Metagaming in Twilight Imperium and in Life

I just spent several months in the United States visiting supporters, and by my count I ended up taking 8 overnight, out of state road trips. I keep wanting to say “more road trips than I have in the rest of my life put together,” but I know that’s not true. What is true is that I have rarely traveled that much alone, especially driving by myself. I was surprised how difficult this was, because I have fond memories of a 16-hour trip I took to New Hampshire in 2018. After a much more unpleasant drive to New Hampshire in October, I reflected on what I was doing wrong this time. The conclusion? The 2018 trip was good because I was listening to NT Wright’s Gifford Lectures on Natural Theology. So I figured I would find those and listen to them again. 6 years later, they are still excellent, and I managed to work one of the 8 lectures into most of my remaining road trips.

In one of these lectures, Wright talks about the resurrection of Jesus as an event that shapes our epistemology – that is, the way we go about knowing things. This is a pretty dramatic statement; there’s not much more fundamental to your experience of life than the way you decide what is true and what isn’t. In a memorable metaphor he compares it to a college that receives a donation of a wonderful work of art. But, rather than just sticking it in a preexisting building, they decide they need to create a whole new building to house this artwork. It’s just that good. But then they realize that they actually need to reconfigure the entire campus to accommodate this new building. And in the end, the campus ends up much better – much more suited to its purpose, much more harmonious and beautiful – than before. The campus seemed to make sense before, but now it makes much more sense, because it’s been reorganized around this work of art. Believing the resurrection should change our fundamental understanding of how the world works, Wright claims, and that should in turn change how we understand the world. Given the same data as before, we reach different conclusions.

Also on these road trips, I’ve been listening to the album Deadhorse by Dirt Poor Robins. (This album was forced upon me on a 5-hour drive back from Grand Rapids in October). Dirt Poor Robins bills themselves as a “husband/wife cinematic rock duo,” and this album presents a sprawling science fiction story that touches on many themes, at least one being humanity’s misguided attempts to save itself with technological solutions. There’s an overly ambitious AI, there are automata who speak in the voices of the dead, there’s a humanity-encompassing Matrix; the book of Revelation comes up at some key points. But I also read in it a critique of science fiction as a genre. On the final track, the artists seem to be lamenting the human lack of imagination for anything beyond the material. “For us there was no land, no land beyond the edges of our outstretched hands” they sing. “Can we beggars ever understand more than our appetites demand?” Science fiction as a genre can be overly concerned with Progress – with how the march of scientific and technological advancement will change humanity and the world. As such it often restricts itself to purely material problems and solutions. But what if that misses the point? What if our technological progress is only relevant as a part of something much more profound that’s happening in history? The track – and thus the album – ends with a chant: “If you don’t know why the bell tolls, you’ll only hear the chime / If you don’t know of the language spoken you’ll only hear the rhyme.” Science fiction so rarely speaks in transcendental language, so how could it even see those purposes?

And yet I still love this genre, in most of its forms. This is illustrated as aptly as any by my (perhaps) favorite board game: Twilight Imperium.

Before I left Uganda in late 2022, I collected a few verbal commitments, should I choose to return. Two of these were from people who promised to play this game with me if I return. This requires a promise because said game is on average 10 hours long; it is not something one embarks upon lightly. Twilight Imperium is by now a classic American space opera strategy game – 25 years old, in its fourth edition, and a glad participant in many of the well-worn science fiction tropes. It has a complicated ruleset encompassing exploration, warfare, trade, and politics. You can play as hyper-intelligent fish, or the beings made of flame who used to be oppressed by said intelligent fish, or a single planet-encompassing plant, or a society of clones, or a computer virus, or Space Australia. But the brilliant thing about the game – the reason it’s fun to play even for 10 hours – is that all the rules are really just a framework for negotiation between players. That 10 hours is supremely interactive: you can’t just sit in your corner building your economy and plotting how to take everyone else down. To win, you need to find objectives that align with others and convince them to work with you, before finally making some grand move that leaves them in the dust with everyone else. You can recognize a TI player when they try to bring negotiation into other games that usually don’t work that way. (But that doesn’t mean they can’t! Really, please do tell me why I should place my Carcassonne tile here instead of there – what’s in it for me?).

But I personally appreciate Twilight Imperium because it’s provided an arena for me to learn important life lessons. Really! I’ve become more comfortable with making mistakes, acting on incomplete information, and the aforementioned arts of negotiation. But one of the most important lessons for me has been the importance of metagaming.

There are a couple definitions of “metagaming,” but the one I’m aiming for here is “The exploitation of the rules, etc. of some other game, at a higher level than simply playing the game normally; a game outside or peripheral to the actual gameplay” (Wiktionary). And really, the concept I’m trying to convey is that, when you play a game, you have goals that reside outside the game itself. “Winning isn’t everything” after all – in fact, it’s not even the most important thing. With a board game, these larger goals might include spending time with people, immersing yourself in a story or a setting or a system of rules, and creating some low-stakes drama. It could include relationship building. It could include challenging yourself with something difficult. Some people care about winning more than others, but if winning becomes the only goal you’ve violated some important social contract with the other people with whom you are playing. You become a “sore loser.”

Twilight Imperium brings this fact to an almost absurd level, since you are going to spend 10 hours on a task at which you have a pretty small chance of being successful (with an ideal game having 6 players, your chances start at roughly 16%). On top of that, in my experience there’s a point in every game in which everything goes sour and I’m sure that I’m going to lose. If winning is the only point, or even the most important point, I’m going to be miserable, and I might not make it through that part of the game. I certainly won’t play this game again. But if I care about more than winning, I can accept my rough patch, and even my eventual loss, as contributing to a higher purpose.

Now, another part of the contract you enter into when you sit down and play a game is that you’re actually going to try and win – that’s an important part of the game, after all, and it helps motivate your actions. Games in which you know you’re going to lose become less engaging. Games in which other people are obviously not trying to win can be confusing. (And one of the reasons Twilight Imperium is such a good game is that every game, after I become convinced I’m going to lose, there is without fail a point at which I regain faith in my ability to win. A lot can and does happen in 10 hours of gameplay). But especially in a game like TI, in which there’s a good element of chance in how the game plays out, remembering the real goal of the game frees you to take actions for the good of the game, rather than just for your own good. For example, if you’re playing as the Muaat and you don’t end up using your one-time ability to turn another tile into a supernova, then you’re just not stewarding the narrative potential of your faction. Even if it’s not the clearest path to success for you, you should figure out a way to make it happen. It frees you to appreciate the dynamics that are happening in the game and among the players, even if they don’t help you win. Wow, that was a well-played deal, when you got him to hand over his trade agreement in exchange for you making my system into a supernova, which you wanted to do anyway. And it frees you from despair when you see that you’re not going to accomplish something you were planning for – because, ultimately, the point isn’t achieving your in-game goals. Those perish with the end of the game, whether or not you were successful. But the story of the game, the experience you all had playing it, that’s what lasts.

Anyway, both of those two people who are going to play Twilight Imperium with me in Uganda have small kids now, but they promised and you can bet I’ll hold them to it. I think we can trick an intern into joining us and have at least four people. Four people opens up some seriously interesting negotiating. Once the shipping crate with the game arrives I’d say we’re in for some interesting space opera.

So how does this connect to Deadhorse and to N.T. Wright’s resurrection epistemology? One thing I’m picking up from N.T. Wright is that he believes the world and all the things in it are pointing to something, and that something is best understood in terms of the death and resurrection of Jesus the Christ. That, for Wright, is the narrative element that changes the entire meaning of the story – the act in history that gives history its new meaning. He suggests that we need to reinterpret the world in light of the love and suffering of God. There’s still a lot here I’m trying to understand, and Wright also cautions against looking for the God we want – perhaps “The God of the Omnis” (Omnipotent, Omniscient, etc.) – rather than the God we get, which is Jesus, crucified, and resurrected. What does it mean to reinterpret the world in light of that? What does it mean that the whole world – “all things” – “were created through Him [Jesus] and for Him. And He is before all things, and in Him all things hold together” (Colossians 1:16b-17)?

One thing it means, I think, is that there’s a deeper purpose to all my manipulation of the things of this world. If I take my role as an engineer at face value, and expect my purpose to be primarily in the technology that I develop or deploy, I’m missing the real potential for what I’m doing. It’s like playing Twilight Imperium for the win, instead of for the story. And one argument of Deadhorse is, I contend, that the stories in our lives can’t be contained by our material pursuits. It’s not enough to engineer ourselves into better, more comfortable or more stimulating ways of survival. Now that’s not to discount those things – any more than to discount the effort of winning in TI. Survival is important, and it needs to be a major goal – to deny that is to deny our humanity, and to reject a major task that God has given us to do. It’s just not the whole point.

I’d like to take a brief moment and say that transmuting these goals to the afterlife – being concerned about survival or comfort there rather than here, really just kicks the can down the road. The traditional argument is that eternal rewards are more lasting than earthly rewards. True; can’t argue with that. But for those rewards to be meaningful they need to arise out of a broader context than your or my search for comfort and security. Again, these are not bad things! It is good and right for us to seek them. But they’re still, ultimately, not the point.

So what is the point, then? Like I said, there’s still a lot I don’t understand – I’m playing around with these concepts as they come up, trying to tie the disparate threads of my thoughts together, trusting that God’s up to something but not confident that I’ve got it figured out. But I’ll submit one hypothesis here: that part of the deeper picture is being involved in this thing that Jesus was up to while He was bodily on earth, including His life, death, and resurrection. He often calls it “The Kingdom of Heaven.” His followers would refer to it with words like “reconciliation” (2 Corinthians 5:14-21), “rescue” (Colossians 1:13-14), and “citizenship” (Philippians 3:20). They consider it similar in character to the birth of a child or the creation of the world (2 Corinthians 5:17; Romans 8:18-25).

When we re-orient ourselves this way, it changes the way we see the world. And by this I mean all of the world: the physical world, our social world, the world of history, and by extension our place in all of these. Rather than some adaptive social behavior in the midst of a worldwide struggle for survival, we see a world founded in love, desperately broken, but actively being redeemed, reconciled, recreated by its Creator. This is the context in which I work to collect rainfall and groundwater data. And I’m still working this out, but I suspect it also affects how I try to understand the behavior of a bird that might visit one of my project sites.

Finally, this affects the way I live my day-to-day life. I’ve been concerned, these past three months, with setting up my material life in Uganda. I’m now at the point where I can pretty reliably feed myself, get where I need to go, and keep my environment reasonably clean (with some help). The temptation, for me, is to keep optimizing these systems. There’s some good in that – I roasted cashews for the first time last week and they  are delicious – but I also need to acknowledge that this isn’t really the point of my being here. These habits and routines are ultimately part of a larger purpose. If I focus too much on them, I lose the story of why I’m here. But if I reorient my life around the death and resurrection of Jesus, even these mundane tasks will have their glory.