Screenshot of the digital Kriegspiel
The artist and theorist
Alex Galloway
and several of his collaborators in the collective
RSG
(whose work straddles what we might call programming art and game art) recently created a digital version of the game Kriegspiel, designed by the distinguished Situationist Guy Debord together with Alice Becker-Ho. Kriegspiel is a strategy game about which Debord himself, very interested in game theory during the 70s, also wrote a book in collaboration with Alice Becker-Ho entitled
“A Game of War”
.
The fact is that Alex Galloway has received a cease and desist notice from the lawyers representing Debord’s widow, something like a “stop doing that or else”, in defense of Guy Debord’s name and intellectual property. You wouldn’t believe it! But the best part is that apparently Debord’s “original” game is “inspired” by a war game derived in turn from chess and called Kriegsspiel (note the double ‘s’!), first shown in 1811 to Prince William of Prussia by Georg Leopold, Baron of Reisswitz.
(Via Water Cooler Games)
