OK thanks to Nick (Megoran) for having us here. We're going to talk about something a bit different.

We designed "TerrorBull Games" - traditional board games and we're very interested in how games reflect and effect the real world. So that's what we're going to be talking about.

We're going to start with this film. I hope you've all seen it. If you haven't, that's homework. Wargames, just in case you haven't, is about a computer game obsessed teenager who hacks into a military supercomputer, challenges it to play a game and accidentally precipitates the start of World War III. As can happen if you do that. 

Where it goes wrong is that he plays a game called 'Global Thermonuclear War' and unfortunately for Matthew Broderick and the rest of the world, the computer doesn't know the difference between simulation and real life. And that's where all the problems arise.

The interesting bit of Wargames for me is the climactic scene - there's a screenshot of it. The launch codes have been started and there are 10,000 nuclear warheads pointing towards Russia and it looks like the world is doomed. 

The computer on the screen starts playing out various iterations of Global Thermonuclear War and testing different strategies, launch strategies, targets, different countries firing first and so on. These cycle through in their hundreds and just when you think it's going to be too late, the timer stops, the screen goes blank and the computer issues the immortal words: "A strange game ... the only winning move is not to play". 

So this seemed to be a good setting for this talk which is basically about games blurring the boundaries and territories between the virtual game space and the real world. 

So I just want you to bear that in mind and we'll jump forward 27 years to 2010 (actually 2009 - sorry, Brenda) and an American game inventor called Brenda Brathwaite causes a bit of a storm when she brings out this game called "Train"

In Train, players have to pack their carriages as full as possible with their cargo and transport them successfully to the terminus. Once the players reach the terminus, it's revealed that the terminus is Auschwitz and everyone's been taking part in a simulation of the Final Solution. 

But what's really interesting in this game is not the kind of bait-and-switch tactic, but what happens after that point. There are a range of strategies open to players, ranging from full compliance to the game's objective - literally "just following the orders" of the game - to voluntary sabotage, where you can try and derail your carriages and basically deliberately lose the game but I guess try and reach for some kind of moral victory, if that's possible even.

So recalling the lesson that the computer learned from Wargames. Brenda Brathwaite herself tells a very interesting anecdote of how she took this game to a rabbi for feedback. The rabbi looked at this game and said, "I get what you're doing; I understand the game, but I don't want to play it" and she told him, "You already did". And she's quite right because the rabbi kind of instinctively, through not wanting to play it, drew out the central lesson of the game which was all about compliance and authority. 

So you might think this is a long way from the games you're more familiar with, that some of you might have even played over the Christmas season. But actually our most familiar games do have hidden educational origins. 

A Victorian moralistic game that was designed to show children the difference choosing good and evil paths we know today as Snakes & Ladders. In the original version of this game, the ladders were labelled as virtues such as "obeying one's parents" and the snakes were labelled after various sins like "gluttony" or "avarice". 

Probably the most famous game in the world started off as "The Landlord's Game", as it was called back in 1905 designed by an American lady again named Elizabeth Magee and that was designed initially to show how the rich, owning class exploited and got rich off the back of the poor renting class and it's only in 1935 when it was sold to the Parker Brothers for the princely sum of $500 that it became ... Monopoly. Maybe you should bear that in mind next time you're skinning your relatives for rent on Park Lane.

It's rather ironic that it's now become a celebration of the very things the initial game tried to subvert. But these things happen.

So the thing is that board games, right from the very beginning - and they date 5,000 years right back to ancient Egypt - have been always concerned with the real world things, by and large. They've been driven by a need to represent and explain and make sense of the world and present that to people. Unfortunately there's no time for a history lesson, so you're just going to have to trust me on that one. But I'll be happy to talk about that at lenght if you want to ask me later.

So this brings us to.. Us. This is where we come in: 2003.  We were watching the news just before the invasion of Iraq, pretty depressed, feeling quite powerless so we wanted to do something about it. Everything else had failed, you know the marches, whatever.

Even though we knew nothing about game design - you could argue we still don't - and we knew nothing about publishing, we were drawn instinctively to use a board game as the medium through which to protest, I guess. 

So we basically drew upon games we were familiar with - like Risk, Monopoly, Diplomacy - and mixed in with it a heavy does of Realpolitik of the day. We were very concerned with the fragility of diplomatic relations: how enemies became allies and allies, enemies, overnight. And also the contrast between public and private discourse: how the public discourse was all for "the good" and the private discourse was all for money.

So what happens in 'War on Terror', very briefly, everyone starts off as an Empire, you have to liberate the world, it's "liberation at all costs" so it often involves acts of horrific violence. And of course you have to control the oil. The whole game kind of spirals downwards from there. 

What we realised from the very first games was that we had something quite special. There were two main lessons that I learned from testing 'War on Terror'. The first was just how liberating it was to laugh at subjects that we'd been told for so long that we couldn't laugh at - those "serious subjects"; subjects shrouded in fear. The language of fear that surrounds terrorism had narrowed discussion to the point where if you if you could laugh at it, suddenly it managed to free up this discussion. And in fact, using the lexicon of terrorism and fear as part of the game absolutely smashed that kind of Pavalovian response of silent compliance that we had all been used to previously. 

There's an example of one of the ways in which we played with the language within the game. It's a game of "liberation", not "domination".

The second lesson that really struck me from playing the game - and anyone here who's played it can attest to this - is just how quickly and naturally people take to deception. 

In the game, you can be really aggressive. You're armed with an array of tools, but it's not necessarily a good idea to be that aggressive because you'll just get shot down for it. So quite voluntarily - and it's not part of the game; the game doesn't demand it - but people started sugar-coating their actions; they started justifying within the game. They would say, "Well, I had to attack Player A because Player A had nuclear weapons and they were going to use them on me" or "I had to attack Player B because Player B was funding too much terrorism and is threatening the stability of the world"... And these rationalisations started to eerily echo the narrative of the time. 

Orwell said that "political language is designed to make lies sound truthful and murder, respectable" and really I never realised the profound truth of that statement until I found myself responsible for the kind of behaviour that prompted that kind of observation. And I think that gets to the heart of how games are really very powerful - to actually take part in something rather than being told something. 

So we developed this in relative isolation for two-and-a-half years and then we realised another lesson of 'War on Terror' - and that is really the idea of the game itself: you didn't have to play it. So basically one morning before the game had actually been released, we woke up to this:

Our local newspaper called us 'sick' on their front page and said we were publishing this at the expense of terrorist and 7/7 victims. And in fact in the following week this narrative was echoed all over the world, with the slight variation of - depending on geographical location - we were "sick" in the UK for making fun of 7/7 victims; we were "sick" in Australia for making fun of the Bali bombing victims and of course in America we were "sick" for making fun of 9/11 victims. 

This only kind of proved our theory of 'terrorism being the last taboo' correct. It was still pretty depressing that the subjects of the game were not up for discussion; it was the ethics of producing such a game that we found ourselves defending the whole time.

The initial effect of that was basically commercial isolation - we were banned from all kinds of industry fairs and the High Street wouldn't go near it. But when people started playing the game, luckily they discovered something worthwhile there and it acquired a bit of a cult following. 

Since then it's taken on a life of its own and it's really has reached places that we never thought about. It's here, for example, in an art gallery in the Berlin Academy of Arts - it was a bit weird to see it in a case where you can't interact with it. It's here in a sitcom; that's the I.T. Crowd. And even on the front line of the War on Terror itself ... which we still can't quite reconcile ourselves with. I won't dwell on that too long.

It's even been confiscated by the police actually. They seized it as a dangerous weapon because the game comes with a balaclava and they argued you could disguise your identity if you were to commit a criminal act using that balaclava. And in fact this is the official police photo that they proudly released to the nation's press. 

Jumping to the conclusion: basically what this taught us was there wasn't just a market for satirical games, there was an absolute need for it. There was something inately powerful in the medium itself. We realised that we really would never have had the same reach and effect with a book or a film or something like that - there was something about a game that really resonnated. 

The game is actually in the permanent collections of places like the Imperial War Museum, the Victoria & Albert Museum and the Bodliean Library. I think it's safe to say that's territory that board games don't normally go into. So as a political medium, it's very suited. 

We went on and released "Crunch, the game for utter bankers" about the fragility and flaws of the global financial system. At the moment we're working on our third game about civil liberties. But recently an interesting area for us - and I'll just finish on this - We've been doing what are called 'print-and-play' games, which are more immediate things. It takes about 2 years, more or less, to produce a product like this, but print-and-play we give away free on the internet, people can print them off and play them using tools readily available around the house. They're frivilous, short games but they allow us to comment on actual events very quickly.

Very recently, just before Christmas in fact, we got our first commission. Greenpeace commissioned us to design this for them to support their campaign on deep sea drilling and marine reserves and that perhaps hints at a new direction.

So just before I get into trouble here, to answer the initial question: "Are games becoming part of our political landscape?" They always have been. Monopoly and Snakes & Ladders show that's nothing new. What's interesting for us is whether games can *change* the political landscape. That's a much bigger question. I believe they can, which is why we're doing what we're doing. In fact we've seen that happening now and the recent development of people like Greenpeace using games as campaign materials shows that you may well see more of that in time to come. Thank you. 

*rapturous applause*