This essay is about autism, so bear with me through the roundabout introduction. Disclaimer: while I make a lot of general claims about people with ASD, I can really only speak about my own experiences, and then only in confused and broken sentences.
From my freshman to my senior year in high school I was on the Scholastic Bowl team. If you are unaware of what this is, because you spent your youth doing cool stuff like playing actual sports or making out in cars, I will explain. Scholastic Bowl is a varsity competition for nerds, where two teams of four players represent their schools by being the first to buzz in and correctly answer questions posed by a moderator, quiz-show-style. It’s basically “University Challenge” from that one episode of The Young Ones. It purports to be a measure of academic knowledge, but the questions are pretty much bar trivia about the humanities and STEM.
This was a game that was basically made for teenaged John, and it’s not hyperbole to say that I pretty much carried my team: I answered around 80% of the questions and usually buzzed in early—that is, before the moderator was done reading the question. It’s not that I was smarter than my teammates, it’s that I had weirdly eclectic interests and an ability to retrieve facts from my memory with speed and precision (I have lost this skill in middle age).
For an activity that took up so much of my teen years, I recall no specific matches, but there was one question, and my answer, that I remember lucidly. It was toward the end of a match that was nearly tied, and the score was making me tense and focused. The moderator asked the toss-up, “who wrote the New World Symphony?”
I buzzed in immediately and responded, “Dvořák.”
The moderator looked confused and peered down at his question card. “Could you repeat that?” he said.
“Dvořák,” I repeated.
He examined the card a few seconds more and then said, “I’m sorry, that’s incorrect. Would the other team like to respond—”
I loudly interrupted: “Is that spelled dee vee oh, ar-with-a-caron ay-with-an-accent, kay?”
Everyone in the room was taken aback; a student reprimanding a moderator was a completely out of order. “Because that’s pronounced duhVORzyahk. It sounds like it has a Z, but it doesn’t, so you must be reading it incorrectly.”
I suddenly realized that my coaches and teammates were staring at me like I had done something wrong, so I added in a softer voice, “because it’s a Czech name…”
Strangely, while this exchange is etched in my memory, I don’t actually remember whether we got the ten points for a toss-up or not.
I tell this anecdote neither to flex about what a precocious kid I was, nor to admit that I was an incorrigible smartass (both of these are true). My point here is to illustrate the way that autistic people’s minds work. We tend not to pay attention to authority. We are very committed to the idea of truth; we are also committed to the idea of justice—these two positions are intertwined. This insistence can (and does) lead to black and white thinking about things that aren’t black and white, but it also means a belief and fealty to objective truth and fairness.
I don’t mean to imply that autistic people can’t prevaricate. There’s a popular truism that ASD renders one incapable of lying; this is ridiculous and implies that we are a fantastical race of fairy children, magically bound to speak truth. It’s more accurate to say that we aren’t willing to lie for the sake of politeness or to make someone feel better. If someone asks me how I’m doing, or if I like their haircut, I’m going to tell them, even if they really weren’t looking for a straight answer. It would feel inauthentic to do otherwise.
Likewise, an autistic heightened concern for fairness—what psychologists call justice sensitivity—is also tied to our sense of integrity. Good faith and equal treatment matter a lot. At its best, justice sensitivity motivates care for others and the questioning of social conventions. However, it can also lead to a rigid and judgmental outlook, and when this is paired with an indifference towards hierarchy, the outcome is know-it-all punks like me ill-advisedly sassing the very people who give out the points.
But, to be fair, the New World Symphony really was written by Dvořák.
My parents were (and remain) staunchly liberal, but for people who lived their twenties through the eras of beatniks and hippies they were (and remain) pretty square. In the 70s my dad had sideburns and a mustache and smoked a pipe; my mom had a bob cut and wore knee-length skirts. Their record collection consisted of mostly classical and musical theater albums with probably the most scandalous disc being a copy of Herbie Mann’s Push Push1. It’s a wonder, then, that my childhood was filled to the brim with subversive boardgames. By this I mean games designed to promote skepticism, free thinking, and in some cases, out and out Marxism. This essay focuses on the eggheaded, leftist games of my youth.
WFF ‘n Proof (1962)
I believe my Dad acquired his copy of WFF ‘n Proof in college. In any case, this strange dice game was kicking around the house as far back as I can remember, and as long as I can remember I was trying, and failing, to learn how to play. WFF ‘n Proof is a game where players roll a handful of odd wooden dice whose sides were (mostly) Roman letters. Then they attempt, using propositional calculus, to arrange the dice into a string of atoms and connectors to produce valid statements, or what the game maker Layman E. Allen referred to as “well-formed-formulas (WFFs).” Just for fun, instead of the standard system of symbolic logic, this game uses “Polish notation,” a system of expression developed by logician Jan Łukasiewicz in which the operator is placed before its operands. Did I mention I tried to learn this game when I was seven?
This game did not strike me as particularly odd as a child. My parents were the type to let their kids play with adult things (if they weren’t dangerous or inappropriate) and let us work out what we could. Besides, my dad was a professor of theology and philosophy and occasionally taught symbolic logic, and he had an old copy of Stephen Barker’s The Elements of Logic (1965) that he gave me and my brother to read. So, proof that autism is hereditary!
The WFF ‘n Proof dice, as inscrutable now as ever
I may never have learned to play WFF ‘n Proof, but I was in love with its odd presentation. The game came (in its original edition) in a plastic wallet with foam rubber housing for the dice, a thick rulebook that was more like a short novel, and a tiny hourglass for timing moves. Whatever happened to these tiny hourglasses? They used to have one in every game. As an adult, I once bought a copy of this game off eBay, only to find that foam rubber does not age well over the decades (to see what I mean, Google “original Yoda puppet”).
The WFF ‘n Proof company (which billed itself as “games for thinkers”) also produced other games. One, which my family also owned, was The Propaganda Game, and it was here that my education as a skeptic began. This game was also developed by Layman E. Allen, but also credited Lorne Greene, Commander Adama himself2. In a statement on the box, Mr. Greene outlines the game’s purpose:
In a democratic society such as ours, it is the role of every citizen to make decisions after evaluating many ideas. It is especially important then that a citizen be able to analyze and distinguish between the emotional aura surrounding the idea and the actual content of the idea. It is to this goal of clear thinking that THE PROPAGANDA GAME addresses itself.
In contrast to WFF ‘n Proof, The Propaganda Game‘s rules are very simple. A set of cards are printed with a series of short arguments or appeals to the reader, and the players have to identify what kind of propaganda is being employed. If they get it right, they slide their tiddley-wink marker up the score sheet; if they get it wrong, they go back a rank.
The game is subdivided into various propaganda categories, such as “Techniques of Self-Deception,” “Techniques of Language,” “Techniques of Exploitation,” etc. Within each category, there are eight to ten techniques to identify, such as “Prejudice,” “Academic Detachment,” “Drawing the Line,” “Not Drawing the Line,” “Wishful Thinking,” “Tabloid Thinking,” and my favorite, “Causal Oversimplification,” which I believe is 85% of discourse online (the other 15% is straight-and-out lying). These categories and their techniques were first proposed in the book Thinking Straighter by George Henry Moulds (1966).
Some of the statements to evaluate. Can you spot the propaganda techniques used?
As you might imagine, a lot of this is subjective, and even as a child I found myself yelling back at Allan and Greene: “That’s not Drawing the Line! That’s just being clear!” Apparently I am not alone in my complaints, as tournament rules for this game use an amended guide, available online.
The most amusing aspect of the game is the “Clear thinking chart” used to keep score. Each rank has an unflattering name that corresponds to how easily propagandized the player is, such as “Brooklyn Bridge Buyer” or “Bilker’s Bonanza.” If you are unlucky enough to slide into negative numbers you end up in the “Ding-a-ling section.” It was a different time. There was also an interesting mechanic for games of three or more players where each voted on the correct technique, so the game not only introduced participants to propaganda but also to the Asch Conformity Test.
Lie, Cheat & Steal (1971)
I remember when my parents purchased this game (at my brother’s and my behest). It was at Straus’s, which was the frou-frou department store that once was the pride of Youngstown, Ohio. In those days before being destroyed by malls and big boxes, department stores often carried unusual games, toys, and other novelties, and that included the output of tiny producers. Lie, Cheat & Steal was published by now long-defunct Reiss Games, whose output mostly consisted of abstract strategy and party games, although they also apparently made a board game based on the 70’s scandalous paperback The Happy Hooker. Lie, Cheat & Steal (herein, LC&S) was a highly jaundiced game about political campaigning, as described on the box bottom:
LIE, CHEAT & STEAL is the game of unscrupulous politics. You and one to five of your shifty friends can get in on the dirty-dealing, back-stabbing and thinly disguised thievery that make up the real political world.
You buy and sell votes, steal from the Public Treasury, and libel the other players to get ahead. The Senate may investigate you. You may even go bankrupt. But don’t give up! LIE, CHEAT & STEAL gives you plenty of opportunity to come back and win.
LC&S actually pre-dates Watergate, but it does reflect the era’s cynical views about corruption and money influence. Modeled somewhat obviously after Monopoly, the players roll dice to move clockwise around the board, acquiring money in unscrupulous ways to eventually buy votes. Along the way you land on spaces with names like “Tammany Hall,” “Chicago Machine” and “League of Women Voters Luncheon.” In the course of the game you might become the subject of a Senate investigation and have to take the witness stand. You collect “feathers in your cap” or “black eyes.” Neither my brother or I understood the meaning of any of this other than the “Jail” space, but we did ask our mom a lot of questions, and she did her best to explain the machinations of American Politics.
The LC&S board. I thought the guy in these pictures looked like a character in an Inspector Clouseau cartoon.
LC&S was probably the most playable amongst the games I describe in this essay, but that’s not to say it was all that fun. Like Monopoly, it ran long, and by the end I was happy when anyone would win, just as long as the game was over. As far as politics went, I was already pretty cynical and needed no board game to disillusion me.
Class Struggle (1978)
I have no idea where my dad got this game, but I suspect he sought it out because of its press coverage. The bottom of the box (I think it was the second printing of the game) enumerates its infamy:
FIRST book about capitalism to come packaged in a game box… FIRST game to be written up in a NEW YORK TIMES editorial … FIRST game ever to be played on the radio (for two hours on WBAI) … FIRST game ever to be sold by Scribner’s, 8th Street Bookshop and Salter’s Bookstore, three of New York’s most famous bookstores FIRST full-scale board game to present the side of the workers. FIRST board game ever to be sold in both Toy and Stationery Departments in Bloomingdale’s .. FIRST game ever to be sold out in one week in Bookmasters, N.Y.C. …
Class Struggle was developed by political professor Bertell Ollman of NYU and it’s really less of a game than a recapitulation of Karl Marx’s Das Kapital, with a rule book that is nearly as long as its source material. The pre-Photoshop collage on the cover shows Nelson Rockefeller arm wrestling Marx. Nelson has a few hundred dollar bills in his suit’s breast pocket, in case the point isn’t clear enough. In this game, one player is “the workers” and the other is “the capitalists” and they are caught in an arena of dialectical materialism, as represented by a cluttered and hastily-designed board. If there are more than two players, other factions are used, like academics or professionals, and these can make alliances with either the workers or the capitalists. The game, at least in its early editions, came with components that were at once elaborate and cheap, the strangest of which were the dice, which seemed to be cast in some sort of yellow epoxy that chipped easily.
The Class Struggle board. Will the world end in Socialism, Barbarism, or Nuclear War?
The game was not so much fun as it was funny. I imagine if you were a student of political philosophy your would get many sensible chuckles. But for me it was another clockwise slog around the board, and the games’s many potshots at Capitalism seemed like casual oversimplification. Callback!
When my parents moved from my childhood home to a new place a couple of decades ago, they cleaned out a lot of the games that had survived our many basement floodings, and one of them was Class Struggle, which they offered to whichever son would take it. I said thanks but no thanks. I think Rob may have taken it, which in hindsight might have been a lucrative move. Because however unfun, the game has developed something of a cult status over the years, with online retrospectives, contemporary re-imaginings, and even original sets sold at auction. An ironic fate, considering the game’s whole raison d’être.
The 70s were filled to the brim with photos of hairy shirtless guys. ↩︎
Yes, I know that he’s primarily known for Gunsmoke. This sentence is here just to annoy Boomers. ↩︎
In an earlier post I discussed the board games of my 70’s childhood. That one was popular, so here’s an essay about the games that came after.
One evening in 1977, my dad mentioned that some of the kids at the college where he taught were playing a strange new game that was played with pencil and paper and a variety of eccentric dice. Also sometimes lead figurines, but how they fit into the game did was unclear. He was talking, of course, about Dungeons & Dragons, which at the time was only three years old and very much a niche activity for the kind of young man who owned several Frank Frazetta posters. My older brother Rob, who had been obsessed with fantasy since my father read us the Lord of the Rings, wanted to try this thing out, so the next Saturday my dad drove us out to the Hobby Models store in Peoria, Illinois.
The original edition of Dungeons & Dragons (1974) and its predecessor/supplement, Chainmail (1968). Rob bought all of these and if he hadn’t worn them to shreds they would now be worth approximately 100 bajillion dollars.
Although I didn’t know it at the time, the Midwest was a hotbed of indie game production, and the birthplace of role playing games. Dungeons & Dragons was the product of game publisher Tactical Studies Rules, and TSR was situated in Lake Geneva, Wisconsin; the science fiction RPG Traveler, which was an early competitor to D & D, was published by Game Designers’ Workshop, located in Normal, Illinois. Even before he co-created Dungeons & Dragons, designer Gary Gygax had established the annual game convention that would become Gen Con (named after Lake Geneva, its original host city).
Computer Space: groovier than it had a right to be.
The first time I entered the Hobby Models store was as much a mind-expanding experience as if I had wandered into a head shop on Ocean Front Walk1. We may have come in search of Dungeons & Dragons, but the inventory ranged from model rockets to balsa wood and tissue kits to an enormous yellow Computer Space cabinet, the first coin-op video game (1971). Roughly a third of the floor space was dedicated to Napoleonic miniature war games. A small group of scraggly men in torn jeans and stained tee-shirts were hunched over a miniature battle ground made of green felt stuck on a sheet of plywood, supported by a pair of saw horses. On this battleground were hundreds of painted metal figures of infantry, calvary, and artillery. Players made their moves by measuring inches with a ruler; once a unit had fired in a turn, tufts of cotton smoke were placed as markers until the next turn, usually an hour or two later at the rate they played.
Waterloo: I was defeated, you won the war.
The front of the store was where the indy games were, and here Rob was able to procure a copy of Dungeons & Dragons. For anyone who has not seen the original booklets this game came in: the rules were next to indecipherable. There were only three ill-defined character classes and the text kept referring to an earlier game by Gygax, Chainmail, which was a set of rules for miniature play. The set actually told players they would need a copy of Chainmail, which seemed to me (and still seems to me today) like a cheap move by TSR.
In a way, the original game of D&D was a set of story-based interludes to spice up your figurine play, and it was only after a series of four supplementary books that the game evolved into its recognizable stand-alone form that charmed nerds across the nation and terrified their parents, who by the early 1980s believed the pastime to be demonic.
Concerned mothers are warned of the inevitable progression from playing D & D to worshiping Satan in the Jack Chick tract Dark Dungeons (1984).
Rob was 13 when he began to play role-playing games with friends and I was 10. I wish I could say that I took to the game as well, but 1) I found the constant dice rolls took me out of the fantasy, and 2) Rob didn’t want his dumb brother hanging around and harshing his game night vibes. But while I wasn’t much of a player, I did find the rule books fascinating, and even more so the many odd games that emerged in Dungeons and Dragons‘ wake. There was Tunnels & Trolls, whose name was a bit too on-the-nose as a clone. There was Chivalry & Sorcery, whose rules were maybe 20 times more complex and were printed in blotchy 9-point text that looked as if it had been photocopied a dozen times. There was Bunnies & Burrows, in which players played as rabbits à la Watership Down.
But if RPGs were not for me, Hobby Models also was a doorway to the a fascinating world of small-press board games, and particularly microgames, that I did come to love. But since this essay is already longer than I planned, I will get to those next post. To be continued.
I have searched in vain for interior photographs of this store from the late 70s or early 80s but I guess not everything has made it into the digital era. I did, however, find this charming advertisement from (I’m guessing) the 1960s: ↩︎
