Space-Cast! #40. Heading Flint
Politics! There’s no avoiding them. In today’s space-cast, we’re joined by John du Bois to talk about two of his designs that encourage political awareness and human empathy: Heading Forward, about recovering from a traumatic head injury, and Striking Flint, focused on the 1936 General Motors sit-down strike. Along the way, we cover topics ranging from triggers and spoons to the banning of Matteo Menapace from the Spiel des Jahres.
Listen here or download here. Timestamps can be found after the jump.
TIMESTAMPS
1:14 — introducing John du Bois via his shirts
3:55 — Heading Forward and Striking Flint
10:45 — John’s experience with brain injury
13:52 — triggers and spoons
21:10 — conceptualizing Heading Forward
27:38 — the insurance company as antagonist
32:51 — describing Striking Flint
41:08 — the inception of Striking Flint
46:04 — reverse worker placement and calendar games
52:35 — representing strikebreakers
58:58 — committee abilities
1:05:54 — pitching to Hollandspiele
1:08:00 — Matteo Menapace and the Spiel des Jahres
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Posted on August 7, 2024, in Board Game, Podcast and tagged Board Games, Heading Forward, Hollandspiele, Striking Flint, The Space-Biff! Space-Cast!. Bookmark the permalink. 6 Comments.
SPACE-BIFF! 
You finally managed to get me to listen to (part of) a podcast. I… do not like listening to podcasts. I love reading, but podcasts, documentaries, news on the telly, vlogs… I just can’t do it. But, I always read your list of topics on these things, and when I read, “the banning of Matteo Menapace from the Spiel des Jahres.” I reacted with a huh? I guess this shows just how much I have walked away from reading/talking about games to playing them, that this is how I find out about something that just a couple of years ago, I would have known about right away.
So, after reading the article on BGG, I came back here and actually listened to that segment. And, yes, it would be nice if games, like arts in general, put more thought into what they are actually saying, instead of sticking their heads in the sand while they promote the status quo. Any game that celebrates colonialism is promoting the status quo of genocide and we just pretend it is not. Which is not to say that we can not make games that do, but just, I think, we need to be very honest about it.
I recently reread for the so many times I’ve lost trackth time, The Phantom Tollbooth. A book I think is even more genius as an adult than I thought as a child. Which is setting the bar rather high. However, this time while reading it, I was a little distracted by the background procolonialist themes. I do not think they were intentional, I suspect they were so much part of the author’s life growing up, procolonialist values, that they were put in without even being noticed. It was written in the 50s or 60s by a white man. I am not surprised he had never questioned his procolonial values enough that they snuck into a children’s book.
And so, yes, on the face of it, TtR, any iteration, is about building train tracks, not unlike what I did as a child with the wooden set by grandparents had in their house, but in the case of the USA/Canada, it has also got that background procolonialist celebration/theme of genocidal displacement that enabled that in the first place. And, yes, we do not question it at all. And that is, I find, more covert and insidious than games that do acknowledge the horrors they include (even if I might recoil at committing genocide in Age of Empires III and never play the game a second time, I prefer that they acknowledge it over TtR’s erasure of it).
I appreciated listening to a discussion that focused on that aspect of board games, board game culture, and board game criticism (which, I think, of all the awards, SdJ comes closest to).
I know my feelings on Israel are complicated, because I live in Canada, itself a country founded on genocide and which is still actively engaged in genocide. And, so, nuance is always important as well as understanding that actions do not happen in a vacuum and more than one thing can be morally wrong at the same time.
I love reading old “problematic” books for that very reason. We get to see the ways we’ve transformed as a culture and how we might continue to transform. That’s something that goes missing, I think, when outsiders ask why I bother to think and write so much about certain topics. I don’t write critically about colonial settings, the failures of empire and capitalism, or offbeat narrative forms because I hate this stuff. I do it because this is the peak of the hobby. You don’t get John Company without critiquing Catan.
Something tangentially covered in your talk at the end there was that the shape of the pin was a major part of the SDJ decision to ban Matteo.
The pin was explicitly designed in the shape of Israel, painted over with the Palestinian colours, and this detail seems to have been what caused the SDJ consternation.
Matteo says that he’s against the erasure of any one people, and I personally believe that he sincerely means that. It is unfortunate then, that the symbol he wore appeared to advertise the opposite sentiment.
There’s not much else that can be said, without trying to read his mind.
I think this misses part of the point Dan and I were trying to make – that the SdJ committee was extremely eager to engage with their interpretation of what Menapace wore, but did not engage at all with the more concerning aspects of the narrative content of the games being nominated for and winning awards.
Additionally, in his written statement following his ban, Menapace tried to remind us that while we argue about the specific shape of the watermelon sticker he wore, we’re also declining to engage with the stated message of wearing a watermelon sticker of any shape – solidarity with a people who are being forced out of their homes, deprived of basic needs, and killed by an occupying military.
Finally, I question the wisdom of the SdJ committee moving directly to banning a new designer with an inspiring attitude toward what games can be over their interpretation of an ambiguous symbol without any other, less punitive or permanent means of correction being attempted first. Surely there’s something between “nothing” and “lifetime ban” they could have done instead.
I tried to keep my discussion on the podcast focused on the need to be critical and responsible makers and players of games and their underlying narratives because I didn’t want to make it specifically about the SdJ, but I also think that the committee’s actions were hostile and excessive until there’s more evidence there was an explicitly antisemitic intent behind Menapace’s actions.
Wow what a conversation! Thanks John for coming on the podcast, and thank you to Dan for facilitating it!
Thanks, Malachi!