RSG [Radical Software Group]

Guy Debord’s “The Game of War”

Filed under Game, projects

In 1978 the French Situationist Guy Debord designed and fabricated a board game called “The Game of War.” Thirty years later RSG is resurrecting this largely forgotten game, translating the game instructions from French to Java and releasing it as an online computer game. We explore the contradiction between Debord, a symbol of radical politics and art in 1960s France, and the nineteenth-century Napoleonic campaign game he created. In Debord’s own words the game was the only thing in his entire body of work that had any value. Was it nostalgia, or a vision of things to come?