Terror Bull Games

Monday 8th March 2010

At Last, the Perfect Opportunity to send Hugo Chavez a Game

It feels slightly taboo to say you support Venezuela's famously populist president, Hugo Chavez. At best you mark yourself out to be a hopelessly gullible idealist and at worst some kind of child-eating communist. But from what I know, I'd take Chavez over any of our party leaders here in the UK.

We've been meaning to send Chavez a War on Terror since Day One but we lacked a solid pretext except to say, "We think you're alright; here, you might like this". Not that we need a solid pretext, but in Chavez's case, it seemed requisite.

Well today we have our pretext and unfortunately it's a negative one. Last year, Venezuela passed a law that comes into effect this week, banning the import, sale and promotion of violent video games and toys.

Video and electronic games with violent content will be banned, as will toys that mimic any number of tools of violence - guns, knives etc. Additionally, toys that "stimulate aggressiveness or violence" also come under the ban.

Trying to ban violent video games or violent movies is about as pointless as trying to ban violent art or violent books Not only are the contraband items rather vague and general, but the application of this new law is equally broad and open to all manner of subjective interpretation. For example, the "promotion" of one of these toys is now unlawful and punishable by up to 5 years in prison. What constitutes promotion however hasn't been defined.

Why is this so bad? For a start, even if the law were laudable, it's hard to imagine how it will be effectively enforced. Modern history is littered with failed attempts to try and ban x or y genre because of its supposedly degenerative effects. It never works. And it shouldn't. Censorship isn't the answer. Trying to ban violent video games or violent movies (the two most common entertainment forms under attack) is about as pointless as trying to ban violent art or violent books.

More importantly, even if you accept that violent games really do have a negative effect on society, any blanket, extreme measure like this wipes out too many entirely valid games and toys because not everything that deals with violence and aggression is bad. Of course, War on Terror encourages a violent, short-sighted and aggressively greedy disposition to succeed (most of the time). It demands this attitude because the game is, at its heart, an exercise in role-playing and through that process you reach a greater understanding about the world and the forces that drive it.

Acknowledging then that some toys and games are "acceptably violent" raises the even trickier question of who decides what is an isn't valid - hence the need for the extreme blanket measure in the first place. This approach, while absurd and unfair, is far preferable to the minefield of subjective whim and fancy that would follow a case-by-case evaluation.

The reason that Chavez and the Venezuelan government have got this so disastrously wrong is that this ban is the answer to the question: "How do we reduce violent crime in our society?". Providing opportunity and reducing inequality, along with effective policing and education are the key tools for reducing crime. Never has it been limiting access to the Playstation. If this were the case, the most violent countries would be those countries where children played the most games.

So we finally have a good reason to send Chavez a War on Terror. I'm still debating whether to include a lengthy, reasoned argument or simply the single line: "Surely, you don't want this banned too?" The latter would be a lot easier to translate into Spanish.

We'll be sure to update you on any response we might get.

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Posted by Andy S on 8 March 2010 - 2 comments

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Wednesday 3rd March 2010

On Game Development, Irrationality and Cheating

We've been a bit quiet of late. That tends to mean one of two things - there's a tax return to complete, or we've drunk ourselves into a pre-foetal state of comprehension and are unable to do much except wallow in our own pool of dribble and vomit.

Well, as of right now, there is a third explanation. To be more accurate, this third explanation replaces the 2nd explanation above, since - let's be honest here - we're simply too old and boring to get that drunk these days. So that means there are still only two explanations, but just one of the explanations has changed - which in itself is an exceptionally convoluted way of declaring that we're designing a new game!

In anticipation of the avalanche of questions from the world's media and bloggosphere, we can't unfortunatley give much away except to say it's in very early stages. We have a prototype that is currently being played and blankly stared at in equal measure. We are, however, very excited. This one's more in the vein of War on Terror than Crunch in terms of size, ambition and theme. That will probably make a lot of people happy, but it also means development is slooooow.

What's particularly exciting for me personally is that I've been drawing a lot of inspiration of late from counter-intuitive behaviours and other psychological oddities. To this end, the current game is benefitting (well, that may be debatable) from the wisdom contained within books like "Irrationality" by Stuart Sutherland, "Prisoner's Dilemma: John Von Neumann, Game Theory and the Puzzle of the Bomb" by William Poundstone and "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely.

Using actual psychological forces and behavioural patterns to inform game mechanics fits perfectly with our desire to use games to comment on the real world and to use existing human tensions, relations and interplay as the basis for in-game player interactions. This works so well across the spectrum, from Realpolitik to Keynesian economics, that we're genuinely surprised that no one else seems to be embracing it as a way of designing games. It could be that a lot of designers are overly focussed on the holy grail of "elegance" and "simplicity" giving way to deeper gameplay (chess and Go are the spectres behind such obsessions). However, the chaos of human behaviour is far more interesting for us: harder to manage in terms of game design, but much more rewarding.

Of the books mentioned above, I can recommend "Predictably Irrational" by Dan Ariely as a particularly enlightening-but-easy read.

To start you off, check out this TED lecture of Dan's on cheating and our irrational moral code. The real meat starts at around 4 minutes and 20 seconds in:

The implications here for game design should be obvious. Think for a moment about what he says about the actor who cheats wearing different college sweatshirts - cheating as a member of one group can make another group (collectively) more honest. Amazing! There are many games that use cheating as a mechinism, but few really unearth the human drives behind this common behaviour - they just chuck it out there as something you have to do. A game that was really based on cheating would have these remarkable, counter-intuitive outcomes: players may make themselves honest; most likely they would end up creating their own (internal) rules.

I actually have to force myself to stop reading now in case our prototype turns into a behavioural economics classroom exercise instead of a game. But still .... it's all research.

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Posted by Andy S on 3 March 2010 - 12 comments

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Tuesday 26th January 2010

Three new reasons to leave the country

In the absence of much else happening, a triumvirate of bad news for your digestion:

1. Flying Robot Spies UK police are planning to use 'military spy drones' to hover and criss-cross the skies of Britain in an attempt to better control and spy on people fight crime. You can bet that as this hits opposition, some nasty terrorist plot will be 'foiled' just in time to show how necessary it is. Too Orwellian for words.

2. Secrecy is the Order of the Day Lord Hutton, the man who exonerated the government of any wrong-doing in the death of Dr David Kelly has now decreed that details of his death, including the post mortem, be kept secret in the "interests of national security" (somehow) for the next 70 years. Any semi-functioning democracy holds as one of its core tenets the necessity for independent, public autopsies and coroner reports. Apparently in the UK, this requirement (like many other basic human rights) are subservient to 'national interests'.

3. We Knowingly Facilitated Torture (and Benefited From It) In a parallel universe, where world leaders are held accountable for minor indiscretions like the pointless massacre of a million people, someone has the guts to state once-and-for-all that we knowingly facilitated the torture of terrorist suspects being flown around the world by the CIA and that we happily reaped the 'benefits' that this barbaric practice brings. Oh hang on, that person is Craig Murray. There's hope yet ... (EDIT: More hope here, if you can call it hope).

In slightly (OK, very) unrelated news, War on Terror got a glowing review in the Morning Star the other day. As you know, we're commies at heart, so this made us right proud.

P.S. This month marks FIVE YEARS of TBG blog posts. To mark this quite unlikely achievement, let's, you and I, take a little spin in the TBG time machine and revisit that very first post. The time is January 2005; War on Terror is emerging from a rather rocky period of development, while the real war on terror is going from bad to worse...

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Posted by Andy S on 26 January 2010 - 2 comments

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Monday 11th January 2010

Welcome to the Future!

Happy new year and all that jazz. Hope you all had a good one. 2010, apart from the anticipated arrival of hoverboards, cities on the moon and entire-meals-in-pill-format, is set to be an interesting one for TerrorBull Games.

It's way too early to start spilling our guts, but we'll be spending more time running TBG, which will hopefully mean we'll have more space to develop and explore various game ideas.

Also, for anyone who missed it before Christmas, here's our ugly mugs giggling our way through a segment on the otherwise insightful and revealing BBC series, Games Britannia:

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Posted by TerrorBull Games on 11 January 2010 - 1 comment

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Thursday 31st December 2009

The Noughties: a Nostalgic Retrospective

As we draw to the end of the first decade in this brave new millennium of ours, it's natural to cast one's eye back over the previous ten years and ponder what events, people and themes have characterised this period.

Perhaps the most notable thing is that we struggled to find an easy label for the decade - 2000s, zeros, twenty hundreds, noughties ... It's no wonder that feelings of uncertainty and angst dominated when we couldn't even agree on a good name for this timespan.

Of course, war and terrorism are both tightly threaded through the decade. From '9/11' to Obama's recent commitment of 30,000 extra troops to Afghanistan (what's that in your hand, Mr President - no, your other hand ... it's ... it's a Nobel Peace Prize!). It's been a depressing and violent decade, to say the least.

Although often (wrongly) presented as the 'opening salvo' of the war on terror, 9/11 clearly ushered in a new era of intensified conflict. Regimes all over the world used the attacks to further their own agenda, typically as a pretext for ordering tighter controls of their own population. But often the overblown (or just plain fabricated) threat of terrorism was used to justify the invasion of innocent countries or regions. Not only Iraq and Afghanistan, but Pakistan, Sudan, Ethiopia, Chechnya, Georgia, Lebanon, Palestine and many others were all invaded or saw military intervention of one form or another. Governments everywhere generally became adept at spreading fear and terror in the name of fighting terror.

This in turn stoked existing, long-held grievances and acted as an excellent unifying cause, behind which previously disjointed groups could unite. The upshot, unsurprisingly, was not just a colossal death toll, but a predictable and dramatic increase in terrorism.

One of the biggest crimes of the decade however (second only to giving the order that resulted in over a million deaths in Iraq) is the silence and complicity of the mainstream media. After all, the role of the press is supposedly as a watchdog for the nation, not – as happened - obsequious cheerleaders of official policy. Nowhere was this worse than in the United States, where government and military sources were regurgitated as gospel and a cloying air of patriotism stifled any genuine discussion. It's quite possible that, in hindsight, 2000-2010 will be remembered for the death of honest, unbiased journalism as much as anything else.

But there was something going on in the twenty-hundreds that, in terms of its implications, was bigger than all of the above. I personally believe that these first faltering steps in the new millennium signaled the moment that, as humans, our own fallibility dawned on us.

After riding high for some 150 years, making incredible strides in the advancement of medicine, technology, science, construction, transport, business, the human race has reached what feels like a pinnacle of sorts. Looking in the mirror, we'd be forgiven for seeing an evolutionary Adonis staring back - as a species, we're the fucking best. But now some pretty worrying cracks are appearing.

Confidences in age-old systems are beginning to wane. Banking, democratic governance, energy production - some of the cornerstones of Western civilisation – all revealed inherent weaknesses. Stuff started running out in the noughties; people noticed the change, tried to downplay the change, but anxiety spread like a fever. After all, while the invasion of Iraq served many political purposes, it was also, lest we forget, the first major war for control of a vital energy resource. (Many people have predicted the first of many). And to cap it all, after almost 30 years of warnings from the scientific community, the reality of climate change revealed itself in a number of empirical ways and finally became mainstream discussion.

At the end of the decade, we find ourselves at the confluence of several major threats to our existence as a species. Nuclear war, terrorism, climate change, economic instability, dwindling resources and increasing cost of basics: food, energy and water. Any one of these things would be a major challenge. Together, especially when they are interrelated, they pose a real quandary.

Such overwhelming uncertainty might account for the glut of so-called 'disaster porn' – reality TV (“When Nature Goes Bad” etc.), end-of-the-world disaster flicks and the like. These cultural outputs tell us all we need to know about living under constant threat. And, of course, you didn't need to turn on your TV or go to the cinema to get your fill of disaster porn in the noughties. Natural disasters were hot news: the 'boxing day' tsunami that killed an astonishing 200,000+ people. Then the Myanmar typhoon and hurricane Katrina all played their part in putting things – whatever things may be – in perspective.

Meanwhile on the interwebs, social networking went beserk and the penetration of MySpace, Facebook, Twitter et al. Have very quickly conditioned an entire generation to depend on an endless cycle of assertion, feedback, approval and response. Astonishing and occasionally impressive as this phenomenon was, it could also be said to be symptomatic of our collective malaise that we have become increasingly dependent on interdependency. Nothing screams 'I'm scared' more than constantly wanting to feel that someone is out there, listening, agreeing and interacting. Over-simplified? Perhaps, but just take a look at the one word that got America's first black president into office: hope. We're clutching at anything we can get.

At the end of the decade, we find ourselves at the confluence of several major threats to our existence as a species. Nuclear war, terrorism, climate change, economic instability, dwindling resources and increasing cost of basics Of course challenges bring out the best in human nature too – and on the positive side, we're beginning to see a rise in community focus, grass-roots organisation, people taking control, being conscious, being critical of and questioning authority; not just accepting that the way things are is how they have to be. There's undeniably a growing realisation that our existence is not sustainable - emotionally, you could compare us to a toddler; just becoming self-aware, aware that there is a world beyond ourselves and that we have an impact on it.

Which brings us slightly awkwardly back to games and what we do (because after all, this is a blog on a game publishing website and if we didn't somehow tie all this in with what we do, our shareholders will be furious). Because this part-time enterprise is born of that very same realisation and no doubt, this has lead - in part at least - to War on Terror's success.

That game, as an object, represents something that is being appreciated and repeated more and more - the questioning (even undermining) of official voice. That brightly coloured box, using for its title the very lexicon of the absurd, as dreamt up by the 'enemy', is a little symbol of defiance - a small transference of power from them to us. If you're an English literature teacher, the game is the fool in a Shakespearean tragedy, free to say what it likes by prattling apparent nonsense. If you want a more popular reference, we're Michael Winner in the esure insurance ads, with a special licence (supernatural ability?) to point out artifice and fakery. You don't have to play the game (or even know how it's played) to recognise and enjoy that. I think that's why we've seen people adopt it so fondly, championing it themselves, spreading the word with a fervour that we find both humbling and hard to match ourselves.

I'm not saying that War on Terror will be remembered as the game of the decade, even though that is just what I said, but if, theoretically, when the committee of Historically Important Board Games meet to nominate their choice for 2000-2010 and War on Terror is unanimously voted as the winner, it will be less to do with the (awesome) gameplay and more to do with the fact that the issues that inspired it could reasonably be claimed to be the dominant zeitgeist for the period.

Finally, it's been a hell of a decade for us at TerrorBull Games. Since founding the company in 2005 we've published our first game, been through the reactionary press wringer, had stock impounded and seized by the police, been rejected by the industry we naively thought we could be a jolly part of ... and then our luck slowly began to change – we were invited to America for our first convention and the world's first War on Terror tournament, we started picking up some serious (and famous) fans, Amnesty International and the Nobel Peace Center joined the growing ranks of those suddenly championing a game that was now being recognised as having a real social value. We brought out a second game about the financial crisis and most recently the BBC seem to believe we're the saviours of the British board game industry. That's quite some turnaround.

So while we're in a nostalgic mood for a very nostalgic decade, it's fitting that we give thanks and praise where it's due – and that's to everyone who's ever bought our games, played our games, raved about our games, became outraged by our games ... you all contributed not only to the games' success but to the very dialogue that was virtually absent back in 2003 when we started development. This, for me, is the real success of the decade for us. It looks like, on some very small, local level, it looks like we made a bit of a difference. Thanks, all.

P.S. To end on a warm, fluffy note, a special thanks to Mark Harrison in Manchester for sending us our first ever Christmas Card after we moaned that no one cared. You are the future, Mark! Never lose your humanity!

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Posted by Andy S on 31 December 2009 - 0 comments

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