"There are at least two kinds of games. One could be called
finite, the other infinite. A finite game is played for the
purpose of winning, an infinite game for the purpose of continuing
the play." James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games,
p. 3.
According to Merriam-Webster, games are "a procedure or
strategy for gaining and end"; an "activity undertaken
or regarded as a contest involving rivalry, strategy, or struggle".
This definition–touching on issues of hierarchy, volatility,
and revolutionary change–also applies to the social sytem
in which we participate, and this system's response to and treatment
of ecosystems and natural resources.
We play games for pleasure. However, they are also cultural artifacts;
representations of our social system and its organization. In
the language of game design, our current social system is a finite,
object-oriented game that is conditional on infinite resources.
Whether played on a board in a nursury, or played out at global
scale, such a game is unsustainable. We are used to our games
coming to an end; yet we seem to exist in a collecctive state
of denial about the end our current game strategy might bring
us to–environmental crisis, and possibly, collapse. Instead
of addressing the issue of global resource management through
urgent rhetoric or guilt-ridden representations, the Endgame Project
instead invites the social citizen to play a different kind of
game–in the most literal sense–which I have designed.
1. Introduction: The
Level of Culture
"Finite games can be played within an infinite game, but
an infinite game cannot be played within a finite game. Infinite
players regard their wins and losses in whatever finite games
they play as but moments in continuing play." James Carse,
Finite and Infinite Games, p. 7.
Much of our current environmental debate can be reduced to two
simple, shared illusions. 1) We treat the world's resources as
infinite, when they are not. 2) We regard our own actions as having
only a local impact–or no impact at all–on the ecology
we inhabit when, in fact, these effects can be drastic. Addressing
and changing these ideas will take more than political, industrial,
or economic action. In order to make an impact on popular notions
of 'environment' and 'sustainability', we must first address the
issue at the level of culture.
Prejudices about the environment, and shortsighted views of human
action, are embedded in the very fabric of human culture–in
our buildings, our landscapes, our business models, and even in
our entertainment and games. For the Endgame Project, I have taken
one small part of culture–the traditional board game–and
have analyzed, disassembled, and reassembled it. I see this as
a small step in a larger process of remaking cultural attitudes
towards the environment. This process is essential if we are to
continue living, working, and playing games into the forseeable
future.
2. Creating the Game: Product=Process
The product of this year's work is not a product at all, but
a set of processes. First, the process for assembling a game board
out of existing cultural and physical artifacts. And second, the
process of playing a game with these tools.
The DIY (do-it-yourself) element of the project reflects the
character of a larger body of DIY environmental awareness projects
that will comprise the Kit Out site ("Opt In, Kit Out").
In a culture that focuses on convenience and instant gratification,
DIY business models, like IKEA and Martha Stuart, and crafty (creative
reuse) sources like GetCrafty.com and the magazine Ready Made,
represent both an interesting anomaly and a potentially robust
alternative to pure consumption. In a green future, I imagine
that the general population has become an army of do-it-yourself
home technology mavens, and that companies like those mentioned
will cater to the masses with plans and kits for conversion and
re-use; post-post-Martha.
Step 1: "Make/Mod Your Board"
To create the game board for Endgame, a prospective player must
simply follow a set of instructions on the kit-out.net website.
Crucially, these instructions call for the manufacture of Endgame
not from the whole cloth of craft supplies, but from the modification
and adaptation of existing games and objects. The site for the
creation of Endgame is not a blank slate, but the dusty closet
of every American home with its boxes of Monopoly, Othello, and
dominoes. Further, the additional supplies needed for Endgame
is an old atlas, a box of toothpicks–are equally available,
and seemingly superfluous, in the domestic environment.
Step 2: "Download Rules"
"In the narrowest sense rules are not laws; they do not
mandate specific behavior, but only restrain the freedom of
the players, allowing considerable room for choice within those
restraints." James Carse, Finite and Infinite Games,
p. 8.
The game rules, developed through an extensive process of testing
and workshops with volunteers, were continually revised and adapted
to create complex, stimulating, and rewarding play. Crucially,
Endgame is designed not as an illustration or forced example,
but rather, as a self-contained, culturally expandable, and infinitely
distributable teaching tool.
The object of the game is to become the wealthiest player through
buying, combining, and selling industries. This must be achieved
while maintaining the balance of earth's natural systems.
My goal is not to propose an end to capitalism, but to suggest
an alternate, sustainable form of capitalism. So I started out
with the classic consumer capitalist board game–Monopoly–where
players buy and sell properties with the goal of bankrupting their
opponents. In Endgame, the player's goal remains to bankrupt his
opponent, but at least two important changes to the game should
be noted.
First: Instead of buying and selling properties, players
buy and sell industries (or processes) and must continue to assemble
and reassemble them to minimize waste and maximize profit.
It is to each player's economic advantage and, more importantly,
essential to the maintenance of the shared ecosystem, to assemble
owned industries into supply chains. The number of dots on each
side of the industry dominoes governs the direction and connection
between the industries. The two ends of a domino can be thought
of as the resource consumption (input) and waste (output) of the
industry, though the direction of this flow is not specified.
Linking industries (end-to-end, just as in the traditional play
of dominoes) therefore represents a reduced quantity of resources
stripped from the ecosystem, and of waste ultimately returned
to it. Linking industries into closed, circular systems, therefore
minimizeds the impact on the environment and maximizes an industry's
efficiency and profit margin.
When a player lands on an industry owned by another player, she
owes a fee based on the position of that industry in her opponent's
system. The face value of an industry is determined by the number
of dots on the industry's face, multiplied by $10. If the industry
is not in a system, the fee is equal to one-half the industry's
face value. If the industry is part of a linear system (not closed),
the fee is one-half the total of all industries in that system.
However, when a system is closed, or circular, the fee is equal
to the full face value of all the industries in the system.
A player can and should continually reassess and reassemble his
industries to maximize efficiency and profit.
Second: Every action in the commercial domain–in this
case, the perimeter of the board–has a corresponding and
potentially cascading effect on the shared ecosystem that now
occupies the center.
At the start of the game, each space of the ecosystem grid is
occupied by a white/black token, turned to its white side. Pieces
turn from white to black as various spaces are landed upon, depending
on the circumstances of that space. It is often the case that
the player is requested to turn over an ecosystem disk in the
row occupied by an industry or other space. These are the vertical
rows proceeding directly from the industry, except in the corners
of the board, where a diagonal row is designated.
Black disks outflank white ones: Within the ecosystem, when a
black disk "outflanks" several white disks–horizontally,
vertically, or diagonally–the flanked disks are flipped
to black. Only the white pieces outflanked directly by a new black
piece are changed. White disks CANNOT outflank, and must be re-created
one at a time.
If the central disk, marked with a skull, is turned to black,
either directly or through outflanking, the game is over and both
players lose.
The presence of an ecosystem in a game about capitalism is a
conscious, and important shift in the way in which we consider
both the environment and industry. In a natural model of capitalism,
our greatest challenge is not whether an individual wins or loses
within the capitalist financial system, but whether all players
in the capitalist system lose because of a terminal failure in
the natural system we inhabit. Endgame models both the capitalist
system and the ecosystem it inhabits, making them interdependent,
and through the grid of the ecosystem, creates a complex web connecting
all pieces of the industrial landscape. The behavior of the white
disks–cascading negative effects, or slow regeneration of
positive ones–reflects the reality of environmental disruption
and the slow process of remediation. The game system also attempts
to model both the actions of remediation and damage in the environment,
and our cultural attitudes towards them.
As a culture, we completely misunderstand and underestimate the
complexity of the ecosystems we inhabit. They may believe that
environmental damage is limited to the site of their loca landfill
or chat pile. But intruth, toxins migrate (sometimes hundreds
of miles per year), and damage to natural processes–balancing
of the food chain, for example–cascade and multiply. By
there very nature, we will never develop a full and complete knowledge
of the natural systems that surround us. But we know enough about
natural cycles so that we can make an attempt to emulate them
in our organization and development of industrial processes.
For a full listing of the rules of Endgame, please go to www.kit-out.net/endgame/rules.
3. Conclusion
"Finite players play within boundaries; infinite players
play with boundaries." James Carse, Finite and Infinite
Games, p. 10.
Global populationi is expected to double in the next 30 years,
the same date by which more than 60% of the world's population
will live in resource-demanding cities. Central governments, in
turn, prove increasingly unable to even stay abreast of expanding
urbanization and resource consumption. This project is dedicated
to the proposition that the imposition of regulation and other
limits onto our global society is an important, but increasingly
limited strategy in response to the pace and scope of global change.
Recalling the paradigm shift of the 1960's, in which works like
Rachel Carson's Silent Spring first reshaped attitudes
towards the natural environment, we are in need of cultural and
social change.
While crucial in our cultural and social development, the environmental
shift of the 1960's, however, presented our approach to the environment
as a binary choice. In the context of the countercultural movement
of the 1960's and early 1970's, environmental awareness was seen
as an "alternative"; an opt-in alternate strategy to
the mainstream structures of capitalist investment and technological
change. The pace and scale of global resource use, population
growth, and existing environmental damage gives us no binary choice
in outgrowing and moving beyond even the most admirable of traditional
environmental attitudes. As would a gardener facing a blight,
we need to produce a new, robust hybrid, a cross-breeding of environmental
consciousness and human, capitalist culture that provides the
prospect of long-term growth and stability for the garden we all
share. As we face a continuing rush towards environmental instability,
and potentially crisis, it is on our whole cultural selves that
thinkers and designers must focus, to produce the steady, productive
change that holds the only hope for environmental change.
"Evil is the termination of infinite play. It is infinite
play coming to an end in unheard silence." James Carse,
Finite and Infinite Games, p. 32.
4. Quicktime Video
This is a time-lapse video of the set-up and play of Endgame.
In the first round of play, the ecosystem is destroyed. In the
second round, one player is able to bankrupt her opponent and
win the game.
