The Gamesters

Game-playing is a fundamental facet of human nature. Perhaps naturally, we have a tendency to project its principles to other species, from the simple games and play fights of domestic pets to the alien races of science fiction. Volumes can be, and have been, written on games in science fiction, but here I take a much briefer look at a handful of examples of gameplay as public spectacle and consider their implications in science and SF.

Games are common to all known human societies and represent a mechanism by which competition, decision making and even aggression can be worked out peaceably, and which, frankly, many people find fun. Science fiction has considered the consequences of this human trait, and extrapolated from it, throughout its history. Examples featuring the game of chess, in particular, are common in stories of future human cultures, but many writers have chosen to invent their own games, whether through detailed rules or simply hinting at the game play, many of which involve public gameplay, or which may even shape a culture and its interactions.

Bread and Circuses

Since well before the creation of the Roman Empire, humans have been entertained by public displays of violence, often carried out as a form of punishment for the participants, but also often as political or power manoeuvrings between those sponsoring the games. The Romans gave us a term for such games in a public arena, and their role in power brokering, in the phrase “bread and circuses”: a populace can be kept passive and controlled if given enough to eat and enough entertainment. If that entertainment can also be used to demonstrate the consequences of deviation from accepted norms, or to replace open conflict in the interactions between its sponsors, so much the better - at least from the point of view of those in power. 

The original 1960s television series directly Star Trek explored the possible evolution of such a system into a technological culture a level equivalent to that of twentieth century Earth, while retaining slave ownership and broadcast gladiatorial games, in the episode “Bread and Circuses” (1970). Early on, the crew of the Enterprise intercept a television broadcast:

Announcer: "... Today, police rounded up still another group of dissidents. Authorities are as yet unable to explain these fresh outbreaks of treasonable disobedience by well-treated, well-protected, intelligent slaves. Now turning to the world of sports, and bringing you the taped results of the arena games last night: The first heat involved amateurs. They're petty thieves from the city prison - conducted, however, with traditional weapons, it provided some amusement... for a few moments. In the second heat, a slightly more professional display, in the spirit of our splendid past, when gladiator Claudius Marcus killed the last of the Barbarians, William B. Harrison, in an excellent example of..."

Uhura: "Transmission lost, sir. Shall I try to get it back?"

Kirk: "Slaves and gladiators... What are we seeing, a 20th-Century Rome?"

Inevitably, Kirk, Spock and McCoy are captured while attempting to locate the crew of a lost survey ship, and forced to fight before uncovering the truth behind what happened.

The interest in the use of gladiatorial combat as an entertainment and power-broking mechanism was also explored in another Star Trek episode. “The Gamesters of Triskelion” (1968) began with Kirk, Uhura and Chekov being kidnapped and transported to the titular world, where they are forced into mortal combat against other alien species, while traded and gambled upon by mysterious voices. This ultimately proves to be at the behest of three disembodied brains who have no other form of entertainment or interaction. In this case, Kirk is able to negotiate a wager to the ultimate benefit of all concerns [1].

Both Roman-styled gladiatorial combat and other games of violent combat are common throughout science fiction, and remain common to the present time, from the basic premise of The Hunger Games franchise (books and films, Suzanne Collins, 2008 onwards) to the 2017 Marvel Cinematic Universe film Thor: Ragnarok. In this story, the Asgardian god Thor finds himself captured and sold for an arena-based combat game, where he is pitted against a former ally, the Incredible Hulk. Against the backdrop of a crowd of spectators baying for blood, and while fighting for his life, he has to try to reach the more rational, human side of his opponent and turn the fight into an opportunity to rebuild their alliance.

Games of Skill and Chance.

Perhaps more interesting than simple combat games are the examples in science fiction of games of skill, or even chance, carried out in arena conditions.

Arguably, the most common such games in SF, blending both skill and chance can be found in card-based gambling competitions akin to poker or dice games akin to craps. Even of Earth, competitive poker is a professional spectator sport, often broadcast and with a large following. Science fiction has extrapolated this to both private and arena settings as, for example in the game of sabacc in Star Wars (1977), pyramids in Battlestar Galactica (1978), triad in Battlestar Galactica (2003) or the roulette-like dabo in Star Trek: Deep Space Nine (1993).

Iain M Banks’ novel Consider Phlebas (1987), contains a striking example of this. One of the characters is a privateer captain, Kraiklyn, who aspires to join the ultimate league of the card game Damage. This elite group plays to enormous crowds in arena settings, and mental and emotional bombardment is part of the gameplay alongside the card choice. However the stakes are raised two-fold in this game. Firstly by the use of human beings (whether enslaved, recruited, sentenced criminals or bred for the purpose) as ‘lives’ - executions that the telepathically linked principal will feel whenever a hand is lost, and which limit their opportunities to recoup any losses. Secondly by the fact that the elite games are played on the brink of catastrophe, moments from death - in the example in the book, aboard a giant orbital settlement that will imminently be destroyed in an act of war. Despite the danger of the setting, or perhaps because of it, the event draws huge crowds, as well as those addicted to its adrenaline-fueled electronically-enhanced mental fields:

"From a spectator's point of view, Damage's special attraction was that the closer you stood to the emotor unit of any particular player, the more of the emotions they were experiencing affected you directly, too. A whole subculture of people hooked on such third-hand feelings had grown up in the few hundred years since Damage had become a select but popular game: the moties.

There were other groups playing Damage. The Players of the Eve of Destruction were simply the most famous and the richest. The movies could get their emotional fix in lots of other places throughout the galaxy, but only in a full game, only on the edge of annihilation, only with the very best players (plus a few hopefuls) could the most intense experiences be obtained. "

Sports, music and other artistic tournaments are common spectacles in SF, and worthy of their own entry in this blog, as is the extensive literature centred on video games. In other science fiction examples, board games such as chess are turned into spectator sports. Television series Doctor Who has an interesting example here. In “The Wedding of River Song” (2011), the Doctor plays a game known as Live Chess while in search of information. Based on the traditional human game, this takes place in an arena of baying spectators. Crucially, each move increases the electrical charge passing through the pieces, until the Doctor’s informant is forced to yield information (to the disappointment of the crowd) rather than face certain death by electrocution. As the Doctor notes:

"The crowd is getting restless. They know the queen is your only legal move. Except you've already moved it twelve times, which means there are now over four million volts running through it..."

Large scale boards on which humans (or others) are used as pieces are found in examples ranging from spy-fi series The Man from UNCLE (TV, 1964-1968) to space opera such as Star Trek: Lower Decks (TV, 2021-2024). A memorable instance can be found in The Final Reflection by John M Ford (novel, 1984). A tie-in to the Star Trek television series (then already almost two decades old), this novel was unusual in being framed as a prequel, set some decades before the original series, and for being set largely within the Klingon Empire - then entirely unexplored on screen.

In the novel, the protagonist is first seen as a child in an orphanage, trained as part of a team to undertake combat in a live three-dimensional version of Klin zha, a widespread boardgame with a strong resemblance to chess. In the version played by military strategists, two pieces (fliers, lancers, swifts, vanguards etc) moved onto the same space engage with potentially lethal or life-changing consequences. The protagonist, Vrenn, is adopted by the navy Thought Admiral (and game Grand Master) directing his side through that initial live game, and further trained in gameplay and strategy, including sacrifice.

The rest of the novel follows his life, strongly influenced as it is by seeing both Klingons and aliens (including humans) through the lens of the games they play. While Star Trek: The Next Generation and later installments of the franchise soon rendered The Final Reflection strictly non-canonical, it is seen as a strong influence on later depictions of Klingon culture, and has been acknowledged as such by later screenwriters, including through the appearance of a ship named after its protagonist in the much later Star Trek series Picard (TV, 2020-2023) [2].

Live participation in another close analog of chess can be found in The Chessmen of Mars (1922), a novel in the Barsoom planetary romance series by Edgar Rice Burroughs. This novel follows the adventures of a princess, Tara, blown away from her home city of Helium by a storm and carried half way around the world. She eventually ends up in the city state of Manator, where both civil disputes and criminal proceedings are resolved by teams of players on a jetan board, on which twenty selected players on each side (often slaves or prisoners, but occasionally volunteers), each with defined moves, are directed by a chief across an orange-and-black checkerboard. Wherever two individuals meet, a single combat decides the outcome, while the ultimate goal is to capture the enemy chief or his princess. Although the jetan game (known elsewhere on Barsoom in its simple board-game form) is described as shaping the culture of this city, and references appears in the architecture of the city, the live action version is restricted to an annual tournament.

Gamester Cultures

As The Chessmen of Mars and The Final Reflection both hint, a more complex scenario can be found in narratives not just placing games as an occupation for a select society but rather as fundamental to an entire society, culture or even interstellar empire, which is defined through its interactions with the game.

Another glimpse of a civilisation obsessed with games can be seen in the Star Trek: Deep Space Nine episode “Move Along Home” (1993). Here the Wadi, newly discovered in the Gamma Quadrant, come to DS9 for an official first contact negotiation. However their first request on arrival is to see games and to be taken to Quark’s bar. After playing dabo for hours, they introduce Quark to their own game Chula, not explaining that as well as pieces on a three-dimensional board, he is also controlling the fates of four of DS9’s senior officers. These individuals are confined to a virtual world, implied to be a hybrid of hologram and transporter technology. The four go through a series of dangers, as Quark ultimately realises to his horror. It is not until he appears to have lost all four that they are returned unharmed - as the Wadi notes, “It’s only a game.”

While the group of Wadi we see (presumably dignitaries or aristocrats of some kind) are shown as game-obsessed [3], it is unclear to what extent the love of gameplay is integrated into their culture. By contrast, the interstellar civilisation described by Richard Cowper in his novelet Out There Where the Big Ships Go (F&SF, August 1979) involves a game called Kalire that is not only profoundly philosophical and religious (the twin deities of the aliens are themselves locked in a game) but also deeply addictive for humans when brought back to Earth:

“The Japanese, with their long tradition of Zen and Go, were the first to become enmeshed in the infinite subtleties of The Game, and within a matter of weeks the great toy factories of Kobe and Nagoya were churning out Kalire sets by the million. The Russians and Chinese were quick to follow. And then — almost overnight it seemed — the whole world had gone Kalire crazy. It leapt across all barriers of language and politics, demanding nothing, offering everything. Before it armies were powerless, creeds useless. Time-hallowed mercenary values, ancient prejudices, long-entrenched attitudes of mind — all these were suddenly revealed as the insubstantial shadows of a childhood nightmare. Kalire was all. But was it a religion, or a philosophy, or just a perpetual diversion? The answer surely is that it was all these things and more besides.”

Again we see little of the alien culture, but the story describes the first human Master, other than the explorer who brought the game back, reaching a realisation of the mind-state required for a victory which will ultimately see humanity accepted by their alien contacts and returning to the stars: 

“Up to that instant in time, my whole approach to Kalire had been based upon the overwhelming desire to win. In order to become that which I was not (in my case, at that time, the winner of that vital third game), I had to go by a way which I did not know. There was only one such way available to me. I had to desire not defeat (that seemed inevitable anyway) but the achievement of a state of mind in which winning or losing ceased to have meaning for me. ”

A broader picture can be seen in some other work. The Second Game by Charles V. de Vet and Kathleen MacLean was a novella published in March 1958 in Astounding magazine. The story is told from the point of view of a human representative of The Ten Thousand Worlds who poses as a local on the world of Velda. Here he sets himself up with a fairground stall promising to beat any individual in the second of two games, having used the first to evaluate and understand his opponents. As he explains when confronted and identified as a human:

 “A chess adept wrote me, in answer to an article on chess, that a man from one of the outworlds had shown him a game of greater richness and flexibility than chess, with much the same feeling to the player, and had beaten him in three games of chess after only two games to learn it, and had said that on his own planet this chesslike game was the basis for the amount of authority with which a man is invested.”

In fact, by playing the game well, he hoped to be taken to those in authority for negotiations with the hostile Veldans (who have already destroyed a diplomatic fleet), and is soon seeing increasingly skilled and powerful Veldans at his booth.

 “I knew then that I had set my lure with an irresistible bait. On a world where the Game was played from earliest childhood—was in fact a vital aspect of their culture—my challenge could not be ignored.”

However the protagonist wasn’t reckoning with the cultural and biological drivers of this civilisation, which make even the offering of negotiations an offense. Realising this while in the custody of, and playing games with, one of the world’s leaders, and at the risk of his life, he ultimately advises the allied Ten Thousand Worlds to surrender… only to prove some time later that he has correctly assessed his opponents and would indeed ultimately see humanity triumphant in the clash of cultures - winning the second game.

Still more depth is given to a game-playing culture in The Player of Games (1988), the second of Iain M Banks Culture novels. In this series, the Culture is a post-scarcity interstellar civilisation in which everyone - including both humans (broadly defined) and artificial sentiences such as drones and Minds - is free to pursue their own goals. Amongst them are competitive game players and theorists who spend their time playing and writing about strategy games. However when Contact, the subset of the Culture assigned to interacting with those outside, clandestinely or otherwise, meets a new empire in one of the Magellanic Clouds, one of the Culture’s leading game players, Jernau Gurgeh finds himself blackmailed into leaving his home and becoming involved in the effort to understand the aliens.

 “And it was true that, as he’d been told, there was one constant in all the numbing variety of Azadian life; the game of Azad permeated every level of society, like a single steady theme nearly buried in a cacophony of noise, and Gurgeh started to see what the drone Worthil had meant when it said Contact suspected it was the game that held the Empire together. Nothing else seemed to."

The Empire of Azad uses the eponymous game - played through multiple rounds of one-on-one and multiplayer contests, ranging from card games and board games to huge, three dimensional constructs, and with advantage built up throughout - to determine everything about its culture. Roles from junior civil service posts, through military authority all the way up to the Emperorship itself are determined by the outcomes of a six-year sequence of tournaments which culminate in a live broadcast game series on a world regularly swept by fire.

Gurneh immerses himself into the culture and ultimately the mindset of Azad, drawing on his experience in countless human tactical games to reach the highest levels of the tournament, until he finally finds himself facing the Emperor Nicosar himself.. And losing. Only then does he realise that while the Emperor’s gameplay is a detailed simulacrum of the Empire of Azad, his only path to victory lies in making his own an equally detailed encapsulation of the Culture and its values. Over the last few boards he does so:

“The Board became both Culture and Empire again. The setting was made by them both; a glorious, beautiful, deadly killing field, unsurpassingly fine and sweet and predatory and carved from Nicosar’s beliefs and his together. Image of their minds; a hologram of pure coherence, burning like a standing wave for fire across the board, a perfect map of the landscapes of thought and faith within their heads.
He began the slow move that was defeat and victory together before he even knew it himself. Nothing so subtle, so complex, so beautiful had ever been seen on an Azad board. He believed that; he knew that. He would make it the truth.” 

As in MacLean and de Wit’s The Second Game, this tournament between two individuals, one steeped in each culture and embodying its values, attitudes and beliefs, has consequences that will affect planetary and interstellar empires.

Games, Gameplaying and Game Theory.

So why do we so often envisage either future humans or, more often, alien intelligences as being obsessively interested in ritualised or formalised game play?

Examples of games are found back to the earliest stages of human history (and arguably into prehistory). They are recognised as a fundamental element of human societies around the world, combining educational, recreational and social bonding roles, and overlapping with sport as proxies for physical warfare. They have also been recognised as providing an insight into the nature of cultural assumptions, with the moves and strategies adopted in a game reflective of the society in which it was created. Just taking two of the more common games played on checkerboards for example, chess contains implicit assumptions about military hierarchies, the role of aristocracies and the use of large armies of footsoldiers (literally) as pawns. By contrast Hnefetafl (a board game played across northern Europe in the medieval period), encapsulated the asymmetric nature of conflict for the Vikings, with an attacking force taking on a well-defended stronghold [4].

In many cultures, the idea that gods or other authority figures may play games with the lives of others reflects human concerns over volition and autonomy, as well as fundamental understandings of structures of authority. The concept of gaming has also been shown to arise naturally from human evolutionary pressures which have led to both mental and physical wellbeing becoming tied to a cycle of clear goals, definite action, completion and punishment or reward. Complex human games exist, such as Go, in which both a logical and a philosophical mental state is essential, and which thus forms part of a meditative practice and a way of not just representing but also altering the mindset of individuals. Similarly chess has logical underpinnings and requires a clarity of thinking which has made it attractive to physicists such as Dirac, Einstein, Hawking and many other less well known scientists, some of whom became chess champions or grand masters.

While no society on Earth has had its hierarchy as intricately intertwined with a single game as examples such as Velda and Azad in fiction, some have come close. Expertise in the strategic board game Go was famously considered one of the crucial skills for aristocrats and members of the civil service in China in the medieval period (although admittedly I haven't found an authoritative source for this), and so proficiency in the game could indeed enable one to modify one's social status (albeit alongside other proficiencies). In a more recent example, various government agencies including the UK's GCHQ and the CIA in the US have published problem-solving puzzles in a bid to identify candidates for recruitment. It is perhaps natural that authors have used the framework of science fiction to take such formalised or game-based systems of advancement and extrapolate them to a logical extreme.

However anthropology and the study of human cultures aren’t the only sciences which have engaged with the principles of game play. Game Theory is now a large and well-established area of mathematics, addressing the analysis of strategic decision making. Building on earlier analysis of competitive board games, John von Neumann and others in the mid twentieth century reframed this as a fundamental mathematics with relevance to everything from politics and economics to systems science and computing. The theory formalises the cost and benefits associated with decision making, along with the probabilities and risks associated with it. Game theory itself has been massively influential on science fiction, with a recent well-known example being found in Cixin Liu’s Three Body Problem (novel, 2006) and The Dark Forest (novel, 2008), in which the cost and benefit of encouraging interactions between alien species and the wider galaxy are weighed up.

The idea that humans will ever play games with aliens, and that many and varied species will view competitive games as a spectator sport, also reveals implicit assumptions regarding the cultural structure, worldview and priorities of other species. Human beings are capable of extrapolating the consequences of their actions both in the immediate (tactical) sense and long term (strategically). They are prepared to take risks, and short term losses, in the interests of large ultimate rewards, although the extent of risk, and the extent to which the risk and reward are personal as opposed to affiliated with a team, side or society, vary enormously. Human societies also tend to be hierarchical, and this is often reflected in game play where the sacrifice of some pieces, territory or resources to protect those of more importance (such as a king or queen) is often a key element. An alien species in which every individual was sacred might not engage in games of sacrifice, while one in which individuals are not valued might play pyrrhic games without flinching. One without conceptions of property might not engage with games of territory or acquisition. One without conceptions of violence, or from a society without scarcity, might be equally baffled. One whose timescales or balance between tactical and strategic thinking differs substantially might prove unable to play against humans, or have games which prioritise other skills. And all of this pre-supposes that the human tendency towards abstraction, which casts a battlefield or a way of life onto a small board using representative tokens, is in some way mirrored in mentalities which develop through different environmental pressures and in different circumstances.

Even pre-supposing game play as a facet of intelligent sentience, as we would recognise it, the idea of not just national or city-state cultures but entire species being defined by a single game envisages a good deal more social coherence than the human species has shown to date. Game play in science fiction, and particularly game-obsessed cultures in SF, nonetheless serves to highlight the degree to which an understanding of the historical drivers and worldview of a culture are represented in its games. It extrapolates from the use of game analysis as a cultural and psychological tool on Earth to suggest worlds which are both familiar and very different to our own. It also suggests ways in which other aliens may interpret our own cultures and logical structures.

In Star Trek: DS9’s “Move Along Home”, while the crew are trying to understand their situation trapped in the game, Julian Bashir speculates:

 “Perhaps they’re giving us some sort of behavioural test? Like a laboratory rodent who must work his way out of a maze?”

While the reason for the game of Chula in this episode is ostensibly purely recreational, there are undeniably elements of exactly such a test - in this first contact scenario, the Wadi are trying to understand the degree of risk and loss acceptable to the newly-encountered species, as well as understanding their conceptions of fair play. Similar game-as-behavioural-test scenarios can be found in many places elsewhere in science fiction, from other Star Trek episodes to worthiness tests such as those in Out There Where the Big Ships Go and The Last Starfighter (film, 1984).

 Ultimately, we are far from certain whether other life can exist elsewhere in the Universe, let alone intelligent life. If sentiences we would recognise as such do exist, we cannot be sure that they would engage in the recreational or formalised abstractions we know as games. However in any species that makes decisions beyond immediate impulse actions, game theory analysis must to some extent apply, giving us a window into interpreting their priorities and values. In the meantime, games and game theory continue to shed a light on the immense diversity of our own cultures and interactions. Perhaps, after all, our own actions are no more than moves on the great chessboard of life.