Matteo Menapace

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Feb 25, 2017 · 7 min read

I dislike games of pure chance. I know it can be very exciting (and addictive) to forfeit your fate (and money) to luck, but for me having no choice, no strategy and no personal agency overweights the excitement. So I forced myself to study one of those lucky games: Zohn Ahl. It turns out chance was not some lame mechanic, but it played a deeper spiritual role in the ritual performance of the game.

What is this game really about?

At first Zohn Ahl looks like a standard cross-and-circle game: you race against your opponent around an obstacle track. What sticks out about it is that you have no standard dice. Instead, you use both hands to shake and throw four 2-sided sticks against the ahl in the middle of the board. Depending on how the sticks land (for example, every time the green stick lands face up, you get an extra throw) you work out how many spaces you can move along the track.

It’s an elaborate method to generate random numbers from 1 to potentially infinite, but more likely somewhere around 10. You may wonder: why was such a fancy method used for such a simple game? Because this was not just a random number generator as we’d call it these days, but people used those sticks to tell fortunes and predict the future. The anthropologists Csikszentmihalyi and Bennett argue that games emerged in many cultures as light-hearted versions of divination rituals. Instead of playing with your own future, you would play out the imaginary destiny of your game proxy.

Zohn Ahl is a cultural product of the Native American Kiowa.

The gully and creek (zohn means creek) on the board conjure up images of the Great Plains, and a sense of vastness (as well as a certain fear of water).

In this semi-nomadic hunter-gatherer male-dominated society, women took care of the camp while the men were away. And it was the Kiowa women and girls who played Zohn Ahl, maybe as a way to fantasise of running around the vast fields. Because there is no decision-making in the game, you are not running as a free agent, but rather as a channel of super-natural forces that guide you through life (and the Zohn Ahl race).

Since you are not racing side by side, but in opposite directions, your running is rather solitary. When your path crosses that of your opponents, something interesting happen: as a European I’d assume the new-comer gets to leave (I was here before you, this land is mine), but instead in Zohn Ahl you have no rights on the land. The new-comer kicks her opponent back to the start.

Chance (or the super-natural forces that you channel through the sticks) play a fundamental role in the game. Luck is quantified through 8 tokens (4 per player to start with) and you win the game when you receive all the tokens. Your bad luck is your opponent’s good luck, as they gain tokens directly from your misfortunes.

In essence, Zohn Ahl is a game of intertwined good luck and bad luck, running around in circles, in solitude.

What will the hacked game be about?

Digging out the cultural background of this game led me to learn about the current struggles of Native Americans (and in a broader sense all indigenous people). They are a special kind of ethnic minority, one that was undeniably “there already” before the majority arrived and colonised the land of freedom. They are a living reminder that colonialism didn’t end with the Declaration of Independence from Britain in 1776, or with the massacre of Wounded Knee in 1890. Colonialism is not buried in the embarrassing and regrettable corners of American history, it still happens today.

Contemporary colonialism takes the shape of massive infrastructure projects, like the Dakota Access pipeline (DAPL), built to carry oil from North Dakota’s fracking fields to Illinois. Drilling through land that was granted to the Great Sioux Nation under the Fort Laramie Treaty of 1851, and threatening the water supply of those indigenous people that were confined in that land. As Julian Brave NoiseCat puts it, contemporary colonialism requires

…indigenous presence to be contained, removed, and then forgotten so that the United States can continue to live on, and profit from, lands taken from indigenous people.

The forgotten bit is important, because it addresses us, those not directly involved in the drilling and profiting. We too, the consumers, the citizens, are (indirectly) taking part in this struggle. Our actions and inactions count too. What exactly is the struggle then? It goes beyond the fight of indigenous people to protect their rights and their water.

In This changes everything. Capitalism vs the climate, Naomi Klein defines our contemporary economic model as extractivism: a “dominance-based relationship with the earth, one of purely taking” which is “the opposite of stewardship”. It’s the idea that nature is just a collection of resources from which short-term wealth can be extracted. We’ve become extractivists not just in our relationship with the planet, but often with each other too. To someone somewhere, we are human resources.

The indigenous people who lead the #NoDAPL coalition are the front line of a global struggle. A struggle to preserve the planet for future generations, but also to resist the shortsighted profiteers who took hold of our democratic institutions and pitched the rest of us against each other.

How can I hack Zohn Ahl so that it’s about resistance?

Keep the circle, ditch the chance.

Before I decided what the new game would be about, I knew I wanted to play with the running around in circles aesthetic from Zohn Ahl, so I set out to keep the circular shape and experiment with the ability to move in opposite directions. I also knew I wanted to reduce the role played by chance in the game, in favour of a mechanic that gives players agency, and maybe even allows for strategic choices. How did I know? I just knew.

Mapping the struggle

With those creative constraints parked in my head, I dived into indigenous struggles and #NoDAPL. I frantically read articles and jotted down scattered notes, feeling like I was absorbing a lot but not going anywhere. As I was starting to run out of oxygen, I decided to swim back up and draw a simplified map of what I learned. I boiled it down to the three main actors in the struggle and their main resources:

• investors, those with money, vetted interests and political influence
• resisters, those on the front line who are compelled into action
• the rest of us, consumers / voters who trade their attention

I hope I’m not oversimplifying, bear with me.

A three-player struggle

At this point the idea of a three-player game started to emerge. They can all move in both directions, engaging in a non-binary struggle: for example resisters have to fight against the investors (in the case of DAPL, opposing its construction on the ground) whilst also struggling to capture the attention of the rest of us and win us over to their cause. Whatever directions you are pushing, there will be resistance: for instance, investors may use their money to corrupt the political institutions that should oversee the disputes over indigenous land, and consumers may resist engagement with escapism. Here’s a polished version of the struggle-map.

(Standing) Rock-paper-scissors

That circular struggle-map reminded me of this diagram, which illustrates how player choices in the game Rock-paper-scissors balance each other out.

Maybe I could use this mechanic to replace the throwing of the dice.

I could reskin it so that instead of rock, papers and scissors players could choose between actions that are meaningful in the context of a power struggle.

I’m currently toying with these three symbols:

• 👍 represents persuasive tactics, seeking validation and consensus
• 🖕represents provocation and shock tactics
• 👉 stands for giving orders (uncompromising)

So persuasion wins over provocation, which in turn trumps orders. But really, it could be the other way around as well.

How to play

You will need three players (or three teams), three tokens and the struggle-map (see above).

Place one token on each of the three black dots in the struggle-map, so that they are positioned mid-way between each player’s home base.

At each turn, every player decides which tactics to deploy (👍 or🖕or 👉) and then perform their choice at the same time as everyone else.

You then examine the outcomes of each struggle and move the tokens accordingly. For example, let’s say player R deployed 👍 and player C deployed 🖕. 👍 wins over 🖕, so player R can move the token one step towards C.

When a token reaches the home base of another player, those two players may join forces against the third player. Or, the player whose base has been taken is eliminated and the game becomes a binary struggle. What do you think?

As you probably worked out, this is work-in-progress stuff. I’ll keep updating this post as I prototype and playtest the ideas above.

Meanwhile, since you made it this far, and assuming this post has sparked some thoughts in your brain, why not add a little comment down below, or give us a clap? Thanks!