Mined Quarries™ #012
The Art of “Four Forms™”: A New Strategy Game Based on Sun Tzu, part 5, The Tragedy of Strategy in Games
The Art of “Four Forms™”: A New Strategy Game Based on Sun Tzu, part 5, The Tragedy of Strategy in Games
This is supposed to be part 5 of a multi-part blog series chronicling how I created a zero-sum hand game called “Four Forms™” to teach my sons (9 and 11) some strategic thinking and concepts from Sun Tzu’s Art of War.
Author’s Note: Thanks for reading the last blog. My attempt at rigor was nearly undone by Substack’s clunky tools (or maybe just my ham-handed approach). Moving on.
Four Forms™ Playtesting Update:
Playtesting Four Forms™ has been a fiasco. Lesson learned: market research should come before creating a full-fledged product. My sons, the unwilling guinea pigs, are too busy with summer break to humor their dad’s “Rock, Paper, Scissors” game. We haven’t even conquered Level 1 yet, let alone recorded tutorials.
So, the playtesting blog is on hold. Instead, let’s dive back into the themes.
Let’s Recap.
Four Forms™ offers a twist on thinking about and applying Sun Tzu’s Art of War. Designed not just as a game, but as a crucible for forging cunning, it serves as a martial arts dojo for the strategic mind.
In the Four Forms™ arena, players learn and master strategic principles through increasingly complex and chaotic “battles”, all through intuitive hand gestures – the Fist, the Palm, the Spear, and the Claw – which teach the language of one-on-one combat reminiscent of Sun Tzu’s time. Commands like “Breach!” and “Hold!”, twists on tactical orders, seemingly express strategic intentions.
As players progress through the levels, the game throws in tactical twists like “Feints” and “Shadows” requiring them to anticipate and counter their opponent’s next move with insight and agility. This cerebral dance, a blend of structured lessons with on-the-fly adaptations, enhances proficiency with each engagement, ensures that no two games are ever the same, and encourages a depth of strategic decision-making that becomes more dynamic with time.
Reaching the final level transcends mere game progression. It’s a journey into the depths of stratego-philosophical contemplation. My goal with Four Forms™ is to inspire strategic thinking fit for Sun Tzu’s legacy (and beyond).
“Four Forms, choose one!”
Strategic Decline: A Cultural Catastrophe
The day I published the last blog, I stumbled upon a grim revelation from Quantic Foundry: “Gamers Have Become Less Interested in Strategic Thinking and Planning”
For over nine years, strategy games and strategic elements have plummeted in popularity, with 67% of players now favoring more mindless, reactive gameplay instead of “long-term thinking, planning, and careful decision-making”.
The article blames two culprits: the long-term erosion of attention spans and the cognitive carnage wrought by social media’s relentless “negativity, polarization, intrusiveness, and emotional manipulation”. This echoes Canadian philosopher, “father of media studies”, and hepcat, Marshall McLuhan’s incisive observation in The Medium is the Massage back in the 1960’s.
“All media work us over completely. They are so pervasive in their personal, political, economic, aesthetic, psychological, moral, ethical, and social consequences that they leave no part of us untouched, unaffected, unaltered. The medium is the massage. Any understanding of social and cultural change is impossible without a knowledge of the way media work as environments.
All
media
are extensions of
some human faculty— psychic
or physical.”
<How long have humans been cyborgs?>
In our media-saturated, pollutant-spewing mini-dystopia chronic stress erodes cognitive flexibility, pushing us toward rigid, habitual responses and much worse1. Interestingly, research demonstrates that authoritarian environments have similar effects, fostering a mindset where people’s thinking becomes more rigid and less adaptable.
Strategically speaking, this is what being formless, using stratagems, causing chaos, and using surprise attacks are partly designed to do to the mind of the opponent, making it inflexible, predictable, and primed for losing…
“Know your opponent…” Sun Tzu reminds us.
Though writing about his own time, McLuhan foresaw our own
“Age of Anxiety,”
where technological and cultural upheaval leaves us in a perpetual state of confusion and despair. Currently, this “age” can be captured by neologisms like “Technostress” and “Infodemic” (terms dealing with the negative psychological impacts of digital technology), “Alt-Right” and “Wokeness” (terms that exemplify media’s power to mobilize, polarize, and shape public discourse and facilitate collective identities), and “Surveillance Capitalism” and “All-seeing AI” (terms that capture how technology acts as an extension of human faculties and power structures that reshapes economic, social, and personal realities).
In regards to the latter two:
Pervasive media-as-environment and all that entails, then, becomes an (the?) instrument of chronic stress, demoralizing us, making us physically weak, sapping our strategic faculties, and priming us for conquest (which sounds to me like psychological warfare2 on a massive scale.)
In this bleak landscape, Four Forms™ is a rolling fortress with a spiked cowcatcher and blaring fog lights. It dares players to unplug from their media-induced stupor, sharpen their wits, and embody the cunning of true strategists.
“Prepare your mind, playa. The battlefield beckons.”
Stay Tuned for our Next Edition (Something about Strategy, Games, or Playtesting)!
See “Editorial: The Impact of Stress on Cognition and Motivation”, but if you don’t want to read it from the article, here goes: “chronic stress usually leads to maladaptive responses in various organs and systems, activating pathophysiological mechanisms such as psychiatric disturbances, neurologic disorders, cardiovascular diseases and metabolic dysregulation”. Nasty stuff.
Bonus:
While the specific pathways and mechanisms may differ from those seen with chronic stress, excessive sugar consumption—often hidden in ultra-processed foods and prevalent in carb-heavy diets—also contributes to various health issues. These include psychiatric and neurological disorders such as depression, mood disorders, and neurodegenerative diseases; cardiovascular risk factors like obesity, inflammation, high triglycerides, diabetes, and elevated blood pressure; and metabolic problems such as insulin resistance, weight gain, and increased abdominal fat. Equally nasty stuff.
The food and drinks that are not ultra-processed, carb-heavy, and/or high in sugars include (drum roll, please…) some of humanity’s oldest foods:
Water (natural, fresh, filtered)
Plain milk, plain yogurt, real butter, ghee butter, & hard cheeses
Fresh or plain frozen vegetables, particularly the non-starchy kinds, like leafy greens, broccoli, spinach, carrots, etc. (preferably organic & local grown)
Fresh or plain frozen fruit like berries, lemons, limes, tomatoes, & avocadoes (preferably organic & local grown)
Fresh meats like grass-fed beef, fish like wild salmon, free-range poultry and eggs (“nature’s multivitamin”), and raw nuts
Salt
Olive oil & coconut oil
For me, preparing the “heart-mind” isn’t only mental and intellectual. My “food pyramid” now looks much different than the one below. <I didn’t want to write a whole blog about this so I snuck it in. Sue me.>
Interestingly, Boorman calls Sun Tzu a “Prophet and Pioneering Theorist of Information Warfare”, which is closely linked to Psychological Warfare.