The Small Fish Online Transcript
It took Small Fish Online to ask the questions that mattered and some questions we quite frankly couldn't understand. Why isn't all journalism like this?
(You'll notice Andy T was a little more pressed for time than Andy S).
SMALL FISH: From what we can see, a fair degree of research has gone into this to make it - well, at least as geographically astute as Risk, but let's be honest - it's not exactly Cluedo, is it? Were you really looking at this as some kind of commercial venture?
ANDREW S: A lot has gone into making 'War on Terror' - research, love, sweat, tears, sanity ... I think it's safe to say that for at least two years we were just doggedly pursuing this as a mad side-project. We were determined to finish something for once and we were having fun and it just felt 'right'. People kept telling us we had to be quick otherwise the moment would be gone, but we had a hunch the real war on terror would be around for a while. So this was certainly no 'race-to-market' kind of venture. If anything it was creative indulgence.
In the last year, once the development of the game was coming to an end, that's when we started up TerrorBull Games - our publishing business - and suddenly we were in a whole different world of print design, import duty and pallet dimensions. Then we had to raise the money ... even then, even when we realised people were as interested and as excited by the idea as we were, I don't think I really knew this was going to happen until we had that money in the bank. And that was just 3 months ago.
ANDY T: And Cluedo is a bit shit.
SMALL FISH: You must have expected some kind of controversy, but were you surprised at this level of vitriol from the popular press?
ANDREW S: It's true, we did expect controversy. We used to just mention the title of the game to people and they'd either laugh or they'd suck air in through their teeth. Just the idea of taking a massive, complex, emotive subject like the war on terror and turning it into a board game - a common reaction was "you just can't do that". Why not?
However, we weren't prepared for the particular 'sick' angle. Because we knew we weren't sick, we never thought, 'what if we get accused of being sick?' But it's a classic tabloid side-step; moving the target - literally putting a civilian in the line of fire. That's fighting dirty!
We thought - and maybe this is a bit arrogant or naive - but we thought, people are going to be upset because this game doesn't say the right things, because it challenges and criticises established black-and-white thinking through its ambiguity. Well, imagine that as a Sun headline: "Ambiguous Boardgame Subverts the Accepted Paradigm by Refusing to Offer Answers!!" Looking back, I'm not surprised that they went for the angle they did.
ANDY T: I thought everyone would just 'get it'.
SMALL FISH: War is just about the most popular subject for board games, computer games, films - what's different in your version?
ANDREW S: I think our version is realistic. It's crazy to say that, but honestly, we've made the most realistic war simulation game that I know of. And I'm talking modern warfare here - particularly the war on terror.
War games traditionally pit one side against the other. You line up your armies and fight it out. In our game, you can force someone out of the game by financially crippling them. You can sell someone a nuclear weapon, confiscate it back the next go and then use it on them. Maybe someone will step in and try and sell them a nuclear bunker first. If they do - go after that person too. The friend of your enemy is also your enemy etc. etc. It's not just about grabbing territory, it's about forcing confrontation, getting other people to fight for you, taking advantage of the situation - all these complex things which are as much a part of warfare as pulling the trigger, but which rarely get shown or examined.
There are no 'good guys' in our game. You're either the bad guys or the other bad guys. What's interesting is that the world starts out as a calm, peaceful place. Circumstances and personal greed force players down this dead-end route of fighting it out over diminishing resources. It's ultimately about self-preservation and you find out, over the course of the game, that you'll do virtually anything in the pursuit of that. Cheat, lie, steal, fight ... The end justifies any means in this game. I think that's a fair summary of the real world.
ANDY T: And no other war game has an 'Axis of Evil' spinner.
SMALL FISH: Just how easy has it become to hate something like this based just on semantics?
ANDREW S: I'm not sure exactly what you mean, but if you're talking about the power of certain words, then it's very easy. Just take a look at the words "terror" and "terrorism". We're programmed to react a certain way to these words. And the reaction is stronger than "murder" or "rape" or "torture" or pretty much anything you can think of.
We've been trained to have fairly narrow connotations with those words and so our reaction will be also be suitably narrow: fearful, suspicious and angry. Once most people are 'trained' in the 'feeling' of certain words, then it's very easy to manipulate an entire argument by simply dropping in one of these words. Take the Russians and Chechnya - this is the tip of a larger problem of Soviet collapse that doesn't seem to be going away. For years they were "separatists", then 9/11 happened and the Chechnyans become "terrorists". Suddenly the whole world's ears prick up and we take notice.
Drop the word "terrorism" into a headline and you have a reaction, albeit subconscious, before you've even read the article. So going back to the original question, we were asking for it really, making a humourous boardgame using a word that normally elicits hate, suspicion and anger ... it's a contradiction that's going to confuse a lot of people, because it doesn't seem right - it goes against the neurolinguistic programming we've all readily accepted.
ANDY T: Words that create fear should be laughed at.
SMALL FISH: When you sat down and put the game together, did you start to rationalise the various weapons and tactics in the war on terror and say, well, hang on - where's the difference in "extraordinary rendition" and kidnappings of soldiers in Iraq? Did you find yourself with a lot less cards than you expected.
ANDREW S: We had so many things in the first version of the game - we had a whole arms trade section of the game at one point. I'm still a bit sad we got rid of that - it was fun bringing down a fighter jet with an RPG. We also made chemical and biological weapons dirt cheap, but you could only use them when 'evil'.
Let's face it, there are rules to conflict and there are ways around the rules. There are things we find abhorrent by one name and acceptable when called something else. Some call this moral equivalence; I call it hypocrisy. When language games fail you, you can always get out of a tight spot if you have the power of veto in the UN security council. Power and money are the best international bodyguards you can have.
It really is like a global game - "Play nice. Play by the rules. OK, you won't - that's fine because you're bigger than me, just don't pick on me or my mate… " On top of this, we're constantly being told that, "the rules of the game have changed". I mean, it's hardly surprising the war on terror ended up as a boardgame when it's already being treated as such by those in power.
Personally I've always had a bit of a theoretical problem with the Geneva Convention anyway. You have two sides trying to kill each other and there are rules? Does that really make sense? It's almost elevating it to the level of a sport - like boxing or something. Well if you're civilised enough to agree to rules, why not stay round the table just a little bit longer and start talking about what's troubling you.
But to answer your question, we had too many cards. Too many everything. The war on terror is a big subject and it bleeds into many other complex subjects. We had to rein it in a lot.
ANDY T: I spent a few months in the middle east researching the latest counter-counter-insurgency tactics, only to lose my notepad in a bar in Tikrit.
SMALL FISH: As clearly satirical as this is, does it really start to equate the injustices on both 'sides?'
ANDREW S: Well both types of players - Empire and Terrorist - work towards roughly the same goal (global 'liberation'), using roughly the same tactics: muscle, extortion and charm. Is that equivocating both sides? For me, the parallel being drawn is that everyone is in it for the 'right' reasons, from their standpoint. There are very few arch villains in the world - I mean 100% evil baddies - who are only interested in global destruction. Most people really believe they have right on their side (and if they're lucky, God too). The only difference is the interpretation of what is right for them and others.
Somehow you have these individuals and nations and groups so sure of being "right" that they're willing to take up arms to defend, or actively protect that notion - which is clearly insanity because right is a subjective concept. It's like fighting over whether this water is hot or not. If I want to splash it on my face, it might be too hot. If I want to make coffee with it, it might be too cold. It's subjective and subject to context. This notion of not even questioning whether you're right or not - in the game it proves to be self-defeating, because while your version of "right" might prevail, what you end up inheriting is a world covered in terrorism and radiation and chaos.
ANDY T: A 'War' card destroys a development, a 'Terrorist Attack' card does the same.
SMALL FISH: Obviously there's little place in the game for the misery of civilians (which is possibly accurate as a simulation of the politics of the WOT). At risk of sounding insensitive (or lucid, which is often an equally terrible crime), where is the relevance in asking you what you would say to a victim of terrorism?
ANDREW S: It's true this game is about the global picture. The poor civilians don't get a second thought. Players replicate the behaviour of the 'Commanders in Chief' of this world. They make decisions based on short-term political and monetary gain and they don't have to busy themselves with the after-affects of those decisions. Just like WW1 Generals in their offices moving pieces around on a scale map of the Somme - you're abstracted from the pain deliberately so you can make such decisions.
On one level, you're quite right - where is the relevance of mentioning victims of terrorism? After all, the War on Terror is so tangentially attached to terrorism (apart from the fact it seems to do a good job of promoting it), that it's not really valid to link our board game to victims of terrorism. The initial concept for the game was, after all, an incredulous response to the absurdity of real world events - specifically the continued mentioning of "terrorism" and "Saddam" or "Iraq" in the same sentence, thus linking, in the listener's mind, something that previously had no relation.
I guess what the press did with our game - mentioning 7/7 victims or Bali victims or 9/11 victims in the same article or headline - they're linking those events to our boardgame without there really being that link. The shift was so subtle we didn't even notice it at first. We didn't notice that we were trying to open up one debate and we were being challenged on a different debate. Since we're generally up for debate (we're argumentative sods) we didn't mind too much at the time, but what the media was doing was moving the debate to "safe ground". That is, emotive ground where two parties can slog it out hysterically to the amusement of bystanders and no one really knows why. To condense the process, it goes something like this:
A: "Ha ha, I can't believe how openly hypocritical our actions are. It's a farce"
B: "But what about the thousands of lives shattered on 7/7?"
A: "Erm ..."
There you have it. End of discussion. It's not as simple as that obviously. Many people will and do believe that a game about the war on terror automatically includes those victims of terror-related incidents, but it doesn't - and if it does, we should be answering questions from much farther a-field, from Omagh to Qana. But it doesn't - it was a false association, created to narrow down or derail an argument - not in any conspiratorial way, but that's simply how things work. Maybe it's just done for pure entertainment value or shock value. After all, we're constantly hearing from the media about how stupid and passive we all are and how what we don't want is serious discussion because we only have 3 second attention spans, so let's feed them a high-emotion cocktail of 3 second sound bites.
A similar thing happened with Blair and his magic WMDs. As soon as anyone seriously challenged the legitimacy of the WMD claim, the favourite counter argument would be to picture the scenario of 'what if...'. What if Saddam did have WMDs and he fired them here, in England, London, at your house. Of course, this isn't part of the debate any more than the above example, but the effect is the same. You're derailed onto emotive territory and it's difficult to discuss rationally or objectively any more.
Using a similar tactic, I'm sure I could drum up support for invading the moon next week. After all, the other night through my telescope, I think I saw some Clangers building a catapult and loading it up with large meteorites.
ANDY T: Every time I remove one of my developments from the board, because some bastard has just taken a pop at me, I think of the millions of lives that plastic cylinder represents, and I cry.
SMALL FISH: Are you afraid that you might end up being used as a platform for further rhetoric? There is some form on this - a small issue, with little or no voice, gets itself in the mainstream press, but becomes a springboard for someone else's opinion. It's not really debate if one party has a megaphone, right?
ANDREW S: There's surely always that risk with anything - a song, a story, a film. Once it's out there, it becomes pluralised. People adopt it or reject it for different reasons - and never the exact same reasons as you created it. Since we've made the game to put it out in the public realm, we can't really complain if someone decides to champion it for their own benefit. Maybe some people will champion it, who we don't want to be associated with? I hope that doesn't happen, but if it does, that's largely outside of our control. We'll just re-release it with a slightly different name, or a different coloured box or something.
ANDY T: We'll buy a bigger megaphone.
ANDREW S: That's a good idea. We should pre-empt the megaphone buying and buy the next size up straight away.
SMALL FISH: Some taboos are taboos for a good reason - discuss.
ANDREW S: There should be no taboos. But it's true, taboos are always taboos for a good reason - the question is, for whose good? Usually taboos are inherited notions, almost on a subconscious level and their purpose is to preserve the status quo, to avoid anything that could be subversive to an established authority. When I say that terrorism is taboo, I mean that the strength of feeling combined with the interests of those in power limit both the definition and discussion of terrorism to such a point where it may as well be off-limits.
Terrorism is an interesting taboo because it is a relatively new concept in itself and then it has become taboo even more recently. If you go back to the end of the 60s, beginning of the 70s, we had a very idealistic, almost naive terrorism in Europe. I'm not saying it wasn't brutal or violent, but you had Palestinian hi-jackers demanding the release of the imprisoned members of the RAF. They weren't linked in any way - not even ideologically - but they were 'of a kind'. There was this notion of universal struggle against authority. Things today are far more fragmented and complex and ambiguous.
But the political treatment of terrorism, far from following the fragmented nature of the beast, has become more narrow, confined and dogmatic. Nowadays, to even suggest that terrorism is anything more than a brainwashed fanatic's dream of paradise is seriously challenging. To go further and suggest that terrorism has roots, a purpose, a reason or manifold reasons... that really goes against the grain. What's further interesting about this taboo is that, obviously, I can talk about it. We live in a highly developed democracy which enables me to say what I'm saying. However, at the same time, the established way of thinking, the 'party line' if you like is strongly re-enforced, through various laws and through the complicit actions of the media.
I think terrorism is a behavioural taboo. The word comes complete with a package of emotions, feelings and strong visual icons. That package is so widely accepted and repeated, that any other reaction feels strange. To paraphrase Erich Fromm, freedom of speech is only worth anything if your speech is free, that is to say, free from (adverse) influence.
ANDY T: I eat taboos and shit board games.
SMALL FISH: Some people are accusing you of going 'too far.' Is this just a symptom of the culture of 'if you aren't with us, you're against us,' or is there really a point where you start to become - in rhetoric terms - the mirror of the ideas you are attacking?
ANDREW S: There was no single plan with producing this game, nor one single reason for making it. What we are "attacking" has therefore been largely dictated by what people say we are attacking. As far as we're concerned, it's pretty much against everything. Maybe this is a nihilist boardgame? Maybe... if it weren't so much fun to play, I'd be tempted to claim it is. It's positive nihilism. Life-affirming nihilism. Stop the madness; look around you; open your mind and start having fun!
And "going too far"? I'm not sure where too far is. If you can go too far with a board game, that's kind of scary. Is it too far because of the subject matter? Because of the humour? Because of the combination of subject matter and humour? Because it's a game and not a film, or a song or a play? None of these things should really present a problem for a culture whose supposedly greatest export is ideas. Additionally, we're meant to have an illustrious history and tradition of black humour and satire. It seems that a board game isn't high-brow enough to be included in that tradition, nor common-place enough to be discounted as mere vanity, as a poem or a song or a play might be.
ANDY T: You can only go 'too far' if know where you should have got off
SMALL FISH: What's next? Halliburton Monopoly? Three hotels in the Green Zone? Get out of Guantanamo free cards?
ANDREW S: We've got a couple of games in the pipeline. We want TerrorBull Games to be about bringing people together to have a laugh - and maybe a bit of a think - about stuff you might normally shrink away from. Literally: "playing with your mind". It's a sign of a healthy society, I think, if you can do that. If you can challenge and question at every turn... and have fun doing it... that'd be brilliant.
ANDY T: I've no idea what's next, I was hoping the board game would kick off the revolution.