Wooden Flows and Cardboard Algorithms: Abstracting the Human in Pax Transhumanity
Wooden Flows and Cardboard Algorithms: Abstracting the Human in Pax Transhumanity
Wooden Flows and Cardboard Algorithms: Abstracting the Human in Pax Transhumanity
By Miles Hubble
March 28 2021
Summary
The latest board game in the Pax series, Transhumanity sees players enacting the role of a "Startup entrepreneur in the not-too-distant future"2 endeavoring to ensure that their particular vision for humanity's future is the dominant one.
Although such logics are typically associated with videogames, notably in the work of Alexander Galloway,3 board games offer a uniquely productive view of how algorithmic culture has so interpenetrated our daily lives.
A player card depicting the agent cubes Pax games, a niche within the larger niche of tabletop gaming, differ from typical "Eurogames" in that they have a high degree of player-to-player interaction, feature constantly-shifting endgame and victory conditions, and are notoriously difficult to learn.
As a result, the Pax series eschews the generic categories of Euro and Ameritrash games.
Like the latter, a commitment toward theme and simulation drive the mechanics; the rulebook for Transhumanity sports 59 footnotes which define the game's terms, clarify thematic considerations, and suggest further reading on the topic of futurism.
Paxes are heavily deterministic; the opacity of their rules and board states help create a kind of fog of war, harkening back to the game's wargaming predecessors.
In a Pax game it is common for a reversal of fortune to leave a player with zero points by game's end.
Because the goals themselves shift based on player input, it is impossible to play a mere game of efficiency.
Questions of genre aside, abstraction not only figures into the game's presentation-a necessity in any board game-but also how the gameplay loops, what Ian Bogost terms "Unit operations."6.
These game operations denote the same processes of abstraction and alienation that characterize today's global neoliberal order.
Reference
Hubble, M. (2021, March 28). Analog game studies. Retrieved July 13, 2021, from https://analoggamestudies.org/2021/03/wooden-flows-and-cardboard-algorithms-abstracting-the-human-in-pax-transhumanity/