Nate Schmidt, Managing Editor
““And there is a real thing that I think happens in real life a lot, where this horrifying oppressive force has its boot on your throat…and goes, ‘Hey, I know I’ve got my boot on your throat? Be really careful to get my boot off your throat ethically. Don’t get my boot off your throat in a way that would compromise your values or call your ethics into question. I’m gonna keep crushing your body with my oppressive weight, but make sure you handle this in the right way.’””
Even when you think you’re ready for it, it’s hard when you realize that your university, like any other colossal organization, can be wielded as a tool of repression and violence. Maybe this realization took place upon your first interaction with the economic violence of student loans. Maybe it was an encounter with the bureaucratic violence that gatekeeps resources for students with disabilities and for students who require financial aid. Maybe it was the overt and covert racism and sexism of faculty and peers, or maybe you figured out what “land grant” meant for the first time. Maybe you simply had a semester where you got stuck with a bunch of professors who didn’t care whether or not it was hard for you to finish all they were requiring of you on time. God help you if you’re a student and trying to raise any children.
The point is, we knew that universities were willing to be violently antagonistic towards their own students before a couple weeks ago. We’re not just learning this for the first time now. But wow, it did not take too long for some university administrations to reveal just how deeply in cahoots they are with the rest of the repressive state apparatus. My campus saw state cops in riot gear beating students who gathered peacefully in a historic, university-designated free speech zone. We saw snipers on the roof and police helicopters in the sky. We saw faculty banned from campus for trying to protect their students from imminent physical violence. We saw the brutality of a militarized police state wielded as a weapon against the people we were charged with educating. Students raised an outcry against the slaughter of thousands of civilians in Gaza, and for their bravery they were bludgeoned with polycarbonate shields and batons. University administrators dispatched the full force of the law to punish students for chanting, singing, and playing board games in a field.
In one sense, leveling this amount of force at peaceful demonstrators on college campuses was a new development, at least where protests related to the war in Gaza and Israel are concerned. In another sense, this is a story we’ve seen repeated over and over on college campuses, from the Civil Rights movement and the Vietnam War to South African apartheid, through the invasion of Iraq, and into the present day: protesters have ideals; cops have guns and sticks.
I am going to level with you: it feels a little bit dumb to make a big deal about games right now. In the editorial schedule, this was going to be a piece about Wordle. Maybe Wordle will be important again next week. But this week, we need to talk about a different game. That game is called UP AGAINST THE WALL, MOTHERFUCKER!
The game is a playable version of the 1968 student demonstrations at Columbia University, printed in the March 1969 edition of the Columbia Spectator. Created by tactical wargame designer and Gary Gygax contemporary Jim Dunnigan, UATW,M! is a board game based on a loose map of the Columbia campus in the sixties. (Note that the link goes to the Columbia Spectator archives, and that the first page of this issue contains a really bad take that has nothing to do with the game. I do not know for sure what page that link will drop you on, but you’ll be looking for pages e2, e4, e5, and e7.) Players take up the mantle of either the protesters or the administration, and dice-based encounters resolve conflicts according to a series of tables that are provided as addenda to the game. Each line of squares on the game board represents a group of university affiliates, and the goal for each team is to sway as many of these groups to their side as possible over twelve turns, using the dice and resolution tables. In essence, the game reduces the complexities of coalition building into a series of probabilities: the trustees start the game much more closely aligned with the administration than the local Harlem community members, who were (in the real world) outraged over Columbia’s plan to build a gym in a local park that appeared to flaunt new laws against segregation. Every group can theoretically be “won over,” but the game is won by majority, not by getting everyone on one side.
To address the problematic thing about the name: “Up against the wall, motherfucker” is a quote from Amiri Baraka, a widely influential poet who also said some stupid antisemitic crap in some of his work. Considering the present-day context, he’s not a figure I’m eager to invoke, and I want to be clear that all the writers and editors at GwG fundamentally oppose all forms of antisemitism, islamophobia, and bigotry. While I do not want to let the Baraka connection go unremarked, he also didn’t have anything else to do with the game besides providing a punchy slogan. Dunnigan, the game’s creator, came by the name because Mike Rudd, a student activist, quoted Baraka in a letter to the Columbia administration. By the time the relatively moderate Dunnigan put the name in his game, the phrase had taken on a life of its own that was larger than its originator, spawning a number of anarchist demonstrations, including a forced entry into the Pentagon and an attempt to murder Andy Warhol. The name is evocative and memorable, but it’s ultimately also an edgelord-style provocation for provocation’s sake. (Dunnigan himself refers to the title as “flippant.”)
I am not arguing here that the game, or its name, is fantastic. Dunnigan created the game a year after the fact, and he had engaged with the previous year’s protests as an observer, not a participant. As a representation of something as complex as university protest, it’s reductive in the extreme, and it contains a number of other unforced errors, like lumping all the Black students under a single ideological umbrella or presenting protesters and administration as two equally valid sides to support. In other words, I am not here to ask, “Is this game particularly good?” I’m not quite convinced that it is; the densely mathematical gameplay looks like a thin and oversimplified skin stretched over the bones of the wargames Dunnigan really cared about, games with titles like 1914 and Sniper! I’m much more interested in the question: “What are the effects of turning campus protest into a game, and what can those effects teach us about our present-day time of unrest?”
In an editorial that accompanies the game’s board and rules, Dunnigan offers a few answers to this question. According to Dunnigan, UATW,M! is a “simulation,” and, as a simulation, it is also a “research tool.” Who is already using simulations as research tools? The military industrial complex, of course. Specifically, Dunnigan invokes the Institute for Defense Analyses, a military research non-profit that Columbia supported. This is a provocative choice, because Columbia’s association with the IDA was one of the major motivating factors behind the 1968 protests. He defines UATW,M! as an “operations research simulation,” “as close to a computer-assisted simulation you can get without using a computer.” He argues that “one immediate benefit you obtain from social simulations is a defining of objectives, or at least possible objectives.” Working with the benefit of hindsight, Dunnigan suggests that humanities researchers ought to get involved in the same kind of operations research that the military scientists are doing if they want to mount effective resistance. In other words, to resist the tactics and stratagems being defined by the oppressors, he calls for the inauguration of an innovative branch of humanities research that we might call critical game studies.
To my eyes, UATW,M! is less useful than Dunnigan may have intended it to be because it lacks any tools for roleplay; if the radicals want to sway the conservative students to their side, they just have to roll the dice and try for it, spending abstract and quantitative social capital. The game includes some event cards that invoke the decisions of specific parties like the university president or the New York Times, but these are once again used to calculate numerical values, not to build a narrative. It would be understandable if, considering the protests that are happening on campuses today, nobody wanted to play as the cops, but I think that there could be a twenty-first century version of this game that uses more roleplay (and less math) to identify and develop strategies for resistance.
What’s more, I think that in many cases we are already playing it. How many story arcs in Dimension 20, or Critical Role, or The Adventure Zone are ultimately about tactically opposing violent, totalitarian forces? Hell, there’s even an element of this opposition at play in some of Wizards’ own canonical campaigns–you could play The Curse of Strahd as a straightforward “kill the big bad” campaign, but an imaginative DM could easily make it a game about resisting an authoritarian figure who is able to literally hold people under his thrall. Let’s not limit ourselves to properties that are owned by Hasbro, either. The deeper into the indie RPG scene you get, the more explicitly antifascist the games become: consider the Extreme Meatpunks Forever RPG by Heather Flowers and Aura Belle, or Grant Howitt’s upcoming immortal Nazi-slaying vampire RPG Eat the Reich. Jason Morningstar’s Winterhorn takes another tack, inviting players to roleplay as the oppressive forces who are trying to tear an activist organization apart, so that they can “reflect on weak points in your own activism, and think about ways to harden organizations you care about against government intrusion.”
I am not making the case here for some kind of inherently liberatory element in “games,” writ large. As Hamza Bashandy argues over at Futuress, many games, especially big-budget ones, cast protesters as mobs of apolitical NPCs who serve as a passive backdrop to the hero’s journey. Also, it is obviously the case that protest organizers are already adept at forecasting repressive scenarios and planning for multiple outcomes in the physical world of consensus reality. But I think that, while it has its flaws, UATW,M! offers the compelling suggestion that the way we play can prepare us for the way we agitate. The riot cops are simulating ways to oppress us (see page 13 here), but we know what they’re up to. We have the tools to beat them at their own game, and we’re going to write the rules ourselves.
