Kurt Vonnegut's lost board game published

> "Not enough people know who Kurt Vonnegut is”

Barnes and Noble can go take a flying fuck at a rolling donut [1]

[1] Vonnegut, Kurt. "Slaughterhouse-Five, or, The Children's Crusade: A Duty-Dance with Death". Delacorte Press, 1969. p147

By now I wouldn't be surprised if more people know who Kurt Vonnegut is than Barnes and Noble, at least globally

I walked into a B&N in a wealthy neighborhood of a major city. I went looking for the literature section, couldn't find it, and was finally directed to a narrow set of shelves at the end (i.e., the narrow edge) of an aisle. That was all they had.

Why and when did we discard all that literature?

This from the store that commissioned a portrait of Vonnegut (among other authors) that featured prominently in their branding and store decor?

https://www.behance.net/gallery/15574393/Barnes-Noble-Author...

I remember one time going into a Books-A-Million and being flabbergasted when I asked someone at the Information desk to look and see if they had anything by T.S. Elliot in stock, and she said, "What does the T. stand for?"

And now his board game is sold in Barnes and Noble.

The nearby city of Bloomington, home of Indiana University, also hosts Granfalloon each year. I believe it's in July? I just happened to be in town for work and caught it.

I also recommend it. I was in the city for Gen Con last year and decided to go and it was a very interesting museum.

Lots of letters and interesting artifacts and tidbits about his life.

All credit for this go to Geoff and his efforts to bring this to life. He is a well-known game designer with dozens of published games and founder of the podcast Ludology (no longer an active host after 100s of episodes) that posits that Games are worthy of study.

He is also a co-founder of the TTGDA (https://www.ttgda.org/) that aims to be a guild like resource for designers. It is his connections that got this into Barnes & Nobles. Also of note, the TTGDA has recently convinced B&N to list game designers on all detail pages and search results in the same way they do today for books and writers. He also runs a free newsletter called GameTek (https://gametek.substack.com/) that is a continuation of an old podcast format he did where he does deep dives on specific games and game concepts. In short, he's awesome.

Thank you.

Or a game you may have heard of called "Chess".

Half-off on Switch right now. I might pick it up.

Please let us know!

https://www.barnesandnoble.com/w/kurt-vonneguts-ghq-the-lost...?

If there was poop on it, would you clean it or throw it out? Thought experiment to decide if you should keep a thing around or not.

Other than the theme the two have very little in common. Memoir 44 is card-driven and uses dice for combat resolution so there is a lot of randomness. GHQ is a pure abstract with no randomness at all. On the gameplay side GHQ is much closer to chess than to M44.

I don't think the author doubts the possibility, they are just curious about the details, and about how Vonnegut himself thought about it and what changes he went through (or didn't go through) on the journey to his later antiwar novels. That would be really interesting to have some information about. It appears there might not be any first-hand information, but maybe a Vonnegut scholar or enthusiast will read this article and connect it to other information that shows a change in Vonnegut's thinking about war.

I just read a memoir by the Chinese short story writer and novelist Yu Hua. In the first three years of his career, he wrote stories were full of graphic violence and death. He also had constant nightmares in which he was hunted down and killed. After one such nightmare, he started thinking about the executions he witnessed during the Cultural Revolution as a child. He grew up in a fairly sleepy town, so the "trials" that were a regular occurrence during the Cultural Revolution were a can't-miss public spectacle. When someone was sentenced to death and taken away in a truck to be executed, he and his friends would race to the execution site, hoping to get there in time to see it happen. If they made it in time, they saw the accused executed with a rifle bullet to the back of the head, sometimes watching from just a few feet away. After the nightmares brought these memories back, he decided that if he wanted to stop this violence from being reproduced every night in his nightmares, he needed to stop reproducing the violence every day in his writing. So he stopped writing about violence, and his nightmares went away.

If you only knew that he grew up in the Cultural Revolution, wrote incessantly about violence for several years, and then stopped, you could easily say that there was nothing strange about that, it's not a head-scratcher, but hearing the story as he tells it is much more interesting than simply saying "it's not strange." Raising this question about Vonnegut, even if it has been raised before, might eventually unearth some information that fleshes out his story.

It's a long time since I read the book, but it strikes me as a bizarre misreading. The article quotes the guy who discovered the game as saying:

> In Sirens of Titan, there’s this army of Mars which is really a joke. No one in the army, [not] even the officers, are really in charge of what’s going on. They’re all mind controlled. Nobody has any real free will. They’re just set up as a pawn to be sacrificed, to make Earth come together, kind of Watchmen-style.

The effort of the officers in the book is meaningless, but it turns out the effort of all humanity for all of history is completely meaningless, because humanity is being manipulated by aliens to achieve a trivial purpose.

It is Polygon, after all.

But it's even worse than you say. A plot where a military is used deceptively doesn't invalidate the whole concept of a military.

I think it's also somewhat useful to think about "the other side" when holding a certain position. Of course, it may not be based in reality, or be factually incorrect as to why someone else holds a different viewpoint. I believe it's still worthwhile as a thought experiment to try and understand an opposing point of view, even if you'll never agree with it. There can still be some compassion or common ground, especially when it comes to something so life-affecting as war.

I do agree that authors can only write things they themselves believe, or at least are marked with their own way of thinking, even when trying to guess or infer the reasoning behind someone else's differing belief or opinion. When I get in a heated discussion online, and I can tell that someone is angered just from me stating my opinion, I've often tried this thought experiment to at least not take things personally if someone comes after me with violent or explosive language. I'm sure you've probably experienced it yourself, but some people online seem to hold their own beliefs as law, and will act out when challenged (even when your intention wasn't to challenge, but just to state your own opinion).

Vonnegut was very sarcastic, to the point where his remarks often appear prejudicial. I wouldn’t be surprised if that was a misinterpretation.

When did snark replace thoughtful commentary?

Perhaps the expansion pack includes Ice-Nine

I don't understand how a board game is supposed to be "uncynical" in the first place.

> As we all know, authors can only write things they themselves believe wholeheartedly, and veterans have uncomplicated relationships with war. In general, people only hold simple, consistent positions that are legible to others.

This is all sarcasm, right?

At the end of the day Vonnegut was a liberal not a leftist. A lot of that philosophy is more or less "I agree with protestors of the past but the current thing is 'complex." See democrats on gay rights, trans rights, anti-racist movements, etc. Chicago, perhaps historically the most liberal city, is deeply racially segregated by design. Remember 'liberal' California voted against gay marriage. Obama ran as an anti-gay marrige candidate in 2008. The dems today have hypocritical views on trans rights, migrants, the I-P conflict, etc.

Vonnegut is a good everyday liberal (which is a big part of his commercial appeal imho, never overly challenging and fit in with the neolib NYTimes-style intelligentsia of the time) and good, if not great, writer, but people expecting him to be more to the left than that are just going to be disappointed.

I'd even argue this game is a great example of liberal idealism. That is to say the problem is sort of distilled down and punched down to individuals (hey this game should be taught to soldiers) instead of punching up the dynamics that actually cause the suffering of war he's trying to address (capitalism, MIC, white supremacy, oil politics, racism, colonialism, xenophobia, etc). Or at least it leans far more towards the former than the latter. I think "war is sad and bad" is a far more marketable and acceptable view to liberal readers than "hey we will need to fundamentally revisit and reform or even replace things like capitalism, the modern world order, and even things you might personally benefit from if we want a peaceful world." These types of writers play up to middle-class moralism and liberalism, which is a big market, but never challenge it too much.

Vonnegut wasn't a Chomsky or a Marx. He was an Anderson Cooper or an Obama or a Chris Christy.

This argument is wild to me because anti-war types and protestors aren't, largely, against the military existing or being effective or good at its job. They usually just disagree with the aims or conduct of a particular campaign, or disagree about the cost-benefit ratio. Most people know a military is essential and want it to function properly

The SPACE-BIFF review gives some context: "Is GHQ a good game? Sure. For its time. For its place. Had it appeared in 1956, it may well have become the third great checkerboard game. With its zones of control and special units, it might have helped shape the coming century’s approach to tabletop gaming.

But that isn’t what happened. In our time and place, GHQ is a serviceable game. It suffers from the same endgame as many modern abstracts, packed with fiddly little moves that amount to very little. We would write that it could have used a good developer. But that doesn’t really matter."

https://spacebiff.com/2024/09/25/ghq/

It’s only just come out, not many have played it yet.