Frank Lantz recently interviewed me on Donkeyspace, his excellent Substack, which generally focuses on the current AI boom but, in reality, is about his ongoing work on the human condition. As my responses would be of interest to readers here, I’ve reposted the interview below.

Is there a competitive scene for Civ, with tournaments, ranking, etc? If so, do bots have any role in this scene, either as part of the game or for training/analysis?

There is no true competitive scene for Civ although there are a number of small ladders that do the best they can. It’s not really a game that lends itself well to the satisfying resolution needed for competitive play – the closest I ever saw was a grassroots mode where the winner was determined by the first to capture ANY city on the map, which Civ 4 eventually supported as an official mode. However, the lack of a competitive scene means that there is a smorgasbord of different, generally friendly, sub-communities which focus on things like succession games, democracy games, team games, team democracy games, games-of-the-month, challenge games, and so on. Generally speaking, these communities are trying to make a solitary game more social, even if the games played are technically still single-player. A democracy game, for example, is run by a specific player with a group of citizens who vote on important decisions (and sometimes vote out the current player or divide power amongst a cabinet or switch to a new government style or…). The bots are not of much interest here beyond being a consistent measuring stick to use to measure success.

The one exception I can think of is Sullla’s Civ 4 Survivor series (https://sullla.com/civ4survivorindex.html). He’s a long-running 4X blogger, streamer, and critic (provided critical feedback for both Civ 4 and Old World), and he organizes and streams “tournaments” which pit Civ 4 AI leaders against each other to see which ones perform best under different environments and rulesets. He has now added a fantasy version of the tournament where viewers can bid on different leaders before the games begin and then track their success, as one might do in “real” fantasy sports.

I’m curious about all-human, no-AI Civ. Do you know if it’s usually played as a free-for-all or symmetrically (1v1, 2v2, 3v3, etc)? Is it very different from the single-player game vs bots?

Team games and free-for-alls are both popular. Indeed, I’ve spent a good chunk of my career trying to encourage players to forgo free-for-alls for team games as the latter tends to be a much smoother experience (fewer losers, positives emotions from teamwork, less waiting if the game supports simultaneous turns), but there is some instinctive pull that draws players to free-for-alls like moths to a flame. (It’s the same instinct that causes players to always choose the largest map possible and the maximum number of opponents, often to their own detriment.)

Multiplayer is very different compared to the single-player experience, where there is an unspoken, and often unthought, expectation that the AIs will play “fairly” and not suddenly backstab the human (which players will describe as “crazy” AI) or all gang up on the leader as they approach victory. In contrast, humans don’t have any problem – at least conceptually – with other players backstabbing them or ganging up on the leader. It might annoy them, of course, but because they can put themselves in each others’ shoes, they realize they might have done the same thing. Nobody, however, puts themselves into the shoes of an AI. It doesn’t matter if we understand that the AI is just acting like a human might act; AIs are second-class citizens.

When designing games which use AI, it’s important to remember that there are two types of competitive games – games with two sides and games with more than two sides. Two-sided games are inherently zero-sum and thus require no diplomacy at all – all the AI needs to do to evaluate a move is add the move’s value for itself and the negative of the move’s value for its opponent (does this move help me more or hurt my opponent more or some combination of the two). In contrast, games with multiple sides also involve diplomacy, requiring the AI to evaluate who to target, which can involve social and emotional reasoning for which the AI is not extended the benefit of the doubt when it does something the human doesn’t like.

(Of course, many games are actually on a continuum between these two extremes – most free-for-all Eurogames severely limit how players can impact each other so that diplomacy is of little use. Race for the Galaxy, for example, is often accused of being multiplayer solitaire – although the other humans add noise to the system, and mastery comes from predicting that noise. AI works perfectly well for these types of games as the mechanics themselves hinder diplomacy.)

Human-only free-for-all games of Civilization look a lot different from traditional single-player as there is often a lack of trust between humans, which leads to much more defensive play. In single-player, high-performing humans understand how important it is to push out settlers as fast as possible to found new cities; the AI will rarely punish you for doing so as rushing the human is both hard for AI programmers to execute and would also be a bad experience for the players so has been avoided intentionally. In the rare case where the AI does punish the player, the human has an easy emotional out by just reloading or quickly starting a new game, options not available for second-class players (meaning the AI). In multiplayer, players still try to expand quickly but do so in a high-stress environment where they know that an undefended new city could be a game-ending gift to their opponent.

(Old World, by the way, includes a Competitive AI game mode, which is explicitly for players who understand the subtle issues of an AI trying to win against the human at all costs. Under this setting, the AIs will start to dislike you just for winning, will rush a player for expanding too quickly, and will absolutely gang up against the leader near the end. Making this mode an option players have to turn on protects us from most of the standard prejudices that humans bring to a game with theoretically equal AI opponents.)

It seems likely to me that the 1P vs bots version of Civ is the “actual”, canonical version of the game, and the all-human version is a kind of variant. Does that make sense?

It could be considered the canonical version – Civ 1 was single-player after all, and multiplayer was never supported in the initial release until Civ 4 – although that’s mostly a result of the logistical issues with playing a multiplayer game of Civ. A two-team game of Civ is, in my biased opinion, one of the best strategy multiplayer experiences that most people haven’t tried.

The issue of “infinite city spam” seems to be a constant topic in Civ discussions. This seems like exactly the kind of thing you would need to manage with AI opponents. Was this an issue on the Civs you worked on?

Infinite City Spam has always been an issue for 4X games which allow free settling, and all versions of Civ have tried different limitations to slow it down, from city corruption to exponential maintenance to global happiness to minimum distances between cities. (With Old World, we adopted what has worked for space 4X games since Masters of Orion – fixed city sites.) Allowing the player too much leeway to cram in as many cities as possible onto the map leads to many, many problems, but it’s especially a problem for games which adopt one-unit-per-tile as it reduces the space for maneuvering between cities, turning the map into a permanent traffic jam. The incentive to maximize the number of cities per tiles is another good example of how we intentionally code the AI to play suboptimally by not pushing ICS to an extreme, so taking that option away from the human as well can avoid imbalances between the human and the AI that we don’t want. Further, having well-spaced cities leads to a better general play experience, so there is little reason to sacrifice that just so that one side can get 10% more science or production.

I loved the story about how players learned to exploit the AI’s “land your fleet at the city with the least defenders” rule. I imagine that beating the highest difficulty levels involves finding exploitable weaknesses like this in the AI’s strategy and abusing them, is this true?

These cracks in the AI are probably somewhat akin to finding various speed-running shortcuts in that, after they are discovered, it becomes hard to resist abusing them. (Many of the community-run challenge games will explicitly bar certain types of play that are deemed to be too exploitative.) The AI programmer for Old World, Alex Mantzaris, first got my attention as the player who discovered a code exploit in Civ 3 that minimized corruption as long as you founded your cities in equidistant rings around your capital, which became the dominant way to play until we patched it out (which led to the weird experience that some players missed the fun they had optimizing the equidistant ring puzzle that we had unintentionally created). However, because these strategies often either break the theme or are very unpleasant to execute, we put a high priority on stamping them out in patches so that players don’t optimize the fun out of their games.

How different are the designs of the AI opponents in Offworld Trading Company and Old World from those you made for Civ?

Offworld was quite different from Civ (and Old World) in that the problems that the AI faced (usually determining which investment had the highest probable rate of return) was something that algorithms usually do better than humans, especially since the game ran in real-time. Further, because black market attacks were both limited and anonymous, the AI didn’t need to grapple with the emotional side of diplomacy as a little Mutiny of a Geotherm was a much smaller decision than a declaration of war. Indeed, Offworld largely feels like a real-time Eurogame where the game has intense competition via mostly indirect conflict. If you don’t have a source of water, and I stop selling my water to drive up the price (or use espionage to trigger an artificial shortage), the effect can be devastating, but it doesn’t feel as mean as conquering the cities you founded and named after your kids. Because of the indirect conflict, Offworld actually works best as a free-for-all; indeed, we were never quite able to make a very compelling team mode for the game.

Old World has many of the same design challenges as Civ – the cursed problem of diplomacy, the human having infinite amount of time to min-max everything, the necessity to give the AI an artificial advantage at higher difficulties – but instead of trying to solve these problems by just writing a better AI, we addressed them at a design level, by making the game explicitly asymmetrical. In reality, all single-player 4X games are asymmetrical (the AI is either not able or not allowed to play the game the same way the human does), but players like to pretend that they are symmetrical. That ostensible symmetry leads to a lot of problems; besides the issues with diplomacy that I’ve covered, there tends to be problems with how games start and end. An AI that begins the game with a single settler is extremely vulnerable to a human rushing it early (which is not a strategy we let the AI pursue). At the end of the game, non-transparent victory conditions (like cultural or religious victory) are extremely unsatisfying ways to lose the game (in which a random popup informs you that you just lost to some other nation you might barely even know).

Thus, in Old World, our AIs start the game AHEAD of the players, as established nations with multiple cities, but are also only able to win the game via victory points, a very transparent measurement of their cities and wonders. Ambition victory, which is managed primarily through the dynamic event system and gives the player ten different ambitions to achieve, is only available to the human, so we never had to make compromises about which ambitions were fair or unfair for the AI to pursue. In fact, the event system doesn’t apply to the AI at all (we simulate the per-turn value of events for the AI as they tend to be positive on average) because we didn’t want to limit what events could do. An event might lead to an unexpected peace deal if, for example, your enemy’s heir shares your personal religion, and she has now taken the throne. These types of events highlight how the AI occupies the role of a second-class citizen; a peace deal like in the previous example is perfectly reasonable for a human to get, but they are not appropriate for the AI. How would the human react if told that they are no longer at war with a weaker nation because its AI got a peace event because their leader is besties with someone in your court. A significant number of players would just shelf the game at that point – their nation is the Middle Kingdom, after all, the center of the universe. There is no room for an AI protagonist in a single-player game.

Players often talk about moves in strategy games in terms of “greed” and “punishment”. Do you think this kind of talk is just metaphorical, or do you think there actually is a kind of moral dimension to these moves?

I do think that strategy games can teach us about ourselves, about our strengths and our weaknesses with different types of reasoning. A perfect example is that games can teach us to separate a good decision from a good outcome; I’m sure you appreciate how success at poker requires being able to make that distinction, and it’s hard to imagine an activity that teaches that lesson better than games. I can imagine a parallel universe where Reiner Knizia was born in Republican Rome, and Cato spends his latter years decrying how the youth have stopped playing board games and are now losing their virtue and discipline. There are a bunch of lessons a good game, even an abstract game, maybe especially an abstract game, can teach: the sunk-cost fallacy, the endowment principle, understanding probability, long-term vs. short-term decisions, avoiding tilt, and so on.

We recently played a bunch of the board game Pax Pamir together, a game neither of us had played before, and you were much better than me. Do you have something like an algorithm that you could write down that captures how you think when you encounter a new game and are deciding which moves to make, or are you just intuitively winging it?

Relative to the average gamer, I tend to do pretty well the first few times through a game (and then fall back to the pack), and it usually comes down to figuring out the most likely mechanic that will deliver victory. With Pax Pamir, I felt it was unlikely that any of the three coalitions would gain dominance in our first few games, so victory would come down to whoever got the most of their own pieces on the board, so I placed as many spies and gifts as I could as that seemed the cheapest way to be in the lead. (Tribes, on the other hand, make you a tempting target.) I also realized that the game was NOT actually an engine-builder even though it gave the outward appearance of being one. The strict tableau limit, the fact that placing cards competes with using cards for actions, and the opportunity for your rivals to kill your cards means that one needs to think of cards as temporary, with their placement bonus being more important than their ongoing capabilities. I think many new players assume the game is an engine-builder because it looks like one, but engine-builders require permanence – the whole point of playing a long-term card early is knowing that it will pay off later. When Tom Lehmann designed Race for the Galaxy, he gave himself an early constraint that no card could damage another player’s tableau, as it would lead to a completely different experience at odds with being an ideal engine-builder. Pax Pamir is perhaps that alternate version of Race – Pamir is not a bad engine-building game, it’s a good some-other-sort-of game.

Do you think that it would be possible to make a game-playing AI that played “for fun” the way we do? That was interested and curious, that learned the game over time, that could get bored, angry, distracted, addicted, proud, etc? If so, would that be a third category, beyond the “fun” AIs that are really just opponent-themed game rules and “good” AIs that are attempting to play optimally? Can you think of any games that have done anything like that?

This question raises another question that I wonder about – is there any point interviewing me about machine learning “AI” just because I work on game “AI” as the two fields are so fundamentally different? The big difference is that, to some extent, most ML AI involves some sort of black box, and we’ve discovered that if you try a lot of black boxes and cram an enormous amount of data into them, you’ll eventually get great results. However, one is never really sure WHY the AI is making the choices it does, which means that it can be a useful tool for a game where the rules have zero chance of changing (in other words, go and chess) and where performance can be reasonably evaluated objectively (we only care if the go or chess AI wins, not if the human has a good experience). Both of these vectors are at odds with actual game design work, where iteration is a given and, generally speaking, we want the AI to grasp defeat from the jaws of victory.

Also, before answering the question of an AI playing “for fun”, I am contractually obligated to reference the other line that Sid is well-known for – to paraphrase, we should always ask ourselves who is having the fun, the player or the computer? Further, it doesn’t matter how much internal emotional depth the AI has if that is not made transparent to the player, who will probably just interpret the AI’s mood swings as random chance, or worse. (If we postulate a future world where humans extend the same theory-of-mind to AIs that we extend to one another, perhaps the answer will be different, but I also suspect that if players really wanted this kind of depth in their opponents, then single-player game modes would be a lot less popular.) Thus, I am largely skeptical that a “genuine” emotional AI would make an ideal opponent. In contrast, “fake” emotional AIs (no magical machine learning, just old-fashioned integer math) are quite useful. Since Civ 3, I’ve had AI opponents describe their attitude towards you using a simple enum, from “friendly” to “cautious” to “furious” – levels which have concrete effects on how the AIs play and also transparent inputs that make intuitive sense.

A lot of people are worried about AI destroying civilization (the actual one, not the game.) Are you worried about that? Does your experience designing AIs for games influence how you think about this issue?

I have a hard-to-suppress instinct that if James Cameron hadn’t made a movie about AI-controlled robots attempting to destroy humanity, we wouldn’t be having this discussion. No matter how generous our reading of ChatGPT or other models are, even if we are willing to extend the label of intelligence to them, they don’t have any agency, let alone any needs, memories, or goals. If we don’t prompt them to write our term papers for us, they don’t do anything on their own. So, it’s really a question of what we let AIs control because, similar to the problem with using machine learning for games, the main issue is that these AIs are inherently unpredictable. So, let’s not give AIs autonomous control of heavy weaponry, alright?

I gave a talk on games and meaning at GDC 2023, which is now available on YouTube:

However, I fully scripted the talk ahead of time, so I decided it would be worth taking the time to post the slides online, in three parts to have mercy on your browser.

Conflict between designer intent and player behavior actually predates video games as it is a common issue with historical wargames. One of the basic challenges of wargame design is how to encourage historical play when no one knows what the likely or even plausible alternate results could be – for example, could the South have ever won the Civil War? – and how to recreate the pressures that led to bad decisions even when we all know the outcome. Maybe Napoleon should have known better than to invade Russia, but even my kids know not to start a land war in Asia.

A good example of this problem is Volko Ruhnke’s Labyrinth, a game about the War on Terror that starts in 2001 and pits the US against Al-Qaeda. It must have been a difficult game to design for many reasons, one of which is that many of the US’s historical actions, such as the invasion of Iraq, backfired horribly, which players would presumably want to avoid. However, when you read the rules for the game, it comes across like a Bush administration neo-con fantasy world. The mechanics enable a domino effect of Western support throughout the region. Establishing a democracy in one Middle Eastern country will cause it to spread to its neighbors, just like we were told would happen in Iraq back in 2003. When I first encountered the game, I was a little shocked, because it is easy to assume that the designer had fallen for this neo-con propaganda.

Years later, the designer actually addressed that question head on:

What if you as the designer have a different view of how the world works than the historical contestants? To get your players to behave historically, for your model to work and produce historically plausible outcomes, you have to incentivize your players the way people at the time were incentivized. What was the US administration’s strategy and what did they think would work? I have to allow that to work in the game; otherwise, the US player doesn’t play like the US in the War on Terror… regardless of whether Volko thinks those ideas are correct.

This raises the question of what is the point of a historical game? Is it an attempt to model history? To actually experiment with alternate outcomes? Or is it to help us understand why people made decisions that we find baffling or shocking today? With Labyrinth, Ruhnke is not trying to recreate history; instead, he is trying to recreate the historical mindset of the time. As we’ve covered, the ability of a game to simulate the actual world is extremely limited and, thus, misleading. Labyrinth shows a clear example of an alternative – simulating the pressures, the desires, and the fears of historical actors, which can be much more illuminating. The study of the past is not just about what people did but also about why they did it, and a game can probably do a better job of teaching the question of WHY people made choices they did than any other medium.

Let’s move that question to a different era, the medieval world of Crusader Kings. Now, they could have made the game with a very different focus – maybe how best to conquer the world or what is the fastest way to advance out of the Middle Ages – made it more like Civilization, in other words. Instead, they leaned into empathizing with medieval rulers, putting you under the same pressures that made it difficult to maintain a dynasty and keep you realm from fracturing. Which leads to…

…lots of posts like these. How to kill off your heir? Is it worth it to kill off your brothers? Indeed, what is the best WAY to kill off your brothers? Now that’s an interesting question for players to ask because…

… fratricide was actually official policy during a certain period of Ottoman history. For example, when Selim I assumed the throne in 1512, he quickly executed his two brothers. Mehmed III had 19 of his brothers and half-brothers murdered. Eventually, they began imprisoning their family members instead, which was quite an improvement. So, Crusader Kings certainly meets Ruhnke’s goal for a historical game, to encourage players to behave historically regardless of what the designers at Paradox think, who presumably have neither killed nor imprisoned their own brothers.

It requires creativity for a game to recreate a historical mindset as opposed to being just a historical re-enactment. For example, Europa Universalis includes a Randomized New World mode which makes the game less realistic but instead more true to the human experience of the age, of being an explorer and not knowing what is over the horizon.

There is a similar issue with Victoria, which designer Chris King outlined a number of years ago. Historically, colonies just didn’t pay. They tended to be a net-loss for the controlling countries as it cost more to subjugate, manage, and defend than it brought back home to the colonizer. However, a game about 19th Century Europe in which those nations did not race for colonies, even if to the detriment of literally everyone in the world, would clearly put players in an ahistorical mindset. In Victoria, they solved this problem by making colonies a necessary part of their economic model, providing the raw goods and, eventually, markets that the player’s factories and businesses needed. It’s not a realistic model of history, but it is a realistic model of what 19th century Europeans thought was important to them at the time.

An important consideration here is whether players will understand the line between the game incentivizing historical behavior and the game espousing a world view.

In Cole Wehrle’s An Infamous Traffic, you play English aristocrats who are profiting from selling opium in China during the 19th century. You are playing bad people doing bad things, and the designer underlines this by how victory works. The money you earn in China gets converted into frivolous prizes back home in London, including my favorite, a Fancy Hat. The game is telling you that it knows you are doing bad things, and you shouldn’t feel good about the fancy hat you ended up with as your prize. A game’s framing can matter a great deal to help players separate a historical mindset from actual reality.

What if, at the end of Civilization, instead of telling you how much land you conquered, the wrap-up screen told you how many cultures you destroyed and how many languages have disappeared?

I started my career very passionate about making games about history, games that could sit next to a book or a documentary as a legitimate secondary source on world history. My history thesis paper in college was a game that simulated the life of a shopkeeper living in early modern Oxford, based on my research in the Oxfordshire Archives. It didn’t just model the change in prices over time but also your standing in the local Mercers and Grocers Guild as well as your family life as the line between personal and business affairs was not as fixed back then, so you have to worry about your children and their future.

Two years later, I started working on Civilization III, and I was super pumped. I had just read Guns, Germs, and Steel and was inspired to make the videogame version. However, I quickly ran into the goofy reality of video games, of how players will twist your games into what they want to play. I learned that you can’t just put Horses and Wheat and Pigs on one continent but not on another and expect players to be ok with starting in the wrong place.

And then I met the twin evils of Civilization, Infinite City Sprawl, which is how the game encourages cramming cities into every possible spot on the map, and the Eternal China Syndrome, which is how once the initial expansion phase is over, the game becomes static and dull. These effects have nothing to do with history and everything to do with players seeing past the historical setting to the game’s inner math.

So, after making Civ 3 and abandoning the idea that I was making a history simulator, I had to ask myself, what could I actually communicate with Civ 4. Why make that game at all? In doing so, I started down a path that led me to why I make strategy games.

Here is the Civ 4 Civics screen. In Civs 1 through 3, you adopted an ideology – Monarchy, Despotism, Communism, Democracy – which came with a bunch of bonuses and penalties, basically judgments on the designer’s part on what those ideologies meant. I dropped that entirely for Civ 4 and implemented a build-your-own-government system where you choose where power lies, the type of economy, how the legal system works, and so on. You could have a Police State with a Free Market or you could have Slavery mixed with Free Speech. Or you could mix Universal Suffrage with State Property. The whole point was to defy ideological labels to get the player to see past them.

If the twentieth century has a single theme, it is that ideology itself is a failure. Dogmatic leaders used ideologies to demonize the “opposition,” which usually meant helping the strong to terrorize the weak. From Nazi death camps to the Soviet gulags to China’s Cultural Revolution to America’s McCarthyism, the twentieth century was full of ideas that gave power to autocratic leaders not afraid to destroy the lives of those who resisted. Much as we hate to admit it, these leaders were often supported by masses of people who believed in the stories these leaders told, the ideologies they espoused.

Demagogues love the labels that ideologies provide because they obscure and dehumanize the opposition; both sides of the Cold War made liberal use of the terms “Communist” and “Capitalist” to define and differentiate each other, even though the United States government has slowly adopted communist programs piecemeal over the last century. Why exactly was the U.S. – a country with social security, medicare, welfare, a minimum wage, labor laws, and trade unions – killing people to keep Communism out of Vietnam? In fact, if you took a typical Red-fearing, union-busting industrialist from 1923 and sent him 100 years into the future and explained to him how America works now, he would probably assume that the Communists won after all!

Labels exist to separate and control people, and I wanted the civics system to encourage people to look past the labels and at the actual choices a society needs to make when governing itself. It was no accident that I attached Mt. Rushmore to Fascism; carving mammoth statues of your country’s leaders into a MOUNTAIN is fascist, even if we do not live under capital-F Fascism. Our own self-labeling as a Capitalist Democracy does not protect us from charges that our country is damaging the world when our policies hurt real people.

I often get asked whether Offworld is a free trade game or an anti-capitalist game or some other statement on the world economy. I don’t think games should make broad statements like “capitalism is good” or “capitalism is bad” – it’s just too simplistic, and as we’ve discussed, injecting a heavy-handed message can so easily go off the rails.

In Offworld, if Iron costs more than Steel, something has gone wrong, and you win by taking advantage of those discrepancies. There is a reason why everything costs what it does. Sometimes, that goes beyond just supply and demand to government policy and cultural factors, but there is always a reason, and if we don’t like what something costs, we should find out why instead of just complaining about it.

More broadly, I made Offworld for the same reason I made Civ 4, to push against dogmatic ideological thinking, the idea that there is one solution to everything. In a good strategy game, the answer to every question – which resource is most important? what should I research first? – must always begin with “Well, it depends…” The point of having to make tough choices and to adapt to the environment is that there is never, ever just one right approach to every situation. Ideologies inevitably lead to a belief that there is one set of solutions to the world’s problems, and I believe that a good strategy game always challenges this type of thinking.

OK, now I am going to tell you something that is definitely in the 10% useful part of this pie chart. We game designers have no idea what we are doing. To be a good designer, you have to abandon the idea that you are anything other than an explorer.

You know how we all feel like we are impostors? Well, what if we are actually right? It’s actually bad to lose this feeling. If you think you have figured out game design, your career is over.

We are not creating ordered systems. We are creating chaos for the player to find order in.

I would extend this quote to say that designers who try to make ordered systems put their intentions, the meaning of their games, at risk because players will break those systems. Players don’t care about the imaginary game you have in your head.

Indeed, player understand our games better than we do. When evaluating design talent, the most important trait I look for is humility. Designers need to be able to hold two contradictory ideas in their heads at all times – to hold true to their design vision even when success is uncertain BUT ALSO to always assume that their vision is meaningless until they see it the hands of real players. They need to have both a big enough ego to follow their own path but a small enough ego to assume that they are probably wrong.

So, why make games at all if the players ultimately take them away from us? Why am I still here, trying to climb up that hill?

Well, what if that infamous Barbados-Grenada match was actually the most interesting game of soccer ever played? Maybe it’s amazing that a soccer team ended up defending both goals?

Maybe it’s amazing that the socialist Landlord’s Game turned into the capitalist Monopoly?

Maybe it’s amazing that Sweatshop created more empathy for sweatshop managers than for the suffering workers?

Maybe it’s even amazing that Spent somehow made people less sympathetic towards the poor.

Strictly speaking, these four examples are all failures, but the way they fail doesn’t at all suggest that games are useless.

Instead, their failures show us just how powerful games can be.

Right now, we are like children playing with fire, we don’t know what we are doing, and we might end up setting the wrong thing ablaze.

In the spirit of humility, I don’t have the answers for how to make sure our games don’t end up conveying a message that is the opposite of what we intended, but I do know of some games that have succeeded better than others, and I bet you do too.

Just remember that simply stating that your game is about X or Y doesn’t make it so. The only people who truly understand your game are your players, so if you want to know what your game means, make sure you ask them.

Thank you for your time.

Part 2, Part 3