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6 min read 38

UofWinds 395, Week 38: Gaming for a non-gamer, Clever Girl, When utopia is oblivion


Good evening. I'm writing this newsletter on Friday night because on Saturday morning, I will be traveling through time and space to go to my very first Michigan Renaissance Festival.

By the time you read this, I will likely be chomping on a turkey leg.

What Baldur's Gate 3 is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Really Play Games


As a way to keep my mind off of everything else, I thought I would try playing the epic cRPG (computer roll playing game), Baldur's Gate 3. As I started playing the game, I realized that this epic video game isn't just inspired by Dungeons and Dragons, it pretty much is a digital interpretation of D&D.

While I look forward to every opportunity I can play D&D (or any role-playing game) with friends around a table, I'm still not entirely hooked on BG3, even though I'm several hours into the game. It took me a while to put my finger on what was bothering me, and through a confluence of videos, I think I now know why.

In Baldur's Gate 3, you play a character who recruits other members to join your adventuring party in your quests for survival and glory. You can ask them questions to understand their backstory. You can try to romance them. You can disappoint them with your choices. But when a horde of goblins (or whatnot) suddenly appears, you are switched in a combat mode in which it is your job to take command of all the members of your party and make all the decisions of where to move, what is the most appropriate spell to cast, what weapon to throw or shoot, and how to avoid getting hurt by making the best use of the terrain. It was in the moment when I was trying to figure out where to move my characters to avoid being surrounded by the enemy who outnumbered us, is when I experienced how Dungeons and Dragons can act and feel like a tactical war game.

So, listen, in the early 1800s, a bunch of German states, including Prussia, were trying to mod chess into a game that could better simulate war by adding rules for terrain and changing the rules of units. And in 1812, the Prussian military is like, "This is all way too abstract. In real life, there is no grid and you don't have perfect mind control over what all of your troops are doing. So this guy, Georg Leopold von Reizzwitz, popularly considered the father of modern wargaming, begins working on a design that his son eventually finishes and calls "Kriegsspiel, "the German word for wargame. [I like to think of this period of history as men will invent Warhammer instead of going to therapy]. So Kriegsspiel is played on accurate topological maps. It simulates the fog of war. It even invented something like a dungeon master. Games of Kriegsspiel would wheel out some ancient Prussian general who'd seen some ****, I imagine he'd have like one eye, and when you declared your orders, you'd tell them to him and he would tell you what you could expect to happen next or whether it was just dumb.

And thoroughly impressed with the military applications of this design, King Frederick William III had it instated as a training tool in the Prussian military.(comical music) So how does this get us to Tifa? (dramatic music) No problem. In 1870, when Prussia defeats France, many countries, including the United Kingdom and the United States, take an interest in Kriegsspiel; they begin studying it. And by the time we get to World War II, wargaming has grown as a tool and has mass applications all throughout the war. But also this creates companies and players of hobbyist wargames who continue simulating war after World War II.

... 20 years later, in 1971, two members of this hobbyist wargaming community, Jeff Perren and one Gary Gygax, make a game called Chainmail, which is simulating mediaeval miniatures combat. Then the Chainmail community begins experimenting with rules for castle sieges that involve sending a team of soldiers to try and unlock the front door by going in via a dungeon, which people realise is fun. And eventually this dungeon mini game grows into Dungeons & Dragons.

Incidentally, why do you think Dungeons & Dragons is all about tactics and killing ****? Why do you think a sequence of Dungeons & Dragons games is called a campaign? If you know what you're looking for, the wargaming ancestry of DnD is as visible as a giant tribal tattoo.

The above is a brief excerpt from the 1:12: 30 video from People Makes Games called, The Games Behind Your Government's Next War. It is a serious video and one worth watching if you consider yourself part of the games industry.

But if you are not in the gaming industry, I would not recommend downloading Baldur's Gate 3, or at least, not before watching the illuminating, What Baldur's Gate 3 is Like For Someone Who Doesn't Really Play Games to see if its for you. Spoiler: the person in question did not really like Baldur's Gate until they started playing co-op with their friends.

Clever Girl


Just as D&D can be considered a tactical war game, Jurassic Park (the original movie) can be considered a feminist classic.

So says Hannah McGregor in her forthcoming book, Clever Girl.

From its blurb:

In Clever Girl, Hannah McGregor argues that the female-only dinosaurs of Jurassic Park are stand-ins for monstrous women, engineered by men to be intelligent, violent, and adaptive, and whose chaos resists the systems designed to control them. As they run wild through their prison, a profit-driven theme park, they destroy the men and structures who mistakenly believed in their own colonialist and capitalist power, showing the audience what it means to be angry, monstrous, and free.

I haven't read the book yet but I did hear the Material Girls podcast episode dedicated to Jurassic Park x Spectacle (transcript available) and I enjoyed the joyfully unabashed feminist second-reading of the movie.

I wish I knew how to convince my daughter to listen to this podcast. Years ago I got her this t-shirt and I don't think she was particularly impressed.

When utopia is oblivion


Last year, my son was part of an architecture program for his first year of university. While he had many positive experiences from that program, this year he has opted to re-start his post-secondary education in engineering.

Buildings are a shared responsibility among a variety of professions and professionals, and yet, I think its fair to say that the average person knows more architects by name than engineers.

One engineer that I'd like my son to know is Buckminster Fuller. I was reminded of him and his legacy after I followed a recommendation from Sentiers to a recent keynote called When utopia is oblivion / Quand l'utopie force l'oubli by David McConville and Dawn Danby:

This immersive keynote was presented in the Satosphere at the 2024 iX Symposium / MUTEK Forum, which adopted the theme of Utopia or Oblivion. Following this description is the transcript, linked references, and further reading. Feel free to read along with the spherical video or audio recording:

The provocative 1969 book "Utopia or Oblivion" by R. Buckminster Fuller presented a stark choice between binary opposites. But what if they’re deeply entangled? Dreams of utopia (“no place”) frequently require oblivion (”the state of forgetting”) when pursuits of an ideal society are contingent on the erasure of existing realities.

Yet, as the saying goes, the land doesn’t forget — and water has memory. Experience is held in both bodies and places.

This immersive performance examines the consequences of utopian endeavors, from the religious and colonial to the technological and corporate. By uncovering the paradoxes hidden within these idealistic pursuits, we explore the potential of emerging technologies to foster reconnection and remembrance rather than impose exclusion and control — and to fundamentally re-establish relationships with the living world.

This week's question

Imagine you have been asked to contribute a long essay for a series of serious considerations of a specific work of pop culture. What work would be the easiest for you to write about?

Answer below or use the friction-free survey form.

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