All credit for this go to Geoff and his efforts to bring this to life. He is a well-known game designer with dozens of published games and founder of the podcast Ludology (no longer an active host after 100s of episodes) that posits that Games are worthy of study.
He is also a co-founder of the TTGDA (https://www.ttgda.org/) that aims to be a guild like resource for designers. It is his connections that got this into Barnes & Nobles. Also of note, the TTGDA has recently convinced B&N to list game designers on all detail pages and search results in the same way they do today for books and writers. He also runs a free newsletter called GameTek (https://gametek.substack.com/) that is a continuation of an old podcast format he did where he does deep dives on specific games and game concepts. In short, he's awesome.
The path to getting this game published was not easy. At one time, Barnes and Noble rejected the idea of publishing and selling the game because “Not enough people know who Kurt Vonnegut is” [1].
For any Vonnegut fans who find themselves in Indianapolis, I recommend checking out the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library: https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/
When I visited for the first time this year, I learned about GHQ and the upcoming release
Other than the theme the two have very little in common. Memoir 44 is card-driven and uses dice for combat resolution so there is a lot of randomness. GHQ is a pure abstract with no randomness at all. On the gameplay side GHQ is much closer to chess than to M44.
> While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an excellent training aid for future military leaders, including cadets at West Point. How are modern audiences to reconcile those words from the same man who wrote Cat’s Cradle?
As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. That's especially true if those people are introspective, creative types. So I agree, and this is a head-scratcher for me just like it is to the author of the article.
I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war.
I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away.
If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.
The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII.
First of all, it's Sixth Column. Secondly, the "white people" were the remnants of the US military after the United States had been invaded and conquered by a fictional pan-Asian bloc that included the remnants of a conquered Soviet Union. IIRC, the invaders also treated Asian-Americans brutally. The religion was just a ruse to cover their rebellion. IIRC, they beat the invaders using a sci-fi mcguffin that, among other implausible things, could selectively tuned to kill based on genetics. It's among his weakest novels but I'm not sure how anyone would derive "genocide" out of it.
And don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a militarized society was great, unironically.
Starship Troopers asked whether it would make more sense to give control over society to those who felt a responsibility to protect it and were willing to prove it through personal sacrifice. That is an interesting question which I wish other SF authors would pick up and run with.
That Heinlein portrayed military service as acceptable evidence of such responsibility is kind of dumb but doesn't deserve being boiled down to "Heinlein said militarism was good, haw haw".
No, the Federal Service was not completely military --- that was just one small aspect of it --- as is noted in the novel, most people in the Federal Service are simply bureaucrats doing necessary government work (Skywatch is specifically mentioned --- a search of asteroids to determine which would have orbits which would intersect with that of earth). The protagonist's best friend who joins at the same time becomes a researcher on Pluto.
I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it. There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially when it comes to something so life-affecting as war.
I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking, even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought experiment to at least not take things personally if someone comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but just to state your own opinion).
"The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point.
Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set.
The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it.
It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author.
edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way.
It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.
I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.
This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is essential and want it to function properly
It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:
> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
> As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others.
At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.
Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.
I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much.
Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.
It’s the BuzzFeed of gaming websites. Both Polygon and Kotaku are owned by Vox Media. Its brand of degenerate circa 2010 faux-liberal corporate consumer rhetoric is social pollution. Recently both websites have plummeted in popularity do to divisive content and their staff making blatantly racist and sexist comments about consumers, developers, and the video game industry in general. I’ve never liked them or Venus Patrol and video game journalists that came out of Boing Boing, Brandon Boyer most of all.
Polygon is owned by Vox Media and still pulls an estimated 15m+ monthly visitors per Similarweb. Kotaku is owned by G/O Media, a dying media company that has recently sold both its namesake sites Gizmodo and the Onion. But either way, does not warrant any sort of flagging of Polygon's content.
BGG entry: https://boardgamegeek.com/boardgame/422478/ghq
How-to play video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXPIhvFPjw
Space-Biff review: https://spacebiff.com/2024/09/25/ghq/
All credit for this go to Geoff and his efforts to bring this to life. He is a well-known game designer with dozens of published games and founder of the podcast Ludology (no longer an active host after 100s of episodes) that posits that Games are worthy of study.
He is also a co-founder of the TTGDA (https://www.ttgda.org/) that aims to be a guild like resource for designers. It is his connections that got this into Barnes & Nobles. Also of note, the TTGDA has recently convinced B&N to list game designers on all detail pages and search results in the same way they do today for books and writers. He also runs a free newsletter called GameTek (https://gametek.substack.com/) that is a continuation of an old podcast format he did where he does deep dives on specific games and game concepts. In short, he's awesome.
Thank you.
The path to getting this game published was not easy. At one time, Barnes and Noble rejected the idea of publishing and selling the game because “Not enough people know who Kurt Vonnegut is” [1].
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20211201220314/https://www.getre...
And now his board game is sold in Barnes and Noble.
For any Vonnegut fans who find themselves in Indianapolis, I recommend checking out the Kurt Vonnegut Museum and Library: https://www.vonnegutlibrary.org/
When I visited for the first time this year, I learned about GHQ and the upcoming release
I also recommend it. I was in the city for Gen Con last year and decided to go and it was a very interesting museum.
Lots of letters and interesting artifacts and tidbits about his life.
Related NYT piece https://www.nytimes.com/2024/10/03/crosswords/kurt-vonnegut-...
https://archive.ph/t3CBZ
Reminds me of Memoir '44.
https://www.daysofwonder.com/memoir-44/
Other than the theme the two have very little in common. Memoir 44 is card-driven and uses dice for combat resolution so there is a lot of randomness. GHQ is a pure abstract with no randomness at all. On the gameplay side GHQ is much closer to chess than to M44.
Is the game fun?
Please let us know!
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/kurt-vonneguts-ghq-the-lost...?
> While The Sirens of Titan was a deeply cynical view of war, GHQ is deeply uncynical. In fact, his own pitch letters note that Vonnegut thought GHQ would be an excellent training aid for future military leaders, including cadets at West Point. How are modern audiences to reconcile those words from the same man who wrote Cat’s Cradle?
As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others. That's especially true if those people are introspective, creative types. So I agree, and this is a head-scratcher for me just like it is to the author of the article.
I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war.
I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away.
If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.
The same man who wrote Stranger In A Strange Land, arguably the best sci-fi novel ever written and an ode to free love and universal acceptance, also wrote The Fifth Column, where a bunch of white people create a fake religion so they can wholesale genocide every Asian person on the planet at once because that's how the US would eventually win if we lost WWII.
People contain multitudes.
First of all, it's Sixth Column. Secondly, the "white people" were the remnants of the US military after the United States had been invaded and conquered by a fictional pan-Asian bloc that included the remnants of a conquered Soviet Union. IIRC, the invaders also treated Asian-Americans brutally. The religion was just a ruse to cover their rebellion. IIRC, they beat the invaders using a sci-fi mcguffin that, among other implausible things, could selectively tuned to kill based on genetics. It's among his weakest novels but I'm not sure how anyone would derive "genocide" out of it.
And don't forget Starship Troopers, which wasn't satirical as per the movie version. The book really suggested that a militarized society was great, unironically.
Starship Troopers asked whether it would make more sense to give control over society to those who felt a responsibility to protect it and were willing to prove it through personal sacrifice. That is an interesting question which I wish other SF authors would pick up and run with.
That Heinlein portrayed military service as acceptable evidence of such responsibility is kind of dumb but doesn't deserve being boiled down to "Heinlein said militarism was good, haw haw".
No, the Federal Service was not completely military --- that was just one small aspect of it --- as is noted in the novel, most people in the Federal Service are simply bureaucrats doing necessary government work (Skywatch is specifically mentioned --- a search of asteroids to determine which would have orbits which would intersect with that of earth). The protagonist's best friend who joins at the same time becomes a researcher on Pluto.
I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it. There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially when it comes to something so life-affecting as war.
I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking, even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought experiment to at least not take things personally if someone comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but just to state your own opinion).
It is Polygon, after all.
But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a military.
Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks often appear prejudicial. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a misinterpretation.
So it goes.
Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine
I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.
Monopoly is famously and on-purpose cynical, to pick a familiar example.
"The Landlord's game", the game that inspired (or some would say was ripped off by) Monopoly was cynical in that its designer Elizabeth Magie was a devotee of the the radical economist Henry George and the point was to teach why landlordism was bad. But there is no evidence that Charles Darrow, who designed Monopoly, was trying to make any sort of political point.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game
Charles Darrow didn't design any part of Monopoly excepting the excellent graphic design that Parker Brothers went on to use. He used the same rules as the Quakers he learned it from, and had gone into business selling his very cool looking copies of it (assembled at his kitchen table iirc) at a time when everybody was making their own set.
The Charles Darrow lie was a way to remove Magie from the game altogether (Parker Brothers purchased the game from Magie), and didn't start until after she was dead and couldn't complain about it.
It's a classic theft. They tried to steal her game, got caught, bought it from her, and after she died pretended that the graphic designer was the author.
edit: The Landlord's Game isn't one game, it's a class of games with a similar structure (read the two patents and watch how the details changed between them.) It has two halves, of which Monopoly is the first half. The second half is a cooperative game called "Prosperity" where players reach rough equity by changing the rules on land ownership, Henry George style. The first half is funner, because the second half is really a proof that the first half is no way to run a society. In the first half everyone starts off in the same place with the same resources, and through blind luck and minuscule skill differences, one player ends up owning all of the others. In the second half, Magie is telling us that society doesn't have to work this way.
It's not "cynical", though, it's optimistic. It's not cynical to say a sick system is sick, it's cynical to say that systems must be sick.
I listened to a Drew Carey interview once.. the man is passionate about Monopoly. I don’t think there’s too much strategy there besides “don’t let property go unsold” and “hoard houses” but he disagrees.
Sounds like the plot of Megalopolis
This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is essential and want it to function properly
It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:
> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.
The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.
> As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others.
This is all sarcasm, right?
When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?
2014
At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.
Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.
I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much.
Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.
There should be a trigger warning for Polygon links.
What's wrong with Polygon?
I'm guessing you might end up going down a rabbit-hole you don't have time for
The rabbit hole is 14+ years old at this point, yeah.
It’s the BuzzFeed of gaming websites. Both Polygon and Kotaku are owned by Vox Media. Its brand of degenerate circa 2010 faux-liberal corporate consumer rhetoric is social pollution. Recently both websites have plummeted in popularity do to divisive content and their staff making blatantly racist and sexist comments about consumers, developers, and the video game industry in general. I’ve never liked them or Venus Patrol and video game journalists that came out of Boing Boing, Brandon Boyer most of all.
Polygon is owned by Vox Media and still pulls an estimated 15m+ monthly visitors per Similarweb. Kotaku is owned by G/O Media, a dying media company that has recently sold both its namesake sites Gizmodo and the Onion. But either way, does not warrant any sort of flagging of Polygon's content.
You’re taking me literally. I’m joking-not-joking. Also both website have a similar schtick.