfortunately your insight that "actions committed by people more like me are more acceptable than ones by people that are not" as a sort of typical guiding moral compass seems to be absolutely correct.

 

I think that's part of it, but there's also the history book aspect.  The transgressions of your own country generally tend to get swept under the rug in school texts unless they're so egregious and recent they can't be avoided.  As an example, there's apparently reasonably good evidence that here in Canada the Haida (a west coast aboriginal tribe) were nearly wiped out by a smallpox epidemic caused by intentionally infected blankets in the mid to late 1800s.  It's not something I've ever seen mentioned in a school history text (though admittedly that may have changed; it has been a while since I've looked).

 

I think there's also a lot of "the past is a foreign land inhabited by murderers and fools" to it.  We're past all that stuff now.  Except when we aren't.

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I think that's part of it, but there's also the history book aspect.  The transgressions of your own country generally tend to get swept under the rug in school texts unless they're so egregious and recent they can't be avoided.  As an example, there's apparently reasonably good evidence that here in Canada the Haida (a west coast aboriginal tribe) were nearly wiped out by a smallpox epidemic caused by intentionally infected blankets in the mid to late 1800s.  It's not something I've ever seen mentioned in a school history text (though admittedly that may have changed; it has been a while since I've looked).

 

I think there's also a lot of "the past is a foreign land inhabited by murderers and fools" to it.  We're past all that stuff now.  Except when we aren't.

 

Huh, I've never heard that about the Haida and I've taken many, very critical Canadian history courses. But none of them were particularly focused on the west coast, so maybe that's why.

 

On the topic of the Shut Up & Sit Down review, that did a pretty good job of illustrating the things I like and dislike about Twilight Struggle: the core mechanics of the game - operation points, scoring cards, coups, the DEFCON track - really do feel like they recreate the brinksmanship of the Cold War. However, the events, while they all refer to real historical events, feel like painted on theme, which is really too bad.

 

Also, those opening points about how you really play as the spirits of communism and capitalism, not any one ruler, reminded me of something that's probably relevant to our earlier discussion: I think its always best if you can put the player in the shoes of a specific person, whether real or fictional. Making the player a historical force brings up all sorts of difficult issues like historical inevitability and stuff that are much easier to sidestep if you specify who the player is. I feel like that specificity also creates a deeper connection with a game's theme.

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On the other hand, if you want a game that has the scope of something like Civilization, you generally need to fall back on the "spirit of the nation/historical forces/other kind of abstract concept", etc. Crusader Kings 2 gets to sidestep the issue because its about dynasty politics, but it's not always appropriate for games to introduce that level of detail to their systems. I'm okay with that level of abstraction, it allows me to focus more on appreciating the strategy of the game rather than getting caught up in trying to role play my character correctly or whatever.

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The "who are you?" problem of strategy games is ubiquitous, even in tactical games.  Even in games where the narrative strongly implies who you are, it rarely bares close analysis well.  You're almost invariably too powerful, too well connected, and too well informed to be any actual player in the conflict.

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On the other hand, if you want a game that has the scope of something like Civilization, you generally need to fall back on the "spirit of the nation/historical forces/other kind of abstract concept", etc. Crusader Kings 2 gets to sidestep the issue because its about dynasty politics, but it's not always appropriate for games to introduce that level of detail to their systems. I'm okay with that level of abstraction, it allows me to focus more on appreciating the strategy of the game rather than getting caught up in trying to role play my character correctly or whatever.

 

I guess I'm just not as into games on that grand, abstracted scale. On a conceptual level, at least. I can think of plenty of games that I love that are fairly abstracted out, but ideally I prefer it when games are more specific.

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I am with Rob in wanting a game where you are Michael Collins in charge of the IRA or some other situation where independence was dependent on a combination of violent and non-violent means.

 

You could do a 2 player game with Collins, De Valera and the English government as a non playable entity and somehow leading to the civil war once the English leave Ireland. A similar game could involve China under Japanese occupation with the nationalists and communists.

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Bumping because this episode and a bunch of others are misfiled -- the audio for this episode is under Sid Meier's Gettysburg, this is some other wargame interview, etc. Obviously low priority, but it makes browsing back episodes pretty tough!

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