Generate catan board
party games), and even circumstance (games are generally only ‘unfair’ when one is losing). That is: standards of fairness vary not only according to individual preferences, but also by context (casual gaming vs. Such contradictory messages suggest that fairness is a highly subjective notion. Similarly, although Caillois argues that “The search for equality is so obviously essential to the rivalry that it is re-established by a handicap for players of different classes,” 7 notion of fairness behind the handicap does not reinforce but rather undermines the agonistic ideal. Admirably precise rules, meticulous measures, and scientific calculations are evident.” 6 Taken together, however, skill and chance presuppose contradictory paradigms of equality, making it difficult to determine what counts as fair for games that incorporate both (as most contemporary tabletop games do). Caillois is adamant about the fundamentality of fairness, arguing that games of both skill and chance ( agon and alea) “require absolute equity, an equality of mathematical chances of most absolute precision. What standards determine which is most fair: that everyone gets the same amount of pie (equality), that everyone gets pie according to their need for pie (equity), 5 or that everyone gets pie in proportion to how much money or labor they invested in the pie (meritocracy)? There are similarly divergent ways of considering fairness in games. Recognizing that fairness is problematic even within the carefully-controlled medium of games should also call into question the very possibility of a level playing field in arenas as complex as global capitalism.įairness, like beauty, is left to the eye of the beholder. Yet, even while reflecting this agonistic ideal, the complicated balancing act performed by actual games demonstrates the limits of this ideal. According to French sociologist Roger Caillois, agonistic games play out agonistic culture “like a combat in which equality of chances is artificially created, in order that adversaries should confront each other under ideal conditions, susceptible of giving precise and incontestable value to the winner’s triumph.” 4 With mathematical precision, agonistic games create balanced contests that reflect the ideal of agonistic culture: a perfectly level playing field that produces a genuine meritocracy. While not all games are competitive, 3 the history of games is thoroughly intertwined with agon (or ‘contestation’) as an organizing principle of Western culture. Throughout, I suggest that while competitive games are typically designed to produce emergent inequality from within a level playing field (systemic equality), the rules that govern such emergent inequality are systemic in ways that allow for critically engaging systemic inequality. Finally, I reflect on the experience of enacting inequality within an unbalanced game system. 2 This paper then analyzes how the Oil Springs scenario for Catan links resource generation to land ownership, the runaway leader problem to the tendency of capital to accrue capital, and industrialization to market destabilization and ecological catastrophe.
In order to analyze these inequalities, this paper first explores game balance as the interplay between emergent inequality (how games determine winners and losers through the inputs of skill and chance) and systemic inequality (how an asymmetrical game state may privilege certain players). The following reflections work toward developing such a critical paradigm by showing how the Oil Springs scenario for The Settlers of Catan plays out ethical dilemmas raised by the emergent and systemic inequalities generated by capitalist systems. Games, that is, need not merely reflect culture, but have critical potential for reflecting on culture. This insight is possible because contemporary games are cultural phenomena that have also become media phenomena. Yet in a world where the myth of a ‘level playing field’ obscures and authorizes ongoing social inequalities, problematizing the notion of ‘fairness’ in gameplay may provide unique insight into the ‘fairness’ of capitalist culture. It’s tempting to label this as poor game design 1 since it certainly violates the principle of fairness almost universally assumed in competitive gaming. In this case, however, the game itself gave me an insurmountable advantage via my starting position. Before the first turn was over, I knew I had won-a circumstance typically only achievable through overwhelming skill, prognostication, or cheating.