The Twitch streamer DougDoug and his viewers play video games in weird, amusing ways, either through mods of games like Skyrim and Grand Theft Auto 5; or external limitations and restrictions on how they play, like controlling characters with voice commands only. They’re fun videos, but not typically germane to tabletop RPGs.
What is relevant is a recent series of YouTube videos edited down from longer Twitch streams. He and his chat (who choose their actions through polled consensus) battle for supremacy first in Europe, then the United States, and finally in outer space. The outcome of each turn's action is determined by AI text generation. The game continues until one side reaches 10 points by acquiring territories through either invasion or alliance.
What’s the antecedent to this style of game? The obvious point of reference is the venerable board game Diplomacy, which also functions through alliances and conquests. But I think a certain “looseness” in Doug’s adjudication of the game pushes it closer to the Free Kriegsspiel Revolution (FKR) philosophy, as thoroughly explained by Jim Parkin in a Board Game Geek post here.
For example, Doug is effectively the referee, interpreting whether each block of AI text does or does not achieve the desired goal and thus score points. As in FKR, faith in the judge is required. Of course, nominally, Twitch chat (being Twitch chat) does not trust Doug, spamming the word “rigged” whenever a decision goes against them. But that’s more expressive of partisan enthusiasm than true distrust, and I would argue the members of the chat are “voting with their feet” by staying and continuing to play the game.
As another example, Doug, in his capacity as referee, must also make common-sense rulings mid-game, for example deciding in the first video that once a neutral nation has formed an alliance with one or the other player, the opposing player must invade it to “flip” it; they can’t simply attempt to overwrite the alliance with one of their own.
Working through Jim’s bullet list from the BGG post, we can make a pretty strong case for Doug’s game as FKR:
- Numbers don't add up to a game. The assets (people, armies, and resources) the two sides control don’t have stats or rules constraining their use. They are purely qualitative objects in the fiction, open to whatever use makes sense.
- If the fiction fits, try it. The AI is a wild card and certainly introduces issues in terms of preserving in-game consistency, but less so than you might think, because it frequently “calls back” to events already introduced in the narrative, preserving some degree of continuity. In his capacity as referee, Doug additionally contextualizes the AI’s wilder diversions (and in a few cases, deletes obviously fiction-breaking tangents).
- You play worlds, not rules. Certainly true here, as the chat, in particular, introduces different media into the game. The second of the videos prominently features television character Saul Goodman, surely the world’s first Breaking Bad- / Better Call Saul-themed wargame.
The AI is an interesting factor in the resolution of the game that sets it apart from its antecedents. On one hand, it’s more chaotic and wild than dice or cards, because it can introduce so many unexpected elements out of left field. On the other hand, the AI, relying on the language it was trained on, repeatedly bends the story back toward genre tropes, favoring betrayals and surprising reversals of fortune.
As far as I know, Doug is not a TTRPG person, nor do I see any evidence from skimming the comments of the videos that the game was inspired by other RPGs, matrix games, or FKR. I suspect this was just an instance of convergent evolution, where people independently land on similar ideas, concepts, and rules simply because they make sense as a natural form of group storytelling and gameplay, universal to humans everywhere.
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