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.
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.
> 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.
How-to play video: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zfXPIhvFPjw
Space-Biff review: https://spacebiff.com/2024/09/25/ghq/
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.
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.
When I visited for the first time this year, I learned about GHQ and the upcoming release
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.
This is all sarcasm, right?
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.
https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/kurt-vonneguts-ghq-the-lost...?
People contain multitudes.
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).
[1]. https://web.archive.org/web/20211201220314/https://www.getre...
It's among his weakest novels but I'm not sure how anyone would derive "genocide" out of it. IIRC, it was a plot point that the invaders also treated Asian-Americans brutally.
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".
Lots of letters and interesting artifacts and tidbits about his life.
To me it's one more sign of how masterful a storyteller Heinlein was that his embrace of the contradictions was conscious and not just a result of some sort of inner conflict.
Barnes and Noble can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut [1]
[1] Vonnegut, Kurt. "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death". Delacorte Press, 1969. p147
> 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.
Stranger In A Strange Land is so creepy, I started to wonder about the sanity of Heinlein. A sex cult around a pseudo-alien? C'mon. It feels like it was written by a 14 year old.
I would submit Incandescence as the best sci-fi novel ever written.
But tastes obviously differ.
That said, there are lots of instances of the clerk-typist being told to grab his rifle and fill out a billet for a patrol and similar things --- RH actually speaks to this and other similar, but broader concerns in _Starship Troopers_
But that isn’t what happened. In our time and place, GHQ is a serviceable game. It suffers from the same endgame as many modern abstracts, packed with fiddly little moves that amount to very little. We would write that it could have used a good developer. But that doesn’t really matter."
[1]. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slapstick_(novel)#Anthropologi...
In a world with both Greg Egan and Ted Chiang writing sci-fi, one has to exclude their novels from any best-of comparisons just to give other authors a fighting chance.
The in the box rules state that every property must go to auction on first landing if the player refuses their option to buy it at face value. There's a lot of strategy possible in auctions, but a lot of house rules don't like the auctions and either avoid them entirely or make them much rarer than the in-box rules state they should be. (In part because early and often auctions increase the cutthroat feeling earlier in the game, whereas a lot of house rules are about pushing the cutthroat stuff off later into end game.)
The slow march of progress has to navigate what is politically acceptable for most people of the time these changes take place in. Obama put in two of the justices that granted gay marriage rights during his first term.
https://www.behance.net/gallery/15574393/Barnes-Noble-Author...
If you play Monopoly and you don't trade, you haven't really played. And I don't mean all of the wacky trades that some families do (although I'm not against that), I mean trading money and property with other players. The two keys are:
1. In all games (not just Monopoly), people who cooperate win. If you make a mutually beneficial trade with another player, even if that player gets the better end of the trade, all other players lose ground. If you cooperate with another player by trading whenever there's any reasonable opportunity, the game is between you and that player; no other players will have any chance of winning. If you trade with everyone, and they don't trade between each other, you will inevitably win. Cooperation is making 1 + 1 = 3. No matter how that remainder is split, the more you get in on that split, the more ground you're gaining. Jump in front of every trade offer and offer a better one.
Almost every player that I've talked to who doesn't understand how Monopoly is a good game (and I've had a lot of Monopoly discussions) is completely incapable of understanding how a trade that gives somebody else a Monopoly can result in you winning the game. They look at you like you're stupid when you say you do it all the time. We live in a sick, atomized and alienated society. Getting the property that completes somebody else's Monopoly means you have a good basis for friendship.
2. You may do a lot of little trades during a game, but inevitably you are building up to the big trade which is your big gamble. You've calculated all of the probabilities, you've judged your competitors positions, and you're going to offer another player (or maybe a couple of other players over two succeeding trades) a huge trade which will set the conditions for how the random endgame will play out. You've made it look like you're giving the other end of the trades a chance, but you've calculated ahead of time that you've maximized your own chances. If you're playing against naive players, you'll always win if you do this first and you know what you're doing. If you're playing against someone skilled, it's a question of who calculated the odds better and whether the dice hate you.
edit: Another game with a similar feel and a similar benefit to cooperation is Container. A good game to soften up people who don't know how to trade is Bohnanza. A game designed to show aggressive cooperation is So Long, Sucker, which requires you to cooperate to be in contention, and requires you (mathematically) to betray someone's trust to win.
As long as you're using the correct rules and everyone is playing the game fast, they know what they're doing, and they're competitive, the game can be quite fun. It's also a lot less time intensive than many other board games where lots of people are negotiating.
Why and when did we discard all that literature?
Chicago under Daley (and long before) was deeply segregated (it still is). But Daley's was a conservative government.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Landlord%27s_Game#Descript...
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33010046 (showdead=true to view evidence)
kylebenzle on Sept 28, 2022 [dead] | parent | context | favorite | on: Why are sex workers forced to wear a financial sca...
All women are whores. Sorry to break it to you.
Economists employed by universities founded by monopolists understood that their route to security - tenure - did not have room for even mentioning George's ideas to their students. (Witness what the Wharton School at Penn did to Scott Nearing, whose ideas up to that point (1915) were largely Georgist.)
As Thoreau said, "There are a thousand hacking at the branches of evil to one who is striking at the root." The evil he was referring to is poverty.
George was pointing out the root, and provided the tool for removing it. It's too bad that it hasn't yet been implemented.