Backstabbers Anonymous: Cloaks, Daggers, and Diplomacy

PHILIP: It's their wedding or the Vexin back. Those are the terms you made with Louis.
HENRY: True but academic, lad. The Vexin's mine.
PHILIP: By what authority?
HENRY: It's got my troops all over it: that makes it mine.
-James Goldman, The Lion in Winter.

Some years ago, when my gaming group still held a semi-regular D&D campaign, our host/game master invited us to play a game of Magic: The Gathering. I had heard of the game, but that was the extent of my knowledge; I had never played it, nor looked at the rules -- or, for that matter, the cards. He knew that much about my gaming experience when he handed me a suit and started the game, so he tried to explain the more important rules as he went along. The game was proceeding at a leisurely pace, and even though I was not doing well, I was not being that much of an embarrassment opposite more experienced players. Or so I thought.

After a while, the game master paused the game, rose from his chair and came to my side of the table. He looked at my remaining cards with a sigh: "You're playing defensively with an offensive suit". I don't think there was any reproach intended; he was just stating what he knew to be a fact. And if he was reproaching me for following an inappropriate strategy, how could I have been to blame? I had not seen all the cards, did not know how they interacted, and was not aware that there was a different approach involved with each suit. For all I knew, all suits involved similar strategies, but I never had the chance to perfect my play; to this day, this remains my only game of Magic: The Gathering.

My game master, however, should have known better than to hand me an offensive suit; I am, almost invariably, a defensive player. This explains my general disdain for the shooter genre and my predilection for strategy games. Dwarf Fortress, for example, is the quintessential defensive game, to the extent of making losing inevitable. Yes, that's right, impossible to beat; it has adopted "losing is fun" as its motto, and the player's objective is to last as long as possible. The old Stronghold series also comes to mind, in some of its missions anyway; but the recent Stronghold: Kingdoms, a Travian/Tribal Wars/Lord of Ultima/you name it-style browser game that considers itself too important to run in a browser, is but a pale travesty of its predecessors, as castle defence is automated once you have placed your troops.

I have carried this defensive outlook over to MMORPG's, with mixed results. It certainly accounts for my picking the underdog where fixed sides are involved, even though I know by now that it all goes haywire after this initial choice. In most of the cases I have seen (Pirates of the Burning Sea, Uncharted Waters Online), the underdog was so under-populated that it was not even functional as a faction, and could not even be of assistance as a kingmaker. New players, not surprisingly, tend to stay away once this becomes common knowledge.

Then there is the play-to-win mentality, which I loathe precisely because it lies at the opposite end of the gaming spectrum. It despises magnanimity in victory, denies nobility in defeat, attributes its victory to "skill" (loosely interpreted) regardless of circumstances, and, scoffing at fair-play, isn't particularly concerned about how it wins; the end justifies the means and all that. I saw the Asian mutation in action in Uncharted Waters Online, which was rife with multiboxers, macro users and other cheaters, with the bonus of racism against Westerners on top; the Western version should need no introduction, as it can be found in such games as Darkfall and EVE Online.

But the problem isn't that the mentality exists; it is that it infects all factions alike, including underdogs. And whereas I get my fun, playing as the underdog, from trying to avoid losing as long as possible, the play-to-win gamer who picked the underdog will just spout hollow phrases about needing to play "harder" or -- my favourite -- "smarter". He (it's nearly always a "he") thinks, no matter how great the odds are against him, that he can actually win. And who knows? Maybe he can, and I certainly wouldn't mind the laurels landing on my head once in a while. Unfortunately, there are always two problems. First, the play-to-win gamer tries to avoid sharing the credit of victory with anyone outside his circle of sycophants. Second, he doesn't care about how he wins; his victory could be achieved at the expense of his own side, or of the long-term longevity of the game, and he would hardly mind.

Which brings us to Diplomacy, the venerable board game created by Allan B. Calhamer, first published in 1959. Called by some the "thinking man's Risk" because luck plays no part in it (it is played without dice), it is alleged to have included John F. Kennedy and Henry Kissinger among its fans. Set in pre-World War I Europe, you choose one of seven powers (the UK, France, Germany, Austria-Hungary, Russia, Italy and the Ottoman Empire) and attempt to win the game by holding 18 territories with supply centres (represented by dots). To achieve this, you must make alliances with, well, possibly everyone else, just for the fun of betraying them when their flank is exposed. Indeed, it is a sadistic little game, where alliances are necessary to achieve anything, but where backstabbing is the norm once such alliances have outlived their usefulness.

I played a few games at one of those websites of questionable legality, and, needless to say, I fared rather badly at it: it is a game where the rules -- which favour a play-to-win mindset -- are in direct conflict with my approach to gaming. Don't take my word for it; allow me to quote Richard Sharp, the author of The Game of Diplomacy (1978):

In a changing world, some things do not change. It may be fashionable to decry the simple Virtues, but we still like to find them in our friends. Loyalty, honesty, frankness, gratitude, chivalry, magnanimity - these are the hallmarks of the good friend, the good husband and father, the nice guy we all hope our daughters will marry.

In the amoral world of Diplomacy, however, they are the hallmarks of the born loser. If a fallen enemy reaches out a hand for assistance, the wise man lops it off. If a friend does you a good turn when you’re down, wait until he’s down, then beat him to death. If an ally asks for your help in planning the next season’s moves, give it freely and copiously, then do the reverse of what you agreed and let him take the counter-attack. Try to surround yourself with people who trust you, then let them down; find an ally who will gladly die for you and see that he does just that.

In short, Diplomacy is not a nice game; to win, it is necessary to behave like a complete cad. Some people adopt a tone of moral outrage at the philosophy of the game, and refuse to play it at all: though it is already unfashionable, and will soon no doubt be illegal, to acknowledge any difference between the sexes, this attitude is particularly common among women — a cynic might say that Diplomacy threatens to erode the natural advantage their innate duplicity gives them over men in real life. At any event, this moral posture is quite untenable. We all have these anti-social tendencies somewhere within us, and it may be better to give them free rein in a harmless game, suppressing them where they could do real damage.

Because I cannot find it in me to "behave like a complete cad", I am likely to find myself forever on the defensive -- therefore, the losing side -- in Diplomacy; it is not that I cannot see a good opportunity, but that I will not seize it. And I would argue that it is precisely because such virtues as "loyalty, honesty, frankness, gratitude, chivalry, magnanimity" are in increasingly scarce supply in the real world that I favour them where they can be given free rein: in games.

Going in, I decided that I would not lie, by which I meant not saying something that I would break in the next round; if I said to someone that I would not do x, I would not do x, unless provoked into it. I might do the equally devastating y, but I would simply omit any mention of y, or skirt the issue to the point of ambiguity. It turned out that even that wasn't enough. Surrounded by players who said they would not do x, only to find them doing x the very next turn as though nothing had been promised, I could only find myself at a disadvantage.

I can appreciate a good backstab, provided there is some artistry involved. The Guiding Hand Social Club infiltration in EVE Online. The plot of The Sting and heist films generally. In comparison, breaking your word in Diplomacy in the course of one turn is graceless, commonplace and cheap. But more troubling is that the players I have encountered in those online Diplomacy games who would consort with the play-to-win crowd found in MMORPG's or even browser games; however graceless, commonplace and cheap the actions of these Diplomacy players might be, the players themselves are anything but. On the contrary, I sense great intelligence among the body of players, which makes the game all the more chilling because of what is required to win: cunning, wits, guile, and an utter lack of scruples. It brings to mind the excesses of intelligence: those which fuel confidence artists, Wall Street speculators, political staffers -- indeed, even diplomats. One almost expects it to be a favourite at MENSA meetings.

As it has been a mainstay of postal and e-mail play, Diplomacy also seems to be regarded with the same reverence as chess; it has certainly been written about extensively, to the extent that opening moves have all been named and catalogued. A typical Austrian opening, for example, is the Balkan Gambit, where the Budapest army invades Serbia and the Trieste fleet moves to Albania, with a combined attack on Greece in the next round; but what you do with your army in Vienna will involve a variation of the Gambit: usually moving to Tyrolia or Galicia, to guard against the Italians or Russians, respectively, or staying put in Vienna. I can't say I particularly enjoy playing chess, but at least it retains a versatility that Diplomacy lacks. And at least chess isn't unbalanced; Austria is notorious for early elimination, and a common house rule involves giving Italy a second fleet instead of an army because land expansion is unlikely in the early stages.
Reading some of the negative comments at the Board Game Geek website is quite revealing: the game is too long (6-8 hours), the rules are convoluted, a player will get eliminated early, it is a wrecker of friendships; in one word, just plain evil. I would suggest, however, that the true evil of this game lies in its approach to international politics; not so much in its claim that diplomacy is, by and large, conniving skullduggery (we all suspect that it is), but more in its game design that discourages genuine alliances. In the game world, the British in November 1918 would tell the French: "Nice place, Picardy. Guess we'll keep it. More objectionable is how the game reduces the purpose of a small country to being gobbled up by one foreign power or another -- a contrast to Risk, where you do not play as a specific country. In Diplomacy, the uncertainty is not over whether Belgian neutrality will be violated, but by whom. Likewise, Holland, Spain, Norway, Sweden, every minor country of Europe (with the exception of Switzerland, which simply does not exist) are sitting ducks, and exist purely so they can be taken over. Then you remember that this game was created by an American at the height of the Cold War, and appreciated by JFK and Kissinger. Unfortunately, if they were looking for merriment in the prospect of invading hapless pocket-sized countries, the Reichstag Follies of 1939 beat them to it.

Many of the comments at Board Game Geek also point to something else, which can be summarized as: "I used to play this in school, but gave up on it 20 years ago." This would coincide with the end of the Cold War. Today, the Realpolitik is still there, but it has mutated into something far different from 1914 or 1959; and it may well be that, as a result of this, Diplomacy will soon find itself becoming a relic of little more than historical curiosity.

I won't miss it, though; I'd rather take a stab at something else.