“How are you tonight? Having a good time? Ready to party? Have fun? Yeah, well, that was the last guys. Wrong fucking band. We’re here to have a bad time.”
Trent Reznor, introducing Nine Inch Nails at a 2013 festival set
Diplomacy, designed by Allan B. Calhamer (1959)
John Company, Wehrlegig Games, designed by Cole Wehrle, art by Jan Lipiński and Amita Pai (2017)
A Game of War by Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, Atlas Press (2007)
Lately my anhedonia has been bad enough that I’ve gotten back into playing online Diplomacy. I couldn’t really tell you why. It’s certainly not because I enjoy playing it – I don’t, and for reasons that have nothing to do with the anhedonia. Among the ways I contrive to spend hours on my laptop failing to get any work done, Diplomacy is in fact one of the least fun. There are a lot of reasons for this – it takes ages, much of that time is spent sorting out tactics for what’s ultimately a fairly simple wargame, and, worst of all, it’s got ridiculously high odds of plunging you into a foul mood the moment you open up the game because one of your nominal allies has just betrayed you.
This aspect of gameplay – called “stabbing” within Diplomacy’s ample and enduring fandom – is largely responsible for the game’s reputation as one you buy, put on your board game shelf, and then never actually play. The way the game works is that you get seven friends together and randomly assign them one of the major powers of Europe at the dawn of the 20th century – England, France, Germany, Russia, Italy, Austria, and Turkey. The game then proceeds by alternating periods of negotiation, in which the players are free to converse with each other in private or public, and actual moves, which are written down and processed simultaneously. Victory is attained by controlling at least eighteen of the thirty-four spaces on the board designated as “supply centers,” each of which correspondingly allows players to have an extra piece on the board above their starting three. As combat rules strongly favor defenders, advancement requires cooperation – progress is impossible without superior numbers. But as the end victory is zero-sum, all alliances trend inexorably towards betrayal – hence the centrality of stabbing.
All this means that the game requires getting seven people together for six or more hours – already a big ask – during which they are gripped with the dead certain knowledge that their friends will be repeatedly lying to their face and betraying them. This is a board game that rivals road trips and badly executed polyamory in its efficiency as a friendship-ender. To put it mildly, it attracts a type.
This type famously includes both JFK and Kissinger, a claim that the game’s publishers have long relied on in marketing. Indeed, you can find both claims in countless reputable publications, which is tremendously funny because there’s not a scrap of evidence for either. The Kennedy claim traces back to a column by humorist Angus McGill in The Evening Standard and the Kissinger one to a magazine article by Giles Brandreth in Games and Puzzles; both are simply presented as things that are known to be true. Neither is corroborated by so much as a single comment in which either man talked about the game, nor any recollection from a fellow player. The closest thing to a public figure to be a confirmed Diplomacy fan is David Eisenhower, the Jared Kushner of the Nixon era, who Woodward and Bernstein described as playing it more and more in the administration’s dying days. This, unsurprisingly, has not made the marketing.
But none of this should be surprising. For all the ways that Kissinger was a monster, he was not a petty sociopath who capriciously betrayed allies in a constant upward struggle for power – at least not in his approach to international relations. The truth is that Diplomacy’s zero sum scramble for territorial control simply doesn’t model the actual practice of diplomacy in any meaningful sense. And for all the marketing rhetoric and stories about its creator Allan B. Calhammer finding a pre-World War I map of Europe in his childhood attic, it’s pretty clear it was never really supposed to. Though it bears certain trappings of historicism, the Diplomacy map is in fact a work of pure fiction. Its northern and western borders are fair enough – the Arctic Circle and the Atlantic Ocean provide legitimate frontiers where one can define a field of play. But then in the south the map simply cuts Africa off at the top, leaving a lone supply center in Tunis and a massive undifferentiated territory called “North Africa,” effectively reducing the entirety of a continent to a contested island territory on the side of the map.
To the east the map is even more absurd. Russia is cut off at about Nizhny Novgorod, so that it is a country without any entanglement in Asia – shocking when one considers the Russo-Japanese War that unfolded squarely in the midst of the period nominally being modeled. The situation is similarly ridiculous in Turkey, whose eastern border consists of the territories of Syria and Armenia, which exist to balance what would be its otherwise impregnable defensive advantage. (The Irish Sea territory – the game’s sole acknowledgment of Ireland, which is otherwise a grayed-out space – serves a similar function for England.) This isn’t just appallingly Eurocentric; it’s absurd, resembling the battle royale island of Fortnite more than it does World War I, a war in which shock betrayals very much did not happen.
But there’s a far bigger omission within the game – one that can’t be chalked up to structural bias and the mandates of game design. Calhammer started work on the game in 1954 and completed it in 1958. In this context it is impossible not to note that two of the great powers depicted – England and Russia – were nuclear powers, and a third – France – was only a few years shy of its first test. (This test would, of course, be carried out in colonial Algeria, or as Diplomacy would have it, Northern Africa.) To roll back time to a point where military conflict consisted purely of shuffling armies and fleets around a map is a very specific decision, especially given that nuclear weapons, to put it mildly, had a bit of an impact on the nature of international diplomacy.
Ultimately the major nuclear powers were united far more by their common interest in being superpowers than they were divided over trifling issues like exactly who got to run which Latin American countries as puppet regimes.
To put it in more direct terms, the notion that diplomacy consists of a series of cleverly timed betrayals is nonsense. For all the animosity between the US and Russia, neither side of the Cold War ever gave serious consideration to surprise-nuking the other after a SALT conference. It’s easy to overstate this – I certainly don’t want to suggest that Calhammer’s game was an especially good model of pre-nuclear diplomacy either. But it remains the case that the diplomacy practiced by Kennedy and Kissinger was primarily about maintaining a balance of power among nuclear states, which functioned much like Marx’s “band of warring brothers.” This is most obvious in the structure of the United Nations Security Council, which gave the five original nuclear powers unilateral vetoes over all resolutions in an (ultimately and unsurprisingly doomed) effort to maintain their joint monopoly on the technology. Ultimately the major nuclear powers were united far more by their common interest in being superpowers than they were divided over trifling issues like exactly who got to run which Latin American countries as puppet regimes. And the art of diplomacy as actually practiced across the 20th century followed from this fact.
In contrast, the usual playstyle in Diplomacy, at least among skilled players, is to go around telling everybody what they want to hear, then at the last minute going back and deciding who you were lying to and who you weren’t. This is the style advocated by Richard Sharp, whose 1978 tome on the game remains the closest thing to its definitive text. Sharp waxes poetic about how “I know of no keener pleasure in this game than sitting safely in the middle of the board, stirring gently, and shouting encouragement to the participants in the wild melee I have managed to create all around me.” He’s right that this can be thrilling, but the nature of that thrill is perhaps more clearly revealed by an anecdote he tells a few pages earlier about “the most perfect position a Diplomacy player could possibly find himself in: he was playing Germany in a game where France had for some time been enjoying the clandestine favours of England’s wife. Germany knew this, and France knew he knew; England, however, did not know.” This blend of mild sociopathy and outright sadism is less Kissinger than Trump. Its pleasure isn’t feeling like you’re one of the elite roaming the halls of power so much as understanding what it must be like to just refuse to pay your invoices.
I’m scarcely the first person to notice that Diplomacy – or indeed countless other classic wargames – has a dubious relationship with the real-world processes it purports to model, nor that this disjunct pushes the game insidiously towards the political right. Whole schools of design have arisen based on looking at the sorts of things that are typically left out when gamifying geopolitics.
Consider John Company, a game that endeavors to model the East India Company and its activities over the 18th and 19th centuries. This is a game that goes to great lengths to emphasize its progressivism. The rulebook advises players to read Edward Said, which is par for the course for designer Cole Wehrle, who has made a career out of socially conscious games. (His debut game, Pax Pamir, models 19th-century Afghanistan from the perspective of local Afghani leaders attempting to play the British, Russian, and Durrani empires against each other.)
The fact that this is a very different game from Diplomacy is obvious the moment you look at the box – or the price tag. For all its length and scale, at the end of the day Diplomacy consists of a game board, a pile of army and fleet tokens (8 of each type for each country, for a total of 112), and a set of rules that take a matter of minutes to learn. The whole package fits into a one-pound box and can be picked up for $25. In contrast, John Company comes in a nearly seven-pound box that retails for an eye-watering $120 ($150 if you decide to spring for the upgraded metal coins instead of the cardboard tokens in the box) and features more pieces than even Strange Matters’s industry-leading pay rates can get me to count. As for the rules, I’ll just go ahead and quote the game’s suggestion of “making a cup of coffee or tea and setting aside an hour or two to read through” them and note that this proved a dramatic underestimate of the effort needed.
This isn’t just the perverse fetishism of a heavily consumerist hobby ($120, while certainly on the high end for board games, is in no way a remarkable price point – there are games for which you can spend more than that just buying an insert to organize the contents of the box). The game’s complexity befits its goals. The players take the roles of wealthy British families seeking to enrich themselves via their involvement in the East India Company. The functions of the company are divided among a bit over a dozen different roles, from high level executives like the chairman and the head of military affairs down through the presidents of the three main administrative zones of India, their military commanders, and the governors of individual regions, at least when those regions are under company control. Players vie to install their family members in these offices so that they can profit before retiring with a nice pension and opening up a new scramble for the job. The game also models the political situations in both England and India, along with, in the latter parts of its timeline, the dissolution of the East India Company’s monopoly, which results in an additional six pages of new rules (in case the game was seeming too simplistic).
The result of this is that the East India Company becomes a grotesquely oversized pantomime horse. Even if the players coordinated carefully for maximum efficiency it would be difficult to manage effectively. In practice, because the game is actually about individual profit, the players spend most of the time at each other’s throats, gleefully screwing each other over in a festival of petty sociopathy that makes Diplomacy look friendly. The game facilitates resource-trading among players, so that every single decision becomes up for negotiation. If your family controls the chairmanship and thus the budget of other departments, the incentive is not to attempt to distribute money fairly and strategically – it’s to force the other players to grovel at your feet and offer increasingly lavish tribute in order to get you to even consider doing your nominal job instead of just selfishly advancing your own interests. As victory is possible and, with some play strategies, even downright easy if the company fails, and since the game has a high degree of randomization that means that even well-laid plans can easily turn into complete debacles, the result is generally a cavalcade of dysfunction that makes Kendall Roy look like Michael Corleone.
This is, I stress, the point. When the second edition of the game was on Kickstarter the marketing copy boasted that it was “as frank as it is cutting in its satire.” The game’s rhetorical purpose is to pull off the colonizers’ mask of civility and nobility and reveal the imperial project for the tangle of selfish buffoons it was. This is, at the very least, a clean upgrade over Diplomacy, in that dickish selfishness is rewarded not with world domination but with a pyrrhic victory of establishing your family – a nebulously defined concept represented primarily by a bunch of tiles stamped with interchangeable aristocratic faces – as the biggest looter of a collapsing company.
But India remains almost entirely abstracted. Empires and centers of power rise and fall, but these are never given any more substance than the stackable resin tower pieces that denote them on the board.
Actually, that word is a pretty good marker of the game’s particular flavor of cleverness. It’s an actual game term – there’s an entire page of rules for “dividing loot,” which is to say the profits of successful military campaigns against the Indian people. And it’s a savvily chosen word, given that the word is taken from the Hindi lūṭ, meaning “to plunder,” and entered the English language precisely because of the East India Company’s ransacking of the subcontinent. The problem is that clever is not the same thing as biting. For all the evident care and thought that went into the word selection, it’s hard to imagine the bulk of players even noticed the word “loot” was odd, little yet broke out the etymological dictionaries to work out the joke for themselves.
And this points to a larger issue. For all that John Company paints a scathing portrait of the East India Company, this is ultimately all it portrays. The game models events in India, and, in keeping with its general commitment to tastefulness, Wehrlegig Games hired an Indian designer to illustrate the deck of cards governing those events in the style of ganjifa cards. But India remains almost entirely abstracted. Empires and centers of power rise and fall, but these are never given any more substance than the stackable resin tower pieces that denote them on the board. Military operations can be carried out with the support of local allies, represented by a couple tokens with Googleable nouns like “Jagat Seth” and “The Nizam,” but these constitute the extent to which Indian society is given any tangible representation.
A similar abstraction takes place over the game’s art. The front of the box consists of two archival images separated by the game’s logo. At the top is Thomas Rowlandson’s A Gaming Table at Devonshire House (1791), depicting aristocrats rolling dice. At the bottom, meanwhile, is an engraving of one of the East India Company’s military fortifications – Fort William, in Calcutta. The contrast between the aristocratic joviality and the austere fort is striking, and it reiterates the game’s thesis statement. But it’s also striking that the portrayal of aristocracy is intimate – we can see the aristocrats’ faces and glean their personalities – whereas the fort stands in a panorama devoid of people. The contrast is between the aristocrats and the machinery of empire – not the horrors that machinery inflicted.
Image 1: Seen on the cover of John Company: A Perspective View of Fort William, by Jan Van Ryne, 1754, Public Domain.
Images 2-5: 2: Plan in 1742 showing the seven Old Fort William batteries; 3: Calcutta in 1756, 4: Barholomew Plaisted’s Projected Fortification in 1747; 5: Plan of Fort William in 1756. Date: 1906, Source: Wilson, C. R. (Ed.) 1906. Old Fort William in Bengal. A selection of official documents dealing with its history. Volume 2. John Murray, London. Public Domain.
It’s not that the game doesn’t acknowledge these horrors. But like the rest of India, it’s wholly abstracted. One of the cards that can come up during the “Parliament” phase of the game is “Relief Demanded for Indian Famine.” But this is the extent of it – the first and last that players hear of the famine. It has no direct impact upon events in India except inasmuch as one of the possible outcomes of the card is an across the board increase in unrest, which is to say that you are instructed to put some wooden cubes on the board. Tens of millions of people died across the nine famines the East India Company inflicted, but these deaths do not get modeled, or indeed mentioned – like much else in the game, it’s left to the players to look it up on their own time.1For an extended analysis and critique of how board games model European colonialism, see Kyle Flannery, “Bloodless Board Games, Covert Colonialisms” in Strange Matters Issue One (Summer 2022). –Eds.
This is a flaw, to be sure. And yet it’s hard to imagine what could be done differently. Sure, Wehrle could have added another two pounds to the box and $30 to the price tag and amped up his complexity even further with more detailed modeling of India – and no doubt still found people willing to splash out for the metal coin upgrade. But there’s an insurmountable problem that one quickly runs into, which is that board games are simply a bad fit for depicting the atrocities of empire. One need only imagine drawing a card and seeing an image of the Doji bara famine to grasp the grotesque perversity this didactic approach can lead to. Yes, that’s a willfully provocative example, and there are more tasteful ways the realities of imperialism could be integrated. But the point is real: such a game just wouldn’t be fun. And yes, there’s a lot to be said for challenging the idea that games are supposed to be fun – a word I have a vexed relationship with anyway. And John Company pushes further in this direction than most, to the point where the manual warns would-be players to ensure that everyone at the table “consents to this exploration” of imperialist themes before playing. But at the end of the day you still have to make something that will get enough Kickstarter backers to let you actually print the thing.
But even in a world where that ragged aesthetic frontier between game and performance art were viable, there are problems. Fundamentally, games reduce things into abstracted systems. Emphasizing the fact that those unrest cubes are modeling the consequences of eleven million deaths does not actually do a lot to make those deaths feel serious. One need only look at the sorts of things that Diplomacy players will gleefully do to each other to recognize that there’s no upper bound to the level of imaginary atrocity people will go for in pursuit of the giddy thrill of Number Go Up.
It’s probably clear by this point that I do not have much truck with simulationism as a philosophy of game design.2Broadly speaking, the belief that a game should be an effective model of the thing it nominally depicts. The term was originally developed by Ron Edwards to talk about roleplaying games, where it was contrasted with gamism (focus on mechanics and winning) and narrativsim (focus on story). When it comes to war games, simulationism tends to appeal to people for whom realism is the holy grail. What I mean by this is that it does not seem to me that what is most interesting about games is their ability to model real-world phenomena. This is not some hardline declaration of pure formalism that declares the real world irrelevant to games. John Company is plainly engaging with the history of the British Empire, and it has a lot to say on the subject. But none of the things it’s saying are “here is an accurate depiction of the inner workings of the East India Company.” Its relationship is one of metaphor and analogy, not miniaturization.
In this I am joined, at least in part, by Guy Debord, who, in addition to being a major Marxist theorist and revolutionary, was also, in an under-discussed aspect of his life, a massive wargaming dork. Indeed, counter to virtually every other assessment of his career, Debord’s view, as articulated in his 1989 memoir Panegyric, was that the most important accomplishment of his career – the one that “may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value” – was A Game of War, a board game he began designing in the 1950s.
There are several reasons why this prediction proved egregiously wrong. For one, although Debord invented the game in the 1950s and patented it in 1965, it received no wide release until 1987, when he and his wife Alice Becker-Ho penned a book explaining the rules and laying out the arc of a sample game played between the two of them. At the same time, they released what Becker-Ho describes as a “rudimentary” version of the game – some wood tokens and a paper map. This was quite the comedown from Debord’s original plans, which involved partnering with his longtime publisher Gérard Lebovici to release an edition that both men imagined would be a colossal hit. Debord and Lebovici commissioned a quartet of lavish metal sets, the pieces and three-dimensional terrain bearing a starkly modernist design cast in silver-plated copper. (Debord was absolutely the sort of guy who’d shell out $30 extra for the metal coins in John Company.) Lebovici, however, was assassinated in 1984,3Lebovici was, as this suggests, an absolutely fascinating character in his own right – an impresario editor and film producer as integral to Guy Debord’s rise as Malcolm McLaren was to the Sex Pistols’. His murder remains unsolved, although, given that Lebovici had substantial business ties with organized crime and was the sort of person who did things like adopting the daughter of notorious French criminal Jacques Mesrine and publishing his memoir, one isn’t exactly short on possibilities for theorizing. derailing plans until the remnants of his company published the scaled down edition, which was only available for four years before Debord changed publishers and all remaining copies were pulped. After that, the game remained out of print a further fifteen years before returning to print in 2007 alongside a new edition of the book.
But even if Debord’s game had enjoyed wide and timely release such that his contemporaries could have evaluated it as part of his legacy, one does not get the impression that it would have proven the landmark he’d hoped, for the simple reason that the sorts of people inclined to evaluate the career of iconic Marxist thinkers are not those who tend to think a board game could be a major work.
A Game of War is not quite a simple affair, but it’s an efficient one. It is played on a 25×20 board that is divided into northern and southern halves. These are balanced but asymmetric – each has an L-shaped mountain range with a single pass, a trio of fortifications, and a pair of arsenals, but the north arranges these compactly around a range that mainly runs north-south, while the south is more spread out and has an east-west running range. Each side gets fifteen pieces – nine infantry, four cavalry, and a pair of artillery and communications units, with one granted additional mobility over the other. These communications units provide the game’s signature mechanism, which is that pieces can only usefully move along defined lines of communication. These extend radially from the two predefined arsenal squares and can be extended by the two communication units, who, if positioned along a line of communication, in turn emit their own set of lines of communication. To function, any unit must either sit on one of these lines of communication or be part of a contiguous mass of units, at least one of which rests on a line of communication – otherwise, the unit can neither be given orders nor usefully defend itself. Further, lines of communication can be cut by positioning hostile units along them, which can in a stroke convert a dangerous mass of forces into a helpless flock of sitting ducks.
The effect of this mechanic is that control of one’s forces is always a slightly rickety affair. It’s easy to find yourself stretched much further than you intended, your units suddenly impossible to maneuver effectively. The battlefield is always slightly too complex to model in your head. On an actual board, this can easily stray into outright fussiness – the combat mechanic, while it doesn’t hold a candle to that of John Company, is still time consuming to resolve. It’s considerably nicer to play a digital version that tracks these things automatically, allowing focus on the actual maneuvers. But even with your lines of communication nicely demarcated and one-tap knowledge of the offensive and defensive scores of a given unit, that underlying sense of the battlefield as something slightly opaque and mysterious remains.
This design is not, in Debord’s view, a rejection of simulationism. He and Becker-Ho open their book by declaring that everything within A Game of War is derived from Clausewitz’s model of 18th-century warfare, and their explanation of the rules ends with a section discussing the ways in which the game’s simulation is incomplete – the lack of weather, nightfall, or troop fatigue, for instance. And yet it is telling, I think, that Debord attempts to model war as it existed two hundred years earlier. This is done neither with the overt historical commentary of John Company nor with the frustrating obliviousness of Diplomacy – Debord is open about the game’s historicism, but he draws no particular conclusions from it.
All of which makes his declaration that it may be his only worthwhile work even more puzzling. At first glance there is no searing insight to the game. It lacks any clear implications beyond its own hermetic model. If anything, it seems like a wholesale embrace of simulationism. And yet at the end of that section from Debord and Becker-Ho’s book about the simulation’s limitations comes a tantalizing declaration that the game “accurately portrays all the factors at work in real war, and, more generally, the dialectics of all conflict.” Debord expands on this in his memoir, saying of the game that “in the often difficult conduct of my life, I have drawn a few lessons from it – I also set myself rules of the game for this life, and I have followed them.” But this explanation remains oblique at best.
Nevertheless, it was enough to inspire Richard Barbrook and his compatriots in the delightfully named Class Wargames group to launch an extended study of the game, over the course of which they too found themselves persuaded by Debord’s assertions of the game’s value. The group has put out two substantial accounts of the game – a short film called The Game of War and a book-length study called Class Wargames: Ludic Subversion Against Spectacular Capitalism. The book lays out a (perhaps overly) elaborate theory of the game’s lessons, claiming, for instance, that “[f]or Debord, the four cavalry pieces symbolised the artists and intellectuals who’d committed themselves to the cybernetic cause,” and that Debord actively intended the lesson to be that these units must be treated as sacrificial lambs so that the more proletarian infantry could thrive.
And yet it’s hard not to feel like this is a bit of a stretch. Barbrook is on firmer ground in the general case, when he argues that the process of trying to comprehend the shifting battlefield and recognize where the battle is going is akin to the strategies of cultural warfare. A Game of War hinges – as Debord and Becker-Ho demonstrate at length in the sample game included in the 1987 book – on sifting through the noise of the battlefield to find singular, focused weak points that can be exploited. It’s easy to imagine how that skill could be translated to other contexts.
But even here what is granted is imagination, not understanding. Much like descriptions of psychedelic experiences, the argument is persuasive not when the lessons of those experiences are explained but when the underlying sense of wonder is described, so as to motivate the listener to try for themselves. Alas, the years-long and focused study of the game that Barbrook and his compatriots describe is outside the scope of an article written with a two-month turnaround. And even if I could complete it, I suspect that whatever revelations I received would be as frustratingly ineffable as Debord’s and Barbrook’s, leaving me with little more to do than implore others to study the game themselves. But this should not surprise us about knowledge gleaned from games, which, definitionally, communicate through the experience of playing.
There’s a lot in that word, of course. On one level it invokes the concept of fun once again. But as I said at the start, my anhedonia’s been pretty bad lately, and I can’t honestly say I have much interest in fun; if I don’t get to have it, why should anyone else? More to the point, that aspect of play doesn’t seem to approach the mechanism by which A Game of War entrances its devotees – surely nobody seriously thinks Guy Debord’s great invention was couching Situationist ideas in a fun, accessible package. That’s Society of the Spectacle. No, the relevant notions of play are much closer to those of performance. A Game of War is played in the sense of gender or guitar – not as recreation but as discipline and theater.
This helps clarify what is ultimately so unsatisfying about Diplomacy and, indeed, John Company. Both, as noted, are effectively asshole simulators – a problem shared by most competitive games with social dynamics, which tend inevitably to reiterate the social structures of capitalism. To a real extent, A Game of War’s key moral advantage over the other two games is simply that it focuses on a straightforward battle of skills. This is more a matter of necessity than sufficiency – I don’t want to argue that checkers and backgammon are inherently useful spiritual disciplines (though I’m even less sure I want to argue they’re not).
But it does, I think, highlight an approach to leftist game design that is potentially more robust than the ultimately facile satire of John Company. It’s long past time to stop treating games as a narrative medium. Enough theory and discourse and flailing attempts to have games be about things. If a game’s defining aspect is that it is played then the obvious conclusion to draw is that games are about praxis. What is important is not what they say but what they do. Debord’s claim – one he took such pride in that he viewed it as the defining achievement of his career – was that he had found a play mechanic that was, if not intrinsically leftist, at least intrinsically useful to leftism. What is interesting here is not whether he was correct – although Barbrook and company make a compelling case that he was. Rather, it is the simple and understated radicalism of suggesting that such a thing might even be possible – that the politics of a game might not reside in what it depicts, but simply in its play. Are there other credible candidates for leftist game mechanics? How do they work? How can we make more of them? I don’t have answers to those questions or any of the dozens of others that immediately arise in the face of the notion. But even I’ve got to admit it sounds fun to find out. ~