All Games Are Wargames

Cydney Hayes on playing to win in a chaotic world

Welcome back to the Sunday Letter, a free weekly essay about art, literature, pop culture, and everything in between. This week: I’m on vacation! But the brilliant

Cydney Hayes

has kindly agreed to step in with a guest essay on games, strategies, and playing to win in an increasingly unpredictable world ♟️ See you next week!

The Sunday (Guest) Letter

Every day for like a week now my (soon-to-be) father-in-law has sent me links to articles—from The Seattle Times, The New York Times, The Washington Post, The A.V. Club, The Detroit News—all glowing reviews of the black-and-white, mostly silent, slapstick epic Hundreds of Beavers (2022, dir. Mike Chelsik). And let me tell you, what a relief. The week before, Johny’s poor dad had driven an hour up from Cupertino to San Francisco’s breezy Outer Richmond district, where I’d dragged him through the lobby of the two-screen Balboa Theater, past the long line of people buzzing to see Dune 2, into the other theater with the art freaks like me, and he’d cringed at the ridiculousness the whole time. But now it’s being praised in the Times and I feel vindicated. Ha!

To be fair, considering Beavers already swept in the 2022 and 2023 indie festival circuits, I’m not totally surprised it’s getting mainstream acclaim now. The sheer creativity, the technical mastery over greenscreen gags and Looney Toons-style animation, the unironic commitment to the bit—it could never have gone completely unnoticed.

One review in the NYT and this guy’s all in on a movie during which he fully fell asleep.

The low-budget farce, made by two 30-something Wisconsin dudes (Chelsik and Ryland Brickland Cole Tews), follows the adventures of Jean Kayak (Tews), who, after destroying his applejack distillery in an episode of drunken buffoonery, must prevail against cold, hunger, and many man-sized, mascot-costumed animals to survive. At first totally helpless, Jean Kayak learns to fashion tools, draw maps, trap animals, outsmart the industrious beaver society, and eventually win the hand of the local pelt merchant’s daughter.

Remember the game Little Alchemy, where you start with the four basic elements and combine them until you get unicorns and spaceships? It’s a lot like that. Actually, all throughout Beavers there are video game elements: A little Jean Kayak avatar moves around a mini-map, his pelts are tracked in an inventory, he levels up with better tools, he completes side quests on his way to fight the main boss (the beavs) and save the princess.

It’s all very satisfying. Anyone who has seen a baby delight in turning a light switch on and off or is familiar with why corporations gamify their products knows that collecting rewards directly related to one’s strategic and tactical efforts—in other words, getting a treat for having figured something out—scratches a deep, reptilian itch. I recently heard from the San Francisco high school teachers’ scene that there are two types of local teenagers these days: The Grovers, the social butterflies who drink and smoke weed in a city park called Stern Grove, and the Gamers, the kids who stay inside and game. The distinction can seem hierarchal—here are the cool kids, here are the outcasts—but if that’s your final reading of the situation, I assume you haven’t played many video games. Like social scenes, games are puzzles, where if you can learn the rules, you can level up. But unlike social scenes, game worlds are stable, predictable, a relief from real-world chaos. Who, really, wouldn’t want to play life in an orderly and conquerable world?

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“All games are wargames,” Johny said to me about a week earlier as we strolled through Golden Gate Park, discussing Peacock’s The Traitors. If you haven’t seen it, I’m going to spoil some of it for you: It’s basically a bunch of reality stars playing Mafia, hosted by the legend Alan Cumming, and it’s such a romp. The cast is (C-list) stacked: Among others, there’s a charming but arrogant former Bachelor, a handful of Survivor and The Challenge winners (though, with that stupid name, I’m still not convinced The Challenge is a real show), a 61-year-old former Speaker of the U.K. House of Commons who has an alleged history of bullying his staff, a cabal of Real Housewives, and a friendly queen from Drag Race, who ends up as the first sacrificial lamb in a way that obviously has a lot to do with latent transphobia.

Johny had caught a couple episodes with me about two-thirds of the way through the season, when most of the professional “gamers” (the people from Survivor and The Challenge) had voted each other out and the tactical prowess of the remaining cast was waning. The Housewives generally made moves based on loyalty, and while we agreed that made for more boring TV, leveraging social capital was an effective strategy all the same. Ultimately, though, two Challenge alumni win, and I have to assume their fluency in game tactics is what clinched it. No one ever quite says the quiet part out loud—that this is a political game (there’s a reason the only non-reality star is a former politician) where some strategies are simply better than others—but the audience certainly sees it. At one point, a handful of players are gathered around a pool table, watching a former Survivor winner break down a path to victory using the pool balls as visual cues. The Housewives are only ever talking about vibes and their 20-year-long friendships, and they forget that politics is mostly a numbers game, that game theory is a whole field of study.

Wargames are a distinct type of game, played tabletop and on the computer, recreationally and by actual militaries. But boiled all the way down, it’s simply I do this, so you do this, so I can move here, set you up to do this, and so on and so forth until I win. After Johny said it, I started to see the concept everywhere. It’s Tom & Jerry, Game of Thrones, American football. It’s chess, which I never cared to properly learn until I knew I was going to write this article. Sunk into a green velvet couch in the back of an Irish dive bar, I hunched over Johny’s fold-up chess board and slowly realized how much an intelligence of spatial positioning factors into the game. One must notice presences and absences, clear and blocked paths, shapes and formations. Just like the pool balls in The Traitors, assessing the situation cartographically turned educated guesses into common sense. During one game, Johny’s army had advanced in a V shape toward me and now held control of the center of the board. My pieces, on the other hand, were cowering in the corners. Obviously, I’d lose.

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So much of Sun Tsu’s The Art of War has to do with physical tactics, with terrain. In the first chapter, one learns that “the art of war is governed by five constant factors”: 1) The Moral Law, 2) Heaven, 3) Earth, 4) The Commander, and 5) Method and discipline. Two of those, Heaven (“night and day, cold and heat, times and seasons”) and Earth (“distances, great and small; danger and security; open ground and narrow passages; the chances of life and death”), are grounded entirely in the landscape. One learns to occupy the high ground, face the sun, etc. But even the rules involving social and emotional situations are expressed so plainly that I found myself wondering if, now that I knew the rules, resolving any mundane conflict in my favor might be simple.

But reading The Art of War is like uncovering some secret of the universe in a dream, and waking to find you remember nothing; it all makes perfect sense in imaginary battles, but to close the book and try to apply such axioms to one’s own life—to being charismatic, to figuring out your career, to buying property—feels totally strange. I suppose it’s the idea of “the enemy” where things fall apart: The opposition between two actors creates the basic structure of everything in The Art of War, and in The Traitors for that matter. Even when the enemy is more abstract, like it is in Hundreds of Beavers (man versus cold, man versus hunger, man versus beavers), wargame strategy still seems to apply. But what about man versus beauty standards? Man versus screen addiction? Man versus late-stage capitalism? How does one find the high ground, face toward the sun?

For all my love of games—of Zelda, Chronotrigger, The Last of Us, Settlers of Catan, Avalon, Tetris; none of which are true wargames but all of which require some tactical command—I started to wonder if I’d ever once actually been strategic about life. Had I actually plotted a path that brought me to where I am now? I’m not sure. I think I’d just done whatever had felt right at the time. Maybe I’m just a hedonist, or maybe at some point (likely in 6th grade when some girls had found my diary, where I’d ranked the popular kids in order to assess where I could mine some social capital), I had moralized ambition, internalized that acknowledging my peers as social, academic, or professional competitors (which of course they were, just as I was to them) was problematic.

But more likely there is a sociological element to why strategy feels kind of irrelevant to life, and has for some time. Ask 50 people when they think things started to feel dicey, and I’m sure you’ll get 50 different answers. But certainly by the time I entered college in 2015, right as Trump was coming up and it seemed like any crazy shit could really just happen, attempts to plan my life beyond, say, two years, began to seem a bit ridiculous. Nowadays, any time I talk to my friends about saving for retirement or having kids, as if institutions are reliable and climate change doesn’t exist, there’s always that gnawing sense that we’re all being delusional.

“What is different about us as individuals compared to previous generations is minor. What is different about the world around us is profound,” Michael Hobbes from

Confirm My Choices

wrote in a spectacular 2017 essay for Huffpost’s Highline called “Millennials are Screwed.” “The touchstone experience of millennials, the thing that truly defines us…is uncertainty.” Some amount of certainty, at least with whom/what one is in conflict and in what landscape you might encounter them, is necessary in designing a plan of attack. In actual wargames, there is an uncertainty mechanic called the Fog of War, which hides, say, the opponent’s location or arsenal. But even games with a Fog of War mechanic do not call into question the structure of the game itself. In reality, everyone’s disoriented, facing an increasingly volatile environmental and economic future. If we can’t trust the ground beneath our feet, what’s even the point of thinking ahead?

There is a lot of literature starting in the mid-2010’s about how uncertainty and anxiety are rampant among young people, but as I looked into this condition and its effect on strategy, I found something else about the Highline piece particularly striking: The package design happens to be video game-themed, as if to say that life is a game one plays, and that for millennials and their successors, it is one they’re doomed to lose.

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For the sake of research, I obviously had to watch Oppenheimer, which I had managed to avoid until now. Frankly, I thought it was a little silly: They really wanted us to buy the Sexiest Physicist Alive narrative, so much so that they flattened all the complexity of “I am become death” into throwaway foreplay. In the context of its source, a story from the Bhagavad Gita about a warrior prince whose cosmic duty is to fight against an army that includes his friends and family, “I am become death” is a meditation on fate versus free will. To its own detriment, Oppenheimer barely handles that question, but it was on my mind anyway when I leaned over my desk last week to ask a designer on my team if he’d seen the latest episode of FX’s Shōgun (war, again). Soon enough we were down the wargames rabbit hole and ended up talking about the old computer game Civilization. I asked him what he thought it taught him as a kid. He said, “To learn to lose.” Hard to argue, when here we both were, having been ushered into cubicles by forces bigger than our aspirations, doing “creative” work for a corporate marketing department.

But still. I can’t draw you a map of the terrain, but I think there’s a middle ground between “life is a winnable war” and “the game is rigged.” So okay, the cowards in the Academy might’ve given Oppenheimer Best Picture; we know the Oscars is a racket. On the other hand, consider the serious critical acclaim for a movie as batshit and unmarketable as Hundreds of Beavers, and tell me there isn’t still at least a little room to play.

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Cydney Hayes is a writer and journalist based in San Francisco. Her work has been published in Entertainment Weekly, Architectural Digest, Paloma magazine, 48 Hills, and elsewhere. She writes the Substack newsletter Discussion Candy.