Kathleen Stock: Right on Gender, Wrong on Board Games

Of all the fine pieces on sex and gender we’ve published at Quillette, few matched Kathleen Stock’s fastidiously argued manifesto, Ignoring Differences Between Men and Women Is the Wrong Way to Address Gender Dysphoria. That article appeared back in 2019, at a time when it required real courage to push back against faddish claims that men can become women by announcing as much on Twitter and Tumblr. And during the five intervening years, the former University of Sussex philosophy professor has staked out a prominent role in the fight to (as she puts it on Substack) “claw feminism back from the idiots [who] ruined it.”

Ignoring Differences Between Men and Women Is the Wrong Way to Address Gender Dysphoria

The main problem with sex eliminationism is that, in a nutshell, it leaves us with no adequate language to describe a politically important feature of material reality.

QuilletteKathleen Stock

But the human condition is a house with many rooms, and not even the brightest bulb can illuminate all of them—a principle well-illustrated by Ms Stock’s recent (and very unkindly titled) Unherd essay, Are You a Board Game Loser? Real Life Is Leaving You Behind. With the holiday board-gaming season almost upon us, now is a good time to dispel some of the widely embraced misconceptions that inform her analysis.

Ms Stock tips her bias right from her first line, which asks, “What is your most shameful memory of an argument over a board game?” This is like beginning a meditation on Mexican cuisine by urging readers to reflect on the last time they threw up after eating a taco.

“Mine involves the mid-1990s, a sister, a boyfriend, a bottle of tequila, and a game of Trivial Pursuit,” Ms Stock informs us. “The subsequent emotional carnage put me off both tequila and trivia games for decades.”

If I were disposed toward moralising lectures, I might suggest that the more trenchant life lesson here is to exhibit greater restraint when consuming inebriants. But instead, I will take the high road by proceeding to an analysis of Ms Stock’s erroneous reasoning: She not only implicitly suggests that her alcohol-fuelled contretemps was a predictable consequence of playing Trivial Pursuit (which I concede to be arguable), but also that Trivial Pursuit itself is a representative specimen of the board-game genre more generally, which is absolutely false.

Not to pull intellectual rank on Ms Stock, but I speak with some authority in this area. I’ve co-authored a book about board games, periodically update a board-game-themed Substack, and regularly attend board-game tournaments across North America and in Scandinavia. Indeed, I am writing these very words from just such an event in Albany, NY. So while I do appreciate Ms Stock’s efforts to educate us all about board gaming, I would invite this esteemed philosopher and feminist to reflect on how she might respond if the meeple were in the other tableau, and it were I presuming to lecture her about oh, say, anti-naturalist mistakes in the philosophical history of womanhood.

We do have at least one point of agreement, however: Notwithstanding its extraordinary commercial success, Trivial Pursuit is, indeed, a ruined evening in box form.

One of my most important tabletop rules is: Never play a game in which one’s fortunes hinge on information that exists outside the game’s own system of rules. Backgammon, chess, checkers, Catan—none of these require any knowledge that can’t be found in a rule-book. So if you get beaten, it doesn’t mean you’ve been exposed as ignorant or stupid. It likely means you’re simply inexperienced at backgammon, chess, checkers, or Catan.

One point of agreement: Notwithstanding its extraordinary commercial success, Trivial Pursuit is, indeed, a ruined evening in box form.

This distinction is vitally important because people tend to react poorly when their pride is pricked in front of others. Without knowing the reason behind Ms Stock’s drunken Trivial Pursuit row, I’m guessing it began when someone felt humiliated because they didn’t know the capital of Norway to be Oslo, or some such. Embarrassment led to anger, one angry word led to many others, and the players were soon giving voice to all manner of festering grievances.

(By way of aside, this is the same reason I detest Scrabble, another widely played game that requires outside knowledge as a condition of success. As I once wrote in The Wall Street Journal, “Scrabble is like a math contest in which you’re rewarded for reciting pi to 1,000 places.”)

Speaking of festering grievances: Ms Stock’s offering exemplifies my larger complaint that the pundits who write breezy journalistic essays about board gaming often seem ignorant of any game developed in the last four decades. Relying primarily on hazy rec-room memories from childhood, their references are restricted to twentieth-century chestnuts such as Battleship, Sorry!, Candy Land, Risk, Trivial Pursuit, and soi-disant “party games” like Scattergories. These are games that few serious modern board-game hobbyists would deign to exhibit in their collections.

To (once again) put my complaint in analogous terms that Ms Stock may find accessible, the dated nature of such references might be compared to a rant about feminism in which I banged on about campus bra burnings and the single motherhood of Murphy Brown.

As noted above, the holiday season is a good time to address these issues—not only because millions of tabletop games (to use the more accurate term) will soon appear under Christmas trees, but because of the nostalgic spirit that typically suffuses the attendant celebrations: Families hang up heirloom decorations, retell old stories, re-watch familiar holiday movies, and, yes, dust off childhood staples such as Monopoly—another game whose structure predictably generates squabbles and hard feelings (for reasons I explained, at some length, in Skeptic magazine a few years back).

Monopoly & Monopolies: What Board Games Teach Us About Capitalism and How to Modify It

This essay was adapted with permission from Your Move: What Board Games Teach Us About Life, by Joan Moriarity and Jonathan Kay, published in 2019 by Sutherland House.

SkepticSkeptic

As Ms Stock learned the hard way, family members (and romantic partners) can be problematic gaming partners, no matter what the time of year—because in-game reversals of fortune tend to summon up old insecurities and emotional wounds. If a stranger stabs you in the back during a negotiation-based game such as Diplomacy, well, that’s just too bad. But if it’s your sibling or spouse holding the dagger, the mental airlock that separates the in-game fictional universe from real life breaks down, and you can soon find yourselves arguing about all those other (far more consequential) betrayals you’ve experienced.

Ms Stock gets at this problem when she laments the manner by which “the lines between game and life are blurring” more generally. On this score, she offers several examples of new games whose themes channel the fixations of ideologically tribalised culture warriors—such as Biome, in which “players aim to build diverse ecosystems and raise baby animals,” and Wokelandia, “an educational, fun-with-friends battle between the Oppressors and the Oppressed. The first persxn with 100 oppression points wins!”

While I completely agree that politics should be kept out of board games as much as possible, the titles she cites are destined to be remembered as mere novelties. They have no real relevance to the hobby as a whole.

Certainly, I don’t know a single serious board gamer (conservative or otherwise) who’d spend his or her time on a game such as Wokelandia. On the other side of the political spectrum, yes, there’s a tiny faction of fanatically anti-Zionist Dungeons & Dragons enthusiasts who now insist on imposing their toxic political neuroses on fellow hobbyists (a phenomenon I covered for Quillette back in July). But they represent a marginal constituency, widely disdained among mainstream gamers.

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QuilletteJonathan Kay

I regularly play tabletop games with people who hold all sorts of political views (and, for what it’s worth, self-defined gender identities); and the vast majority have the good manners to keep their opinions to themselves. Alas, from surveying mainstream media coverage of board games, one might get the opposite impression—as when The New Yorker recently ran a hopelessly pretentious article under the headline, The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design.

The Personal, Political Art of Board-Game Design

What can board games say that other art forms can’t?

The New YorkerMatthew Hutson

The author had no evident expertise in board gaming, but rather seemed primarily interested in profiling a transgender game designer whose creative themes focus on—and these are the designer’s own words—“queer rage and shitposting.” One of the designer’s recent projects, for instance, “tackle[s] the highly personal topic of gender transition,” while also offering “queer love letter[s] to giant monsters.” (A reviewer helpfully explained that while the game is extremely confusing, such confusion properly reflects the sense of “self-loathing and eventual self-acceptance” channelled by the game’s trans creator.)

If the prospect of playing this kind of game strikes you as unappealing, you’re not alone. “I’ve watched my fair share of terrible, sad, art-house movies. But unlike a movie, you have to put a lot of work into learning and teaching a game,” one online wag commented. “I’m all on board with the slate of incredibly thoughtful games that people get into, but to me, making a game that is not fun is like a chef making bad food as ‘conceptual art.’”

Circling back to that aforementioned category favoured by “serious modern board-game hobbyists,” I will refer readers to an Atlantic magazine article I wrote about the appeal of Catan, Power Grid, Puerto Rico, Concordia, Lisboa, Orléans, Le Havre, and other Eurogames. Such “Euros” have come to dominate the hobby over the last few decades because their innovative game mechanics are directed at creation rather than combat. They also feature more immersive themes, better art, and sturdier game components than pretty much anything produced during the Cold War period—a time when tabletop games were seen either as toddler toys (think Hungry Hungry Hippos) at one end of the retail spectrum, or military simulators (think Axis & Allies) marketed toward the hobby’s core male college-age demographic.

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The AtlanticJonathan Kay

In the popular Euro Terraforming Mars, for instance, players compete to build up their corporate empires on the Red Planet. In some rare cases, one can “attack” an opponent by sending an asteroid to wipe out his or her astro-crops. But for the most part, players focus on their own projects, butting heads only indirectly, as when they’re jostling for Martian real estate on which to build cities and forests. Like all Eurogames, Terraforming Mars is competitive in the narrow sense that there’s a winner at the end of it. But the design ensures that even also-rans have lots of fun working on their own in-game missions, mostly free from the predations (and pride-pricking taunts) of more experienced players.

Terraforming Mars

Compete with rival CEOs to make Mars habitable and build your corporate empire.

BoardGameGeek

As I’ve learned at my own holiday get-togethers, board games aren’t for everyone. Most people (alas) would rather spend their holidays drinking eggnog and watching college football. I’ve also learned that even the most refined game design can’t completely pre-empt frustrated outbursts (as with a certain 2016 incident in which my sister took exception to my middle daughter’s repeated use of the Wings card in King of Tokyo).

But if you’re looking to get into the hobby, there’s never been a better time—not only because the market is awash in new titles, but because it’s now possible to learn any game by watching explanatory videos on YouTube, thereby bypassing the bottleneck chore of reading a rule book. (It’s a surprisingly rich genre, in fact—even if the production values vary considerably, ranging from this excellent Watch It Played explanation of Terraforming Mars, to this hilariously confusing explanation of Triumph of Chaos.)

Moreover, many designers have come to realise that not everyone wants to spend a whole evening on a single game. Casual players (women, in particular, by my anecdotal observation) tend to prefer games that can be wrapped up inside an hour. And this appetite has been addressed with plenty of new(ish) titles such as Space Base, Century: Spice Road, and 7 Wonders: Duel, which combine quick game play with surprising strategic depth. (There’s also a new compact spin-off Terraforming Mars variant called Terraforming Mars: The Dice Game, which is proving to be a huge hit at my Albany confab.)

I don’t know what Ms Stock’s holiday plans are. But if time allows her to give board games another try in coming weeks, these are just a few of the titles that could help reverse the unfortunate impression she got back in the 1990s. I’d only suggest that, perhaps this time around, she takes it easy on the tequila.