Play it online with this free implementation from Alex Galloway's Radical Software Group:
http://r-s-g.org/kriegspiel/
[from Simulacrum 28] A Game of War cannot be judged purely on its merits as a conflict simulation, at least in the sense that we understand the term. A Game of War has a dual personality, one intended by the designer and one conferred on it by others. Note: The approved English title of Debord’s book is A Game Of War. It appears as many variants in reviews, including The Game of War and, simply, Game of War. Debord himself used the different names seemingly interchangeably. The game itself, on which his book was based, has also been referred to as Kriegspiel or The Kriegspiel by Dubord. They all relate to the same game and book.
Guy Debord invented A Game of War (Le Jeu de la Guerre) in the 1950s and patented it in 1965. He wrote that it “embodied the dialectic of all conflict”. He was fascinated by it, and saw it as an abstraction and perfection of war. Some commentators now go so far as to say it was his most autobiographical work, though it has received considerably less attention than his films and writings. After the May 1968 Revolution (aka the Paris Student Movement), Debord and his wife, Alice Becker-Ho, left Paris for a remote French village. Debord devoted much of the rest of his life to refining and promoting A Game of War which he came to regard as his most important project. He was greatly assisted by funding from Gérard Lebovici, with whom he shared a paradoxical partnership for nearly 15 years, the Capitalist and the Marxist. In 1977, the pair founded the Society of Strategic and Historical Games, and published Debord’s rules, as well as commissioning a craftsman to make four or five sets in copper and silver. The version that finally reached market in 1987 in book form included a blow-by-blow commentary on a match between Debord and his wife. Gallimard reissued A Game of War in 2006. Atlas Press recently released A Game of War in a new (first) English edition translated by Donald Nicholson-Smith, a translator Debord appears to have trusted. In other related news, Anarchy magazine sells a handmade version of the game, and sponsors the Kriegspiel Blog, as a place where anarchists who are interested in war games can get together and discuss them. The site draws its name and inspiration from Guy Debord’s game. As if that weren’t enough, the Radical Software Group and Alexander Galloway have developed a Java version of A Game of War. The game is currently in limbo, though, as Guy Debord’s estate has filed a cease-and-desist order against RSG, claiming infringement of copyright. But Debord was philosophically against copyright during his lifetime, or at least subsequent to 1965 when he copyrighted his game. One wonders if this is just another one of those conundrums that Marxists either seem to thrive on or fail to recognize.
For Debord, this wasn’t just a game, it was a guide to how people should live their lives within Fordist society (the capitalism of the Fordist era, named after Henry Ford, was kinder, gentler and more predictable than its Victorian predecessor; the Fordist era was an era of regulation, income equality, state planning and stability). By playing this Clausewitz simulator, as it has been referred to by others if not by Debord himself, revolutionary activists could learn how to fight and win against the oppressors of spectacular society (Debord’s 1967 book, The Society of the Spectacle, attacked a cultural ‘spectacle’ in which consumer items and pat images had replaced social relationships). “I succeeded, a long time ago, in presenting the basics of [war] on a rather simple board game,” Debord wrote in 1989. “The surprises of this kriegspiel seem inexhaustible; and I fear that this may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value.”
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