The Great Game: Recent Episodes
Shir Hever
The Great Game is a bi-weekly podcast on the intersection between games and politics. It covers games which have political elements, as well as the gaming elements in contemporary political events around the world. In every episode we will focus on a specific topic and examine it from one of two directions: either we will focus on a certain game or a group of similar games to discuss their political significance, implications and message, or we will focus on a certain political event and discuss it through various games which use themes from that event as a game element. In many of the episodes (but not all) we will have interviews with gamers, game designers, and political experts.
This episode is the second on game theory, a field of study within Economics. The episode deals with real-life applications of game theory and how it affects economic policy. Make sure you listen past the credits!
This episode is the first on game theory, a field of study within Economics. The episode deals with real-life applications of game theory and how it affects economic policy. We also discuss the Prisoner’s Dilemma and the tit-for-tat strategy.
In this episode we speak with Shterny and Levi about the games which they played, growing up in Hassidic ultra-Orthodox Jewish communities. Shterny and Levi reminisce how, in a very strict society with firm gender roles and conservative values, simple games offered a space for making autonomous choices and relying on luck.
Frogwares Studio founder Wael Amr speaks about the origins of his company and how the political reality in Ukraine formed the decision to make detective games based on the Sherlock Holmes stories. Frogwares continues to produce games in besieged Kiev and through its games it tries to send a message about the importance of truth, morality and self-doubt. This episode’s promotional picture contains photos distributed by mvs.gov.ua under the CC Attribution 4.0 International license.
Do strategy games sanitize the horrors of war? We speak with Dr. Jeremy Wildeman about the games Axis and Allies, Risk, Nobunaga’s Ambition and Hearts of Iron 2. All complex strategy games (two board games and two video games) which simulate strategic decisions in war on a grand scale. How do such games affect the way we think about war and how do recent events in Afghanistan and Ukraine are described by people who have learned to see the world as a big strategy game?
What is the connection between Pokémon Go and the Palestinian Nakba (catastrophe) of 1948? We speak with Lia Tarachansky, a scholar, journalist and activist about augmented reality (AR) and how it can be used in games to create a layer of information that can only be seen by those who play the game, and how this shared ability to see something can create a community and convey a political message. We also speak about the Kairos Blanket Exercise, a game which was developed to teach the colonizing of Turtle Island, today known as Canada.
Although women and girls are playing more computer and video games than ever before, gaming companies are not keeping up and fail at creating enough games intended for women and girls. If the demand exists and companies want to make money, how come they neglect this growing consumer base? And what does it mean to appeal to a certain gender within a game?
In this episode we speak with Tal Hever about the old board game Diplomacy and how it represents concepts of cooperation, competition, honesty and betrayal. Why is this a game for players who like to lose, and what does this have to do with the fact that so few games were made about World War 1.
In the second part of the conversation with Hadas Leonov about the game Sid Meier Civilization, we talk about the way that the artificial intelligence creates simulations of real-life political events. We focus on diplomacy and (nuclear) war and also examine how a strategy computer game reflects the beliefs of the game designers about politics and religion, as well as how they imagine their audience will respond to these beliefs.
In the first part of the discussion between Hadas Leonov and Shir Hever, we discuss the political elements which are embedded into the strategy computer game series “Civilization” and how these elements are promoted through the game mechanics, without being openly stated.
In the first episode of the podcast “The Great Game” we talk about the meaning of games in general and political games specifically. We discuss the U.S. withdrawal from Afghanistan and how that war has been represented in various kinds of games.