I'm going to preface this review with a bit of warning: I'm going to go political within this article, and the following words are not going to be a thorough review of the games mentioned within the title. Currently I have yet to play This Guilty Land and hence a thorough review of the game would be incomplete and unrewarding both for me to write and for you to read. Hence the game review elements, as limited as they will be, will mostly focus on Meltwater, which I have played and enjoyed. If you are here as a means to simply find out if Meltwater is worth purchasing and playing, then my heartfelt recommendation is yes: this will save you from having to read my half-formed thoughts on the politics of the two games and how they handle the subject of compromise.
With the preamble dealt with, let me set the scene. Throughout the years I have always been interested in the conjunction of theme and mechanisms, which several years ago a group of fellow board game enthusiasts decided to call "conveyance". A high degree of conveyance was only possible when the actions that you perform within the game actually make you feel like the character that you are portraying. The foremost examples that we used were usually reserved for the games of Vlaada Chvatil, especially Space Alert, a game in which the interactions between the players feel very similar to the ones that you would expect within the crew of a starship beset on all sides from both natural and alien threats.
Although I think the framework of conveyance is still useful nowadays, I think it can be relatively misleading when trying to analyse games that use mechanisms as a means to relaying a message, rather than simply attempting to feel immersive within their fictional universe. This is especially true for Meltwater and This Guilty Land: the experience in both of these games is not to immerse yourself into the role of a post-apocalyptical general or an abstract concept, but to give highly charged political message about the nature of man.
I will be the first to admit that this might appear, at first, to be a quite grandiose claim. Board games are seen by many to be relatively apolitical pieces of media, but I think this actually deflects from the fact that many board games are political without necessarily attempting to be, or are even politicised by the fact that they attempt to whitewash or minimise the aspects of history that would be somewhat uncomfortable to talk about when playing a tabletop game.
Games that revolve around the creation of a medieval town (which, as an aside, I now use of an example of the creative paucity and malaise that is currently affecting the realm of euro games) usually don't focus on the politics and realities of feudal life. Games about international trade during the colonial era don't usually pay too much attention about the exploitation of native populations that allowed trade to flourish during that era. Wargames focusing on World War II don't usually try to simulate the logistics and manpower requirements of running concentration camps. I could keep going on with such examples but I think the point has been made.
This is not to say that every game should have a scathing politicised critique of the era that the theme of the game is representing, and in most situations, including such subjects could rightly be criticised for making light of subjects in a way that would be too simplified to truly make justice of a complex political situation. One example of this is the game Archipelago, which includes elements of native revolution, but does so in a badly managed way that leaves it wide open to criticism in terms of how it handles those aspects.
Yet the examples I gave two paragraphs above cannot be considered to be completely apolitical as some wish they would be. The lack of a message is a message within itself, as it creates a distorted view of the era. Although I'm not actually going to review the game in any depth, at least within the article, another Hollandspiele game, An Infamous Traffic, works well to dispel some of the simplified assumption about how trade operates within the context of the colonial and imperial era of history.
Going back to original thesis of this essay, let's analyse what I think the intended messages are of Meltwater and This Guilty Land. For me, both games try to showcase what happens when opposed groups of people are either unable to compromise, or find it impossible to reach a compromise due to irreconcilable beliefs. The "for me" at the start of the last sentence is very deliberate: even a cursory read of the wonderful developer commentary within the rulebook for This Guilty Land (which I do recommend reading if you get your hands on it), or a read through the wonderful developer diaries of Meltwater shows that to distil the messages of both games into such a simplistic framework is extremely reductionist. However, the messages regarding compromise from the two games are the ones that had the most impact for me personally.
The reason for this is the current political climate in regards to deplatforming. The arguments around this subject is that with the resurgence of extreme right wing political thoughts within the last decade, should we debate right wing ideologues in public spaces? The arguments for allowing them a platform is that when debated in such a way allows people to oppose their views and show them to either be based on false premises or that they are being argued in bad faith. The other end of the argument in favour of deplatforming says, however, that platforming them allows those movements to gain legitimacy and provides them free advertising, and that even if they appear to "lose" the debate, it is unlikely that they would be dissuaded from their beliefs (and that regardless of what is said, the people that participate in such debates against the extreme right have more to lose than to win, as explained within the alt-right playbook series of videos).
As you might have guessed, my own personal opinion on the matter leans towards the deplatforming side of the equation. The criticism towards this stance is that it curtails freedom of speech (a topic that I don't really want to discuss within this particular article), and that it shows both a failure and unwillingness to compromise with your political opponents.
This is, of course, entirely true: deplatforming does not even allow the glimmer of the possibility to compromise. But the argument is this: is compromise always a universal good? And to this I would argue that the answer is no. This is especially true in situations where, in order to compromise, you would have to create allowances for an ideology that is morally repugnant. This is as true when debating a white supremacist nowadays as it was in the 19th century when abolitionists debated slave-owners in pre-civil war era USA.
This is not to say that the two situations explained above are exactly alike. During the 1930s, some historians attempted to liken their current political turmoil to the last days of the Roman Empire, a notion that had traction during that era but was subsequently dis-proven later on. The structural and moral divisions within the US prior to the Civil War bears little resemblance to the structural and moral divisions present nowadays, but some of the themes still bear some comparison.
This Guilty Land holds, as one of its principal messages, that true compromise between the abolitionist and slave-owners was impossible and that any attempts to mollify the slave-owners just lead to a continuation of the status quo and that thus the Civil War itself was inevitable. A more thorough analysis of this is present within the interview at the end of the games' rulebook, which directly argues for all of the points above.
This argument is compelling when someone analyses the era in question: for the south, owning slaves was not only an economic system, but also a political system that allowed them to exert influence throughout the country. The era prior to the Civil War was one replete with potential compromises created and then unceremoniously ignored by southern politicians, principally exemplified by both the first and second Missouri Compromises.
One argument that can be made is that the above analysis is too based on modern sensibilities and from our current understanding that slavery is immoral, and thus that compromise is not inherently wrong if it unclear what side is seen to be morally correct. The issue with this is that even during that time there were strong moral arguments against slavery at the time by abolitionists, and that many large countries had already opposed themselves to slavery, principally the United Kingdom.
So to say that slavery at the time was accepted because people didn't know better doesn't really account for the rise of abolitionist movement, and how these movements affected the people within the US: this, to me, is most exemplified by the lyrics to "John Brown's Body", a song which was popular within the Union army at the time.
The driving point is therefore that true compromise is impossible under certain moral scenarios, and thus that any attempt to reach compromise either leads to a continuation of an untenable status quo. So if This Guilty Land is principally concerned with the impossibility of compromise, how does this tie in with Meltwater's view of compromise?
To answer this question, we must first analyse what the game has to say about compromise. One important thing to note when it comes to Meltwater is that the game pointedly does not say anything about the causes of the apocalyptical war that it simulates, or who within that sphere is morally right or wrong. This is an interesting parallel to This Guilty Land, in which the impossibility of compromise is due to a specific, direct issue. Meltwater, instead, attempts to showcase the results of a failure to compromise between two sides, and how these two sides can therefore be locked in a self-destructive dance where neither can compromise for the fear that this would create an advantage for the other.
This creates interesting parallels when compared to This Guilty Land when compared to Meltwater. In the former game, compromise is impossible and victory is meaningless: as the rulebook sets it, no matter who wins politically, the Civil War always happens, as a political victory by either sides radicalises the other just like it happened in real life.
Meltwater, on the other hand, showcases a situation where the incentives to compromise are only present when the situation becomes hopeless for either side, and the compromise in question is a complete abdication of power. By that point, however, victory itself has lost its value: the fighting that allowed you to gain supremacy also destroyed the very place that you want to inhabit, making a victory against your opponent in of itself meaningless.
The ideal compromise would be thus to simply put your arms down and not fight in the first place, something that one of the designer diaries indicates to leave enough food and water for both (and any upcoming refugees) to survive. Yet within the confines of the games, this compromise is impossible, much like in the minds of some generals during the Cold War, any such compromise would be impossible, even if this lead to large scale death on both sides.
Thus, on one side, the message of one of the games is that it is impossible to compromise, and to compromise in certain situations just leads to an abominable status quo that cannot keep. On the other hand, we have a game in which an inability to compromise leads to situations where this mindset itself leads to abominable situations that would not have occurred if the possibility of compromise was present.
Although at first glance this can appear to be differing positions, the messages themselves are not actually contradictory: both revolve around a situation where the only solution is the abdication of power (even in Meltwater, since a complete bilateral agreement seems unlikely based on the history of the US and USSR). If the only possibility of compromise lies within the complete abdication of your position in favour of your opponent, no compromise is possible.
In this way, the two games almost complement each other: while one showcases how compromise can lead to the continuation of an untenable status quo, the latter showcases what happens in the aftermath of a situation in which this inability to compromise can lead to situations in which only one side can ultimately be victorious.
But even this apocalyptic view of the world creates unresolved issues: in Meltwater, victory usually means the destruction of your own means of survival. In the context of the Civil War, there were plenty of unresolved issues that, although slavery itself was over, still lead to an era of segregation, mostly due to the failures of the reconstruction era of US politics.
So is the final point that compromise is impossible and should never be attempted? The main driving point is not that compromise is always impossible, but that compromise is not always an overwhelmingly good all of the times, especially if it attempts to retain a status quo that is oppressive to a certain group of people. Although reconciliation of beliefs and coming together of distinct views is something that in certain situations is to be lauded, compromising with oppressive forces, especially when they have economical or political reasons to continue that oppression is not only impossible, but also inadvisable.
