Ultimate Checkers Showdown: Zombies vs. Sheep!

The thing I want you to have in your head at this moment is the vision of a checkerboard, but instead of little flat discs for pieces one side is using little sheep and the other side is using little zombies.

Now, how do you play a game? I'm going to contend for the sake of clarity that "play" is to do something in a limited abstraction of reality as a means of limiting risk while the "game" is a wholly-defined interactive structure which, as an effect of being wholly-defined, usually doesn't reflect reality. Put together, the wholly-defined nature of a game allows people to know what they're risking -- often nothing more than a bit of time and a bruised ego -- when they choose to play a game. Boundary conditions would be playing against undefined conditions -- the imagination-fueled exercise of cats, for example, or pursuing political gambits, or playing the stock market -- while not every game is entirely play -- a casino, for example, is full of games that compulsive gamblers cannot play because the compulsive gamblers have failed to limit their risks.

On a related note, Steven Johnsoon has made a case against Candyland that I'm particularly keen on. I suspect that I appreciate his line of reasoning for the same reason I'm increasingly disenchanted with conventional games as the ever-revisionist World of Warcraft becomes the unavoidable point of modern comparison, with "ever-revisionist" being where the game fails -- as soon as I became good at the game (in particular, playing a Paladin) the rules were changed and I had to, in effect, play the same old game with a new set of rules. Thus, even ignoring the addicts, its game-ness is called into question because the massive revisions to the rules make it impossible to say that it's clearly defined what is in the game. Warhammer Online doesn't have this problem per se (while new things are being added into the game, the game isn't being redefined to the point of new players seeing utterly separate rules from what original players were using), but instead runs into a problem of not being adequately abstracted such that the process of winning an objective simply comes down to a question of "does one side have more players and determination at this point in time?" -- there's scant value in being the only player trying to defend a keep.

But it's not like either not-a-game is difficult to "win" per se, as feeling successful is as nebulous online as it is in real life. Which brings us back to the case against Candyland, which can be summed up as "reliance on chance at the expense of rewarding skill makes for a non-compelling game." Or, put another way: just because you've limited your risk in a state of play doesn't mean that you want to cede control of what little you did risk. This is why skilled play, with games like chess or checkers or, heck, maybe even Starcraft (and not ignoring basic building blocks, particularly of the Lego variety) persists even against the cultural juggernaut that is Candyland of Warcraft.

So going back to the checkerboard with zombies on one side and sheep on the other. Yeah. I've never been big on checkers -- it always felt like the illiterate preschool version of chess. There is skill, yes, but not nearly so much of it because there simply aren't that many permutations since everything behaves the same way. And the icons on the board reflect this: the brainless zombies (with only enough feral capacity to need "buhRaaainsss...") would all be pursuing the practically brainless sheep in a routine and non-varying zombie shuffle. The sheep, for their part, would be shuffling around in a similar fashion, only maybe jumping away from predatory zombies or possibly clustering up for defense instead. The behavior of the zombies is effectively the same as the behavior of sheep within the confines of the game, even if an outside observer would say that the motivations are different: "Buh-Rains" instead of "Baa-Rains".

And this is where the checkerboard turns political. Now I'd like to refrain from comparing Republicans to zombies and Democrats to sheep in pretty much the same way I'd like to have a fund in my 401k that was a shining example of what to invest in by having a strong mix of forward-thinking and dividend paying stocks along with innovative small caps with huge amounts of growth potentials. But don't focus on that. Instead, check out Jonathan Krohn, a 14-year old "conservative" pundit that spoke at CPAC this year. Go clicky if you're not familiar with it -- I'll wait. ... Good, got all that? So in the same way that I'm not comparing Republicans to zombies and Democrats to sheep, I'm going to skip over this kid's HumptyDumptying (see Wharburton's Thinking from A to Z) which is the entire basis of his celebrity, avoid mentioning that kids advocating tax cuts is mere meme perpetuation, and instead stick on the point that when I was 14, I wasn't so bright either. Which I suppose is good in that at least they're not Ivy League-elitists... but on the flip side, has he even graduated from High School?

Regardless he's a big-shot speaker at this convention, telling them things that they don't want to disagree with despite the fact that he clearly hasn't a clue as to what he's saying. (I may write up a short diatribe on the subject for the use of debaters needing to argue against these points, but the crux of it would be that there is a psychotic break in wanting limited government on domestic issues and unlimited government on foreign issues, since the real lesson of 9/11 was that there are no foreign issues, there are just domestic issues in other jurisdictions. Besides, on the topic of "personal responsibility," kid, who drove you to this speaking engagement?) And the crowd hails his declarations as if those vile liberals are in favor of Death, Slavery and the Pursuit of Misery who tout Stalinism as a high ideal. As if there is some kind of clash in terms of the ideals of Americans at the 2-minutes-of -grandstanding level.

It's like looking at the pieces on a checkerboard and saying "Sheep don't eat brains, and that's good!" or "Zombies are a higher-evolved form of, um, life... and that's better!" while blithely ignoring that they're just going to go about jumping over each other in attempts to win the game even though, there's not much to win. But in politics, the winner always increases their power to alter the nation in the way that they see fit according to how they think they can make things good. But it's not like the pieces win the game, anyway -- there are players and one will win and one will lose.

I like to envision a goat as controlling the sheep pieces. As an all-consuming eating machine with attitude, I tend to think of goats as being fully aware of the fullness of chaos throughout the world -- and they respond to the chaos by trying to align everything within their sphere of influence, with "eat it" being a reasonable response to things that can't be otherwised aligned. On the zombie side of the board, I think a mummy would be an appropriate player. Nothing says "Old Money" like ancient Egyptian royalty that was buried with it so they could take it with them into the afterlife, and nothing says "conservative" like following a ritual process of organ removal and controlled dismemberment for improved corpse preservation, followed by bindings that inhibit future physical movement (but not the pronoucement of curses on looters). The goat should be wearing a leather jacket; the mummy should wear a smoking jacket. The ritualistic undead can't understand the cagey animal and vice versa, even though they both value winning and their pieces, within the abstraction of the game, all behave in the exact same fashion.

And that's the ultimate checkers showdown I want you to think about: A mummy versus a goat, moving zombies against sheep.