By displaying our replica of The Game of War in the Pump House gallery, Class Wargames was making its contribution to the rediscovery of this forgotten icon of 20th century avant-garde art. In this first phase of our
campaign of ludic subversion, our activities were devoted to upholding the Situationist banner of cultural rebellion. For the knowledgeable visitors to the show in Battersea Park, Debord’s gold-and-silver board and pieces were clearly in the lineage of the earlier Modernist artworks of Rodchenko, Duchamp, Giacometti, Saito, Ono, Maciunas and Kirby. Yet, paradoxically, the inclusion of The Game of War within
The Institute of Psychoplasmics exhibition had required the temporary
prevention of its primary purpose: enabling two sides to engage in simulated combat against each other. Inside the gallery space, the pieces were laid out on the board in the starting positions for the match in Becker-Ho and Debord’s eponymous book.46 However, there were
no chairs for North and South to sit at the table and begin playing the game. Should any curious visitor try to pick up the pieces, they would quickly discover that they were firmly stuck to the board with museum wax. If spotted, they risked the embarrassment of the curatorial staff scolding them for touching the exhibits. When placed inside the Pump House gallery, The Game of War became a museum object. As with one of Giacometti’s ludic sculptures, there was no next move.
There was poignancy in this immobility. Back in 1977, Debord had set up a company with his publisher Gérard Lebovici to manufacture and distribute The Game of War: Les Jeux Stratégiques et Historiques. Like Duchamp marketing his Chess sets and Maciunas selling Fluxboxes by mail order, these two conspirators embarked on a publicity campaign to promote their first product. The four hand crafted metal sets which featured in the iconic photographs from In Girum Imus Nocte were commissioned. Debord and Becker-Ho wrote their book of the game. The rules were published in both French and English. Plans were made to manufacture cheap cardboard copies of The Game of War. Debord was convinced that his company had a potential best-seller on its hands
which would soon join Chess, Draughts and Bridge as a game played in the cafés, clubs and homes of the more proletarian and bohemian neighbourhoods. Everyone could be a player of The Game of War.47
Then, on 5th March 1984, Lebovici was murdered in a Mafia-style hit
by an unknown assassin in a Paris underground car park. Deprived of its generous patron, the promotional campaign for The Game of
War went into terminal crisis. Debord even stopped showing his films
in France and withdrew his books from publication in protest at the brutal murder of his friend.48 On that fateful evening in 1984, The
Game of War had lost its key player – and was almost forgotten for the
next few decades. When Class Wargames’ facsimile was put on show in the Pump House gallery, the frozen pieces of the 1977 gold-and- silver set became a disturbing memorial to those harsher times in which Debord’s game had been invented.
In spring 2008, the gold-and-silver pieces of our replica were temporarily immobilised in The Institute of Psychoplasmics exhibition for a dialectical purpose: seducing the Pump House’s audience into making the next move for themselves. Intrigued visitors could purchase the recently published English translation of Debord and Becker-Ho’s book with its cardboard game in the gallery shop – or download RSG’s unauthorised computer version.49 Participation not contemplation
should take precedence when appreciating this avant-garde artwork. A year earlier in spring 2007, Class Wargames’ first attempts to play The
Game of War had used a homebrew board and pieces made from my
early-1970s teenage collection of 16th century Hapsburg and Ottoman
toy soldiers. Inspired by the discovery of its rules in the back of Len Bracken’s biography, we’d come together to find out whether this ludic experiment was worth investigating.50 By carefully studying the
moves of Debord’s match with Becker-Ho in their book, we eventually worked out the formal structure of this ritualised combat. Much to our
47 See Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, A Game of War, page 7; and Alex Galloway,
‘Debord’s Nostalgic Algorithm’.
48 See Guy Debord, Considerations on the Assassination of Gérard Lebovici.
49 See Guy Debord and Alice Becker-Ho, A Game of War; and Radical Software Group,
Kriegspiel.
surprise and delight, the members of Class Wargames enjoyed playing
The Game of War.51
In a serendipitous coincidence with the imperialist demonology of the 2000s, the recycled Hapsburg and Ottoman figurines of our home-made set mimicked the conflict between the Christian West and the Muslim East in the US government’s War on Terror. Taking inspiration from this DIY version, we wondered whether the imminent 40th anniversary of the May ’68 French Revolution could be celebrated
by re-imagining Debord’s game as a conflict between protesters and police on the streets of Paris. For the Left’s pieces, infantry would be represented as workers, cavalry as students and artillery as rioters with Molotov cocktails. The mounted general had to be Guy Debord and, for the marching general, Daniel Cohn-Bendit – the instigator of the student protests at Nanterre University that had sparked off this uprising – would be a good choice. For the forces of reaction, the remix was also obvious: infantry as street cops, cavalry as riot police, artillery as tear gas grenadiers, the mounted general as French President Charles de Gaulle and the marching general as his prime minister Georges Pompidou. With the pieces sorted, the board’s terrain features could easily be given a Paris 1968 makeover. The fortresses would be turned into street barricades, the mountains into apartment blocks, the passes into alleyways and the arsenals into television centres or newspaper headquarters. Enthused, we contacted Mark Copplestone – one of England’s top figurine designers – to find out whether he’d be interested in making the pieces for this new set as a member of the Class Wargames collective.52 The May ‘68 version of The Game of War
would be the must-have souvenir of the 40th anniversary of the almost
revolution of the baby boomer generation.
Fortunately, Rod Dickinson had a much better idea. Around the cover of the 2006 Gallimard edition of Le Jeu de la Guerre was a purple band with a vivid colour photograph of Debord’s 1977 set design. He insisted in our group meetings that Class Wargames had to build its
51 In contrast, as a warning to all leftist games designers, the admirable politics of
Bertell Ollman’s Class Struggle didn’t compensate for its dull play.
own replica of this iconic version of The Game of War. Rod had acquired international artistic recognition for his re-enactments of unsettling moments in recent history: the 1978 Jonestown mass suicide; the 1993 Waco massacre; and the 1961 Milgram experiment.53 Respecting
this experience, the rest of the collective was quickly convinced by his argument that making a May ’68 remix of The Game of War would be a mistake. Class Wargames should instead focus its attention upon Debord and Becker-Ho playing their illustrative contest in the Auvergne. The artistic investigation of this special historical moment required the construction of a faithful facsimile of the 1977 set design.
The Game of War was meant to be played with its original board and
pieces.
By staging re-enactments, contemporary artists showed how much they’d learnt from the 1960s avant-garde’s happenings and performances. Like Fluxus and Kirby, they also invited the audience to participate in the making of the artwork. Taking inspiration from the lively subculture of hobbyists who devoted their spare time to historical and fantasy role-playing, the goal of these avant-garde artists was to aestheticise – and subvert – this fascination with reliving the past.54
By witnessing for themselves the actors in The Milgram Experiment inflicting apparently dangerous electric shocks on another human being, the audience at Rod Dickinson’s 2002 recreation understood how they too might have succumbed to obeying immoral orders when bullied by authority figures. Empathy intensified not only the personal experience of the artwork, but also the political resonance of this 1960s American psychologist’s research.55
A year earlier, on 17th June 2001, Jeremy Deller mobilised both veterans
of the 1984–5 British miners’ strike and members of re-enactment societies for a participatory performance of The Battle of Orgreave. By reliving together this decisive confrontation in the Tory government’s
53 For more details on these projects, see Rod Dickinson’s website.
54 See Inke Arns and Gabriele Horn, History Will Repeat Itself; and Sven Lütticken,
Life, Once More.
55 See Rod Dickinson, ‘The Milgram Re-enactment’; and Steve Rushton, The Milgram
war against the organised working class, both its creators and onlookers affirmed that their own collective memory of these dramatic times was much more accurate than the media-promoted official accounts of this historical turning-point. In Deller’s happening, those who’d been there at the original battle of Orgreave on the 18th June 1984 were joined in
a common experience by those who’d taken part in its re-enactment 17 years later.56 The avant-garde artwork now meant – most wonderfully
– a public celebration of the Yorkshire coalfield communities’ lost alternative to neoliberal globalisation: the live action role-playing game as the possibilities of the past challenging the limits of the present.57
With Rod Dickinson as a member, Class Wargames soon learnt how to make its own contribution to re-enactment art. The 2008 match at
The Institute of Psychoplasmics exhibition was followed by further public
performances of The Game of War in other gallery spaces, including the Victoria & Albert Museum in London and the State Hermitage Museum in St. Petersburg. Learning from these experiences, Class Wargames became determined to involve the audience more in our events. Equipped with travelling versions of its board and pieces, we began organising participatory contests of Debord’s ludic invention during 2009 at art venues and educational institutions across Europe and in Brazil.58 The Game of War had to be experienced as a DIY
artwork. Built by Lucy Blake, our website also encouraged people to try playing Debord’s game for themselves by providing its rules, board designs and other background information. Over the summer of 2009, with funding from the Arts Council of England, Class Wargames next completed a short film directed by Ilze Black explaining the origins and principles of The Game of War.59 After its launch in September at
Furtherfield’s HTTP gallery in London, the collective’s campaign to
56 See Jeremy Deller and Mike Figgis, The Battle for Orgreave; and Jeremy Deller, The
English Civil War Part II. For eyewitness accounts of the vicious police repression
against the striking miners, see Dave Douglass, Ghost Dancers; and Jim Coulter, Susan Miller and Martin Walker, State of Siege.
57 Revealingly, one of Deller’s goals in staging The Battle of Orgreave performance
was to politicise the usually apolitical hobby of historical re-enacting, see Matthew Higgs and Jeremy Deller, ‘In Conversation’, page 190.
58 For photographs of these performances, see the Events 2008 and Events 2009
sections of the Class Wargames website.
promote Debord’s game was reinvigorated. By combining screenings of the film with participatory contests, Class Wargames received a warm welcome on its 2009–11 European tour: Crash-Crush in Rotterdam,
Wunderbar at the Baltic in Gateshead, Transmediale 10 in Berlin, The Futurological Congress in Lviv and many other interesting venues.60
During this first stage of our campaign of ludic mischief, our role at these events was to enable the members of the audience to turn Situationist theory into ludic practice. For a brief moment of time, the players of The Game of War were the makers of avant-garde art. In these early years of the project, Class Wargames used performances, exhibitions, film, leaflets, xenographs, club nights, radio shows and social media to evangelise for the playing of The Game of War in its 1977 analogue design. The RSG digital version was a useful training tool, but this computerised contest lacked the tactile pleasures of the original version. Unlike in the 1990s, now that people were spending so much time looking at screens at work and in the home, there was no longer anything artistically adventurous about turning his physical invention into a virtual object. Best of all, by moving the gold-and- silver pieces across its board, the 21st century players of our twice-size
facsimile were directly connected with the famous photos of Debord and Becker-Ho competing with each other over thirty years earlier. Like
The Milgram Experiment and The Battle of Orgreave, Class Wargames’
recreation of The Game of War was a public invitation for people to relive an evocative moment from the recent past for themselves. Debord and Becker-Ho had used this version of the board and pieces in their Auvergne hideaway. By playing with the 1977 analogue set, contemporary admirers of the Situationist International weren’t just participating in the continuation of this transitory communal artwork. More importantly, as we would investigate more deeply in the next two phases of our campaign of ludic subversion, they were also taking their first lesson in the political and military teachings of The Game of War. By touring with its replicas of the 1977 set, the members of Class Wargames had committed themselves to realising the most subversive ambition of re-enactment art: enabling the collective exploration of
60 For the photographs of these events, see the relevant years in the Events section of
‘… the relevance of what happened in the past for the here and now.’61
In the early-21st century, The Game of War was a memory of the mid-
20th century rebirth of the cultural avant-garde. More than fifty years
on, Situationism still provided the tactical manual for today’s leftfield artists: media outrages, appropriated material, urban interventions and user-generated content. In this first stage of Class Wargames’ campaign of ludic subversion, the players of Debord’s game were able to return to the times of the group’s founders who combined these subversive cultural techniques together for the first time. By moving its pieces across the board, they briefly became Debord and Becker-Ho in the mid-1970s playing each other in their Auvergne cottage. During these matches, they could experience The Game of War as a transitory co- operative artwork which embodied these teachings of Situationism. In its public performances, Class Wargames’ task was to help their participants to carry out this transformation of cultural theory into avant-garde practice for themselves. Everyone who played The Game of
War was a Situationist.
As long as these ephemeral contests lasted, our ludic re-enactments became collective celebrations of Debord as the master tactician of leftfield art. In this first phase of our campaign of ludic subversion, our vital mission was to remind contemporary radicals of how much they were indebted to the very special moment in the late-1950s when the European avant-garde had redefined its identity. Moving analogue pieces across the board of The Game of War was an excellent method of understanding this original version of today’s cultural dissidence. Players could discover for themselves how the expertise of the most advanced avant-garde art movement of the May ‘68 generation had been materialised in its simulated combat between North and South. Playing The Game of War was a DIY lesson in Situationist history. As Debord repeatedly emphasised, the perpetuation of spectacular domination depended upon the enforced loss of memory of what had already been experienced. Studying the history of the International’s artistic adventures didn’t just reveal the inspiration for The Game of
War. More importantly, knowledge of what had taken place in this past
moment in time explained why the avant-garde tactics of Situationism
still hadn’t lost all of their critical edge in the early-21st century. As
the leitmotif of this first stage of our campaign of ludic subversion, Class Wargames’ re-enactments of The Game of War paid homage to the unique moment when the codification of these techniques was the smartest response to the emerging Fordist methods of social control which still shaped the modern epoch of neoliberal globalisation. The lessons of history were there to be learnt on the game board.