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Right after I posted a selfie with the game in August 2014, I was sorry that it had been published and wanted nothing to do with it ever again.
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In his book I Am a Strange Loop, Douglas Hofstadter proposes that consciousness is a mirage, an epiphenomenon that emerges from the countless interactions taking place at a scale below our level of perception. An example of such from his book:
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One day, many years ago, I wanted to pull all of the envelopes from a small cardboard box lying on the floor of my study and stick them as a group into one of my desk drawers. Accordingly, I picked up the box, reached into it, clasped my right hand around the pack of envelopes inside it (about a hundred in number), and squeezed tightly down on them in order to pull them all out of the box as a unit. Nothing at all surprising in any of this. But all of a sudden I felt, between my thumb and fingers, something very surprising. Oddly enough, there was a marble sitting (or floating?) right in the middle of that flimsy little cardboard box! […]
I peered in between the envelopes, looking for a small, smooth, colored glass sphere. No luck. Then I fumbled about with my fingers between the envelopes, feeling for it. Again no soap. But then, as soon as I grasped the whole set of envelopes as before, there it was again, as solid as ever! Where was this little devil of a marble hiding?
I peered in between the envelopes, looking for a small, smooth, colored glass sphere. No luck. Then I fumbled about with my fingers between the envelopes, feeling for it. Again no soap. But then, as soon as I grasped the whole set of envelopes as before, there it was again, as solid as ever! Where was this little devil of a marble hiding?
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He also liked the Parker Brothers game Funny Bones — coincidentally published the year I was born — most likely because we never worried about who won when we played. Two of us tried to hold as many cards between us as we could while everyone else watched and laughed.
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Excerpt from a Bruno Faidutti article about reviews, slightly edited for style:
Quote:
W. Eric Martin is in charge of the news feed of BoardGameGeek. He's a really nice guy, fun, open-minded, talkative, and I always enjoy meeting him at game fairs. That's why I've always been surprised by how boring his video reviews are, until some day in a Facebook discussion he boasted about the way he could review a game without letting his personal feeling show through, so that gamers could make their own free and independent opinion on whether they will like the game or not. No wonder I don't like his reviews, since the only interesting thing would be his personal opinion on the games.
I find this frustrating and meaningless. By restraining from giving their own opinion, from telling what they have and want to tell, Eric and all the reviewers who share his approach are emasculating their own works. Like the rules paraphrases, this must be boring to write, and it's no wonder it's also boring to read or look at. Such descriptive reviews usually don't give more useful information than the blurb at the back of the box…
Reviewing a game in a cold and impersonal way, ignoring the pleasure, fun, anger or boredom one felt while playing, it's focusing on the subsidiary and ignoring the crux of the matter, the feel of the game. It's frustrating both for the reviewer, who doesn't give his opinion, and for the reader who doesn't learn anything useful. Can you imagine a book or movie critic restraining himself from telling what he thinks of a novel or movie? Where would be the point in reading his reviews? It's not different with games.
I find this frustrating and meaningless. By restraining from giving their own opinion, from telling what they have and want to tell, Eric and all the reviewers who share his approach are emasculating their own works. Like the rules paraphrases, this must be boring to write, and it's no wonder it's also boring to read or look at. Such descriptive reviews usually don't give more useful information than the blurb at the back of the box…
Reviewing a game in a cold and impersonal way, ignoring the pleasure, fun, anger or boredom one felt while playing, it's focusing on the subsidiary and ignoring the crux of the matter, the feel of the game. It's frustrating both for the reviewer, who doesn't give his opinion, and for the reader who doesn't learn anything useful. Can you imagine a book or movie critic restraining himself from telling what he thinks of a novel or movie? Where would be the point in reading his reviews? It's not different with games.
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Excerpt from a note I sent my then-girlfriend (now-wife) in high school:
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But what does it matter because in a hundred years we'll all be dead anyway.
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I edited the rules, then met d'Epenoux at SPIEL 2008 to thank him for the work and get paid. We talked about how he decides on what to publish, and he gave three rules for Cocktail titles, although plenty of exceptions exist:
• They must consist solely of cards.
• They must be explainable in one minute and playable in ten.
• They must be as fun to watch as they are to play.
He also explained how masterful Knizia is at giving publishers what they want, noting that he'll meet with Knizia at one fair, mention specific topics or types of games that he wants, then Knizia will approach him at the next fair with a catalog of designs to fit Cocktail's needs.
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My dad was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease a couple of years before he died from complications following a fall. One story of his that I still remember well from his later years:
While running errands one day, he unexpectedly ran into my mother at the mall — unexpectedly as she had taken the other car to do errands of her own — and while he knew who she was, he couldn't remember her name. He figured that his brain had taken all of his "home" information and put it in a mental box to be retrieved later because he was busy with other things at the time and needed to focus entirely on current tasks.
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La Jalousie presents a narrative without a narrator, a body of text without a self. This book resonated with me, ringing hard my own empty shell.
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More from Hofstadter's I Am a Strange Loop:
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Eventually it dawned on me that there wasn't any marble in there at all, but that there was something that felt for all the world exactly like a marble to this old marble hand. It was an epiphenomenon caused by the fact that, for each envelope, at the vertex of the "V" made by its flap, there is a triple layer of paper as well as a thin layer of glue. An unintended consequence of this innocent design decision is that when you squeeze down on a hundred such envelopes all precisely aligned with each other, you can't compress that little zone as much as the other zones — it resists coompression. The hardness that you feel at your fingertips has an uncanny resemblence to a more familiar (dare I say "a more real"?) hardness.
•••
My memory is fairly terrible — always has been, really — and I often discover after the fact that I'm remembering something in a way that didn't happen, assigning events and quotes to different times or people than where they originated.
Games are concrete objects, with names and numbers that don't change no matter when you take them from the shelf, but I find that I'm not remembering them as well as I used to. I can partly attribute this to the sheer number of games that I see each year, that number ballooning annually beyond the ability of anyone to fathom, much less experience, but only partly. I sample and share what I can, while letting most of it pass over me like rain, content to hope that someone else finds it quenching.
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Despite appearing in game demonstration videos and being interviewed on radio shows and having my name in this space all the time, I'm not someone who craves publicity. I'm not interested in being famous, and I feel embarassed each time someone says something along those lines at conventions or game stores or at my house when they show up for game day.
Yes, I'm a guy who does public things, and yes, my name and face is out there, but that's not me. I'm playing a role; I step into that role at a particular time, do the thing, then retreat into privacy once again. I'm not the one who appears on camera. I just play that guy on BGG TV.
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Another author introduced to me in college by Batty-Sylvan was Jorge Luis Borges, and some of Borges' recurring themes in his short stories included identity and the mirroring of the world, the abstract and the make-believe being made inseparable from the real, as in this one-paragraph story "On Exactitude In Science", as translated here by Andrew Hurley:
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. . . In that Empire, the Art of Cartography attained such Perfection that the map of a single Province occupied the entirety of a City, and the map of the Empire, the entirety of a Province. In time, those Unconscionable Maps no longer satisfied, and the Cartographers Guilds struck a Map of the Empire whose size was that of the Empire, and which coincided point for point with it. The following Generations, who were not so fond of the Study of Cartography as their Forebears had been, saw that that vast map was Useless, and not without some Pitilessness was it, that they delivered it up to the Inclemencies of Sun and Winters. In the Deserts of the West, still today, there are Tattered Ruins of that Map,inhabited by Animals and Beggars; in all the Land there is no other Relic of the Disciplines of Geography.
—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
—Suarez Miranda, Viajes de varones prudentes, Libro IV, Cap. XLV, Lerida, 1658
•••
I often forget to look at myself in a mirror before going out — or maybe "forget" isn't the right word as I just don't think about looking at myself. I know that I'm there because I'm walking around and wearing clothes and eating food so that's good enough, right?
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In the morning, I downloaded the rules for Funny Bones and discovered that it didn't play anything like how I remembered it, so I messed around with my fake recollected game, streamlined it further so that teams competed to hold a certain number of cards first to win, then pitched it to Cocktail Games, knowing that the design fit d'Epenoux's criteria and that I wouldn't pitch it anywhere else if Cocktail didn't want it.
D'Epenoux agreed to publish the game, after which I immediately started wondering whether he had signed the contract because he thought I was going to publicize it heavily on BGG, after which I started hating myself for not trusting his judgment and honesty because he had always seemed like an up-front person in the past. I could barely talk to him after that, always feeling like a fraud who had snookered his way into publication. I hesitated to cover Cocktail following the game's announcement as I didn't want to come across as favoring my publisher, effectively punishing it instead. I didn't know how to relate to this experience, and I just wanted it to end so that I could retreat to what I knew and keep on keeping on.
•••
From an email I sent in 2008:
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I don't feel that I have to convince others that my point of view is the right POV, that everyone must agree with me. I'm writing as a way to record my own thoughts and beliefs and observations, to figure out what I think. Ideally the writing will interest others and make them think about things in a new way, but I have no faith that it will. People get stuck in tracks of thought, and challenging someone's beliefs is rarely enough to encourage them to look at something from a different POV. Everything gets processed through a person's skein of reality, for good or ill.
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One experiment he suggests is called "Two-way pointing":
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Point with one index finger outwards at the world, and with your other index finger point inwards towards your no-face.
The finger pointing outwards points at a scene full of countless shapes and colours. It’s a complicated picture. The more time you spend looking at it, the more there is to see. And most of it is hidden — obscured by other things in one way or another.
The view in is different. Here the space is not hidden at all. You can see it all, all at once. In the photograph I can see only part of the room in the distance, but here I see all of the space. There is nothing more to view here, nothing concealed. Nor is this being that I am here — and that you are here (I suggest) — remote in any way. It is right here, it is what I am. It is the "part" of me that I can never lose. What could be simpler than seeing this — and being this? It is uncomplicated, transparent, open to inspection, nearer than near, given in its entirety…
Is this Who you really are? Are you empty of everything, and at the same time capacity for this endlessly changing view out, room for this amazing world? To find out, just look. Seeing the space here is simpler than simple.
The finger pointing outwards points at a scene full of countless shapes and colours. It’s a complicated picture. The more time you spend looking at it, the more there is to see. And most of it is hidden — obscured by other things in one way or another.
The view in is different. Here the space is not hidden at all. You can see it all, all at once. In the photograph I can see only part of the room in the distance, but here I see all of the space. There is nothing more to view here, nothing concealed. Nor is this being that I am here — and that you are here (I suggest) — remote in any way. It is right here, it is what I am. It is the "part" of me that I can never lose. What could be simpler than seeing this — and being this? It is uncomplicated, transparent, open to inspection, nearer than near, given in its entirety…
Is this Who you really are? Are you empty of everything, and at the same time capacity for this endlessly changing view out, room for this amazing world? To find out, just look. Seeing the space here is simpler than simple.
•••
As soon as Borges had been presented to me, I read nearly everything he had written, finding multiple similarities between his work and Robbe-Grillet's — so much so that for one of my essays in college English, I "wrote" about La Jalousie by stitching together quotes from Borges' stories and essays. In the final paper, 95% of the essay was someone else's writing now repurposed, my voice clearly heard, yet simultaneously unnecessary thanks to my efforts to ventriloquize the dead.
•••
My story from Speak:
Maybe Next Time
So I see you in a cafe reading the Sunday newspaper and having coffee, and on a whim I sit down across from you so I can read a section of the paper as well, although mostly I look at you over the top of the page. I ask you questions about your weekend and weekdays and work life and home life, and I find out you don't have anyone special in your life, no lover or significant other, no partner who considers you the most wonderful person in the world, and this surprises me as you seem to be a charming and lovely person, intelligent, witty. I invite you out for a movie, dancing, a trip to the circus, a walk on a pier in moonlight. We have an evening that satisfies both of us, more evenings and weekend trips, seventeen months of sharing a bed, a kitchen, an apartment, thirty-four years of marriage before you die, leaving me and our son and two daughters to mourn our loss, leaving me without the most important person in my life, leaving me alone for three years before I die. The only thing that survives us, that shows we were together, are our children, but then our children have four children and their children have nine and those nine, fourteen. Our genes spread through the human race and would be a part of every man and woman on the planet except before that happens everyone is killed by chemical agents that leak out of forty-thousand-year-old canisters. The earth lies empty of animal life for the remainder of its lifespan, for six hundred thirty-five million years and then the sun melts the earth to nothing as it expands and dissipates its energy. The remains of the solar system are devoured one-and-three-quarter billion years later by a black hole, which is then consumed by another, and slowly the entirety of the universe is drawn to one point as one black hole cannibalizes another, then another, increasing its mass until it becomes all-devouring. The enormous and universal mass that it absorbs and contains crushes it back to a single point that explodes a nanosecond later to refill and recreate the universe. Fifteen billion years of development create thousands of galaxies and millions of stars and a million million planets and more specifically, in a galaxy which some of its residents call the Milky Way, a solar system with a plain yellow sun and nine planets, the third planet overflowing with carbon-based life. One species advances to the point that it can transmit energy through wires and double the natural lifespan of its members and send representatives of the planet into nearby areas of space. And you live now on this vast and interesting planet that has many areas you've never visited and millions of people you'll never meet and one of those people is me, who you'll never get to experience or know or care for or love; the only contact you'll have with me is reading a story that I write.
—end—
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From a Nov. 24, 2016 email from Cocktail Games' Matthieu d'Epenoux:
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Here is a royalty statement for BODY PARTY.
The game is not a success and I think that we probably made bad choices in terms of cover.
The game is not a success and I think that we probably made bad choices in terms of cover.
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