As scheduled and promoted, I played Amerika at the Happening, with Claudio, David, Laura, and Hans. If you donated to help the event, then you have the brief manuscript we used to play, set in this region of northern California. It’s far north of my hometown, but I have considerable experience there in two pulses, as a little kid in the late 1960s-early 70s, and as a teen in the late 70s-early 80s.

Here’s Sapphire Lake in the Trinity Alps, which I recall quite well:

I played with Claudio, Laura, David, and Hans, and I relied on Hans a lot for his own experience in the general Left Coast culture. Here’s the file or “rulebook” if you want to call it that (the same thing received by donors to the Happening):

I hope you’ll check it out. My current thoughts on a working text is to provide a baseline “militancy in the 70s” as a kind of cultural sourcebook, then a handful of modular usable pieces like this one, with the rules. (in the long run I’d like to rework both Spione and Shahida this way)

Since people are occasionally confused about setting up for play, I’ll stress here that the events of play are mandated to be some time in the middle 1970s, and that setup includes tracing an especially egregious problem of today back to that time, i.e., whatever form the economics, politics, and protests of the day were in. You can think of the people we play as being prescient enough to see it coming, i.e., given reliance on “legitimate/legal” politics, that the problem would in fact get as bad as you and I are currently experiencing it, and they consider(-ed) this to be unacceptable. I think the pamphlet does a pretty good job of summarizing the concerns for the stated region of the U.S. at that time.

Some relevant links: Breaking the Redwood Curtain, some 1970s photographs including Humboldt, Humboldt Area People’s Archive

Our little group formed as follows.

The variables across the top right are Inspiration, Experience, Action, Voice; in play, they’re called Steps because they represent four sequential events which are played more or less simultaneously.

• Pete: Scary Moral Center (Native American), living in one of the many tiny local reservations
• Lester: Old Pal, who lives up the hill in the cabin by the lake
• Suze: Scary Chick (a very local redneck woman), played by Hans, running one of the early/outlaw pot farms prefiguring today’s extensive industry
• Linda: Rebel Chick (a woman with black and white parents), played by Laura, raised in the area and connected to the academic community via her parents
• Stuart: Visionary Pal, played by me, a graduate student at Humboldt State

Although the summed values for the Steps aren’t used as procedure, they are useful to consider as a portrait for the group at the start: Inspiration 2, Experience 3, Action 3, and Voice 2, i.e., rather balanced as these things go.

We launched into a rather direct sabotage of an oil-and-gas industry-and-exploitation love-fest at the university. The Inspiration occurred during a sunny dip and picnic at Lester’s lake, well, the lake, now slated for development; the Experience occurred during a party at his cabin which turned into a confrontation between proto-yuppie bros and a pickup truck full of Pete’s friends; the Action concerned the university’s botany labs and a couple of bombs; and the Voice concerned a radio show after the event, where Linda sought to convey what the group feared and what the people, i.e., you, us, really need to do.

What I didn’t expect quite so much was the depth of emotion. It’s shown up before in playing this game, but in this case, the shift from “OK, a system, let’s try it” to a genuine little-Happening of its own seemed shamanic in its suddenness and content, as if we were actually witnessing and channeling how things were, or what happened, or what was felt. Or at least for one of us, who I hope will share a bit about it here.

Especially given that hard-fought card play did not quite manage to achieve a victory for our group, especially as a Joker was drawn in circumstances that discarded it, when it would have been a great asset for them.

I often caution against treating role-playing, and especially design, as social engineering regarding either play-functionality or messaging. I focus instead on the utility of rules toward functioning procedures and the topics of (crude term) developed or eventual themes. However, I cannot deny that Spione, Shahida, and Amerika are straightforwardly radical texts with specific positions, or more accurately, that they provide material and procedures for play itself to become a radical act.

This may seem to you like splitting hairs: the difference between radicalization and indoctrination. Obviously, the establishmentarian position is that they are absolutely and nothing but the same thing. My view is to conceive viable radicalism as not about getting to a known goal (and hence “believing” in it), but rather to shut down something quite evil and terrible which is occurring right now. Some, even many people think you can’t do the latter without at least some specific hopes for the eventual outcome, and maybe they’re right, but I maintain that the shutdown is the working state of effective radical action, and that it can easily be ruined by excitement, debate, and planning about the big eventual goal in dozens of ways. [also, cue the debate about why Occupy Wall Street floundered, in addition to its suppression; but I maintain my view that it failed to specify what it was shutting down, not that it was critically flawed because it didn’t provide a whole new economic model]

But all such concerns may be left to those who earn degrees by talking about them. The rule is that a group must disband if they are defeated twice in a row, and they may always choose to disband after a victory. Therefore, we did not finish! And as far as I can tell, everyone was afire with wrath and determined to defeat the Establishment next time.