A Rare Marxist Game Sparks Yet Another Intellectual Property Battle

This week’s New Yorker features a nice bit on the cult board game Le Jeu de la Guerre, a copper- and silver-plated strategy game recently showcased at the “Form as Strategy” exhibit at Columbia University. The 30-year-old game was the brainchild of Guy Debord, a Marxist philosopher and filmmaker probably best known for leading the situationist movement in the 1960s. The New Yorker’s Ben McGrath describes it as “a kind of modernist take on chess” - and evidently a very special one, as only a handful of them were produced.  Regardless, the game acquired underground fame among military strategy fanatics, socialists and history buffs alike and led to the creation of a digital version dubbed Kriegspiel (German for “war game”), a free computer game designed by a local programming collective called the Radical Software Group. Alexander Galloway, an associate professor of culture and communication at N.Y.U., is the founder of the collective and helped create the game with mostly scholarly intentions. The game, in both analog and digital forms, serves as an exploration of Debord’s philosophy and his conception of strategy in an increasingly networked (and refracted) society. Kriegspiel is more of an art/history project than anything commercial; Galloway explained that there are only a few hundred players of the computer game and they’re mostly “a smattering of, like, black-wearing English graduate students and sixty-year-old military-reënactment nerds”.

And yet, what has resulted is a drawn-out legal battle between Galloway (and NYU) and Alice Becker-Ho, the widow of Debord and rightsholder to the game, who claims Kriegspiel is IP infringement and must be taken off-line. While the fight between them continues, Becker-Ho’s threats successfully managed to get Kriegspiel moved from its original location in the exhibit (side-by-side with the original) to another room, where,  McGrath reports, “it played in a continuous loop, without sound.”

While a legal wrestling over a socialist boardgame from the 1970s might not seem like frontpage news, we were immediately reminded of the very public battle between Hasbro and the makers of Scrabulous and the can of worms that opened up. What are the parameters of intellectual property in a game? How much of a concept behind a game can be ‘owned’ and copyrighted? While it seem that in both cases the ‘copycat’ games actually brought more attention back to the originals to which they were paying homage, the legality of it all is still being worked out. Meanwhile, we’re guessing Debord is rolling in his grave, watching the squabble play out over the intellectual property rights to the free Marxist computer game he created. Or maybe he’s laughing at the post-modern absurdity of it all. Who knows.

[via The New Yorker]