
Guy Debord’s Situationist Board Game - CrocodileStreet
http://dangerousminds.net/comments/class_warfare_radical_french_philosopher_guy_debords_situationist_board_gam
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tomcam
Looks like an interesting article but was unable to navigate it on my iPad.
Seems like some touch events were hijacked but I lost patience trying to
figure out what was going on.

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UhUhUhUh
A computerized version, with online play, would be excellent. The weakness I
see is that the presence of a terrain is assumed (i.e. the board) when, I
think, it needs to be determined first. This seems crucial, following the
social, historical, premises of the theory behind the game, because such
determination is already a move in the war that is to ensue.

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JoeDaDude
A computerized version was indeed developed but ran into legal trouble. The
web site still exists [1]. Perhaps someday they'll be allowed to host the game
again.

[1]
[http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php](http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/index.php)

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UhUhUhUh
Thanks for the link. Will watch.

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homarp
and if you go to archive.org and look at their version of
[http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/](http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/) on e.g. January
2014, you might find an old downloadable beta...

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andybak
Hmmmm. Clausewitz and Situationism is not a connection I would have imagined.

The article's first paragraph is poorly written. A game known as Kriegspiel
has a much older heritage:
[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_(wargame)](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsspiel_\(wargame\))
and it appears that Debord's game was either a reinvention or merely a variant
of it.

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supernumerary
While Clausewitz and Situationism might be disconnected, Debord himself often
called on Clausewitz.

Here Clausewitz is mentioned in the opening paragraph of Debord's
autobiography 'Panegyric':

[http://debordiana.chez.com/english/panegyric.htm](http://debordiana.chez.com/english/panegyric.htm)

and:

"The world of war presents at least the advantage of not leaving room for the
silly chapter of optimism".

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etangent
> "Terrain is transmuted into psychogeography"

While I understand what the above sentence is saying, I would like to explore
and interrogate the geopsychology of its author in order to understand what
led her to formulate her spatial epistemology using this odiously unnecessary
verbiage.

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SuperPaintMan
Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

From the Wiki page

>defined in 1955 by Guy Debord as "the study of the precise laws and specific
effects of the geographical environment, consciously organized or not, on the
emotions and behavior of individuals."

>"a whole toy box full of playful, inventive strategies for exploring
cities... just about anything that takes pedestrians off their predictable
paths and jolts them into a new awareness of the urban landscape."

The essential tool here being overlaid maps of say San Francisco &
[http://xkcd.com/256/](http://xkcd.com/256/) or a topographic map such as [1]

[1]
[https://theblackbox.ca/project/mapping/DSC02355.jpg.html](https://theblackbox.ca/project/mapping/DSC02355.jpg.html)

~~~
etangent
> Every specialization has their own jargon to grok.

True, but a more subtle observer might point out that the jargon can serve
more than one function simultaneously. In fields like organic chemistry which
is famous for its compound names that sometimes extend beyond the page limit,
the jargon is unavoidable, well defined and categorized, and serves a narrow
and specific role (though true, learning that jargon would signal your
competence within the field, so perhaps it's a dual one, where the secondary
function is to serve as a barrier). In a number of other fields, specifically
the social sciences (and even more specifically, the social sciences after
they inhaled a large dose of Frankfurtian critical theory), the jargon serves
a far more complex role of (1) naming a concept, (2) signaling to peers from
other disciplines the "scienciness" of what could (sometimes justly) be
criticized as a non-empirical field, and (3) signaling to peers from the same
discipline the "political in-groupness" of the author, that is that the author
shares their political beliefs.

One could even argue there is a 4th role, where you subtly signal (to
potential recruits from the student body): "See how much non-empiricism we can
get away with? Join us, and you can get away with it too! Free degree, if only
you agree!"

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samirillian
I wonder if it's at all similar to go, which is considered by philosophers
like Gilles deleuze to be the "war game" part excellence. Go, at least,
closely resembles che Guevara's recipe for winning a guerrilla war: to
encircle and to not be encircled. Definitely going to look deeper into this!

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falsedan
Debord's Kreigspiel isn't very interesting as a game (clearly derived from
chess & less involved) or as a conflict simulation. It's an incredible
artifact!

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cjslep
I'm a fan of military history, but the video at the end of the article is
awful. It doesn't clearly explain the game because it gets lost in historical
pretentiousness.

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JoeDaDude
The video is only superficially about the game and more about the political
philosophy of Debord. It is hosted by the Class Wargames website[1], with a
subtitle of"Ludic subversion in the bureaucratic society of controlled
consumption". Personally, i"m not clear as to whether they are trying to make
a political point or if it is just a tongue-in-cheek website about a few board
games.

[1] [http://www.classwargames.net/](http://www.classwargames.net/)

