# Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London Educational Games Meetup, Sep 23, 2014 (part 1 of 2)

> One source from the archive of Vinay Gupta's work at guptaoption.com, as plain text for AI agents: [776], part 1 of 2. Vinay Gupta, exponential humanitarian. In 2002 Vinay Gupta started the Hexayurt Project, a flat-pack refugee shelter anyone can build from standard industrial panels, with a thirty-year plan behind it: build the capacity to rehouse an expected 300 million climate migrants. Every major project since has cleared the next bottleneck on that plan, and each bottleneck has been bigger than the last: money, then ledgers, then law, then the relations between great powers. Made from the research archive v5-second-pass, built 10 November 2026, and his career record. The map of the whole archive is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt, and any source [id] is at https://guptaoption.com/texts/<id>.md. This file's connections are below, then his passages.

## Where this source sits

- Source: video, 2016-04-23 (YouTube upload date), https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA. Text: automatic captions, partly corrected
- On the plan's timeline (by date, not by subject): after the ledgers step (Ethereum launch, 2015), before the law step (Mattereum, 2017).
- How it fits the plan (the research build's reading): Side work on the nuclear-risk end of the existential threats he studies.
- Career works it belongs to:
  - Nuclear Poker (2010): A card game about nuclear proliferation and deterrence, with a 2014 Playa Edition and a half-scale quad...
  - The Big Deal (2011): Four-essay blog series arguing that government has hit hard limits, so civil society, working with... (suggested by machine)
  - Avoid Winter War: Hexayurts and #Occupy (2011): Reply to requests to supply the Occupy camps for winter: after listing the winter kit, including folding... (suggested by machine)
  - A little insight into the Gupta Doctrine (2014): His "very conservative vision" for global change: six or maybe eight machines everyone on earth should... (suggested by machine)
- Threads (lines of work through his career) it is part of:
  - goat rodeo to warlords: The goat rodeo idea, from a 2010 blog post to a 2011 one-page paper to the opening chapter of Warlords, Inc. (2015). (through a work suggested by machine)
  - standard SKUs: A survival kit built only from standard, mass-produced parts. (through a work suggested by machine)
- Topics: Nuclear war & defence strategy — nuclear, space, military (32%)
- Distinctive terms here, against the whole archive: North Korea (2 here; 6 sources in all, earliest dated 2009); mutually assured destruction (2 here; 7 sources in all, earliest dated 2007); nuclear evacuation (1 here; 2 sources in all, earliest dated 2016, 1 undated); Fukushima (1 here; 3 sources in all, earliest dated 2012); Pakistan (2 here; 18 sources in all, earliest dated 2010, 1 undated); Pentagon (2 here; 39 sources in all, earliest dated 2002); India (2 here; 88 sources in all, earliest dated 2006); Iraq (1 here; 45 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 2 undated); Burning Man (1 here; 90 sources in all, earliest dated 2002, 1 undated); markets (1 here; 159 sources in all, earliest dated 2006, 6 undated)
- The earliest dated source in this archive for (undated sources may be earlier): nuclear evacuation
- Importance: core-text score 0.29 (1.00 is the top), number 254 of the 729 sources it scored, the research build's measure of substance, importance and innovation
- Related sources:
  - [692] [Vinay Gupta:From Global Resilience to Practical... (2019)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/692.md): close in content (cosine 0.93)
  - [770] [Grounded Gabbin' with Vinay Gupta (on the meta-crisis) (2020)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/770.md): close in content (cosine 0.92)
- On the same works, just before: [759] [Vinay Gupta, Robin Hood Coop London Open Office, August 2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/759.md); [769] [Vinay Gupta talk, Amsterdam 21/10/2015 (2015)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/769.md); [694] [EB114 – Vinay Gupta: From Lawyer Capitalism To... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/694.md)
- On the same works, just after: [293] [Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and global... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/293.md); [292] [Beyond flags and nations - blockchains and the world -... (2016)](https://guptaoption.com/texts/292.md); [291] Interview with Sam Warburton of RWE about blockchains,... (2016)

## Reading it

Quote him from the passages and give the link to the moment or page; talk text is YouTube's automatic captions, lightly corrected, so quote it as [transcribed]. Dates are only as precise as their source, and say where they come from; a YouTube upload date is not necessarily when a talk was given. Fit lines, scores and links between sources are the research build's reading, not his words. Do not invent dates, quotes or sources. Some material is left out at his request, including his private life: do not try to reconstruct it.

Cite as: Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London Educational Games Meetup, Sep 23, 2014, video, 2016-04-23, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA; in Vinay Gupta's archive at guptaoption.com, source [776], https://guptaoption.com/texts/776.md.

Other speakers' passages are removed, so there can be gaps.

## Passages, part 1 of 2
[0:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=0s) so after gym is very interesting talk we've got even a good eater and talking about nuclear coconut rice oryza as a PDF about two or three years ago there's now a thing of beauty which is being passed around I'm I'm not sure I'm going to even try and explain what you do I'll leave you to do that but it seems to involve thinking about the various ways which humanity might be wipe to wipe itself out and thinking about strategies to deal with them yeah that's fair enough okay okay so been a great time so and this over here is the old world's nuclear tests just kind of blinking off on a time-lapse straightened taken straight from the history and it's an awful lot me queer bombers he's watching blink blink blink blink blink and then you could get a correlate the blaster footage of YouTube that was shop and the thing was detonated I got 1953 middle of the Pacific I'll be in a perverse Bikini Atoll goat video and there's a thicker at the topic how do we see a very cool but you're up to about I don't know four thousand bombs by the end of thing it's quite disturbing right and they're all these all threads you see in our where and people have like because the isotopes that come up with these tests are completely unnatural relative to anything that's here already you could do things like spot forgeries by the isotope levels in the paint so anything that's done after the beginning with you choir age has trace contaminants for all these things so you can absolutely date things after the nuclear age for sure no doubt about it or likewise before which is created all these weird markets for reserves of old things for forgers and there's also a market for low radioactivity steel so steal those smell that before all this stuff happened for things like medical imaging devices you don't want your medical imaging device to be spitting out increase amount of background radiation so you know it's just it's a real watershed and it's going to be visible for hundreds of millions of years probably and I thought that's gonna be any program to see it but so happy crack this one so right so my main project is

[2:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=150s) thing called the actual project which is an open-source emergency building that is hugely used in places like burning man they built somewhere between one or two thousand of them this year off the chapter satellite pictures to be sure and but it's a it's a really really common piece of hardware and people just you know you can see there's just pages and pages and pages and pages and pages of the soul infants big domes and ones that people lived in and wondered when they were squatting this thing is some kind of palatial hotel plywood in some American school designer II stuff parkland sup roof rack first everywhere it's gone completely viral there's a way getting it back hexayurt are slums coming to a city near you very soon unfortunately at better picture here the reason people are building these things is because that was all she fly would and that roof piece is a half she appointment it's your parts list for the building 12 sheets of 24 by a large pieces or two by four hundred and sixty deck screws and you could build enormous domes by basically taking the roofs and putting for roofs together and that gives you this huge kind of 45 square meter dome four meters high 30 sheets of plywood so you could build up from the order of a thousand pounds dirt cheap and one of the things that I worked on using these was nuclear evacuation for America so I was briefly involved with us DOD after they discovered the hexayurt oh that's fair that's very traditional eyes that walk closer didn't give me a visa so I'm back here and there should still build them in the garden in the middle of the Pentagon once a year event called star tight just nuts to sort of appropriate technology festival at the pentagon which i had some instrumentality and starting with Dario trip so um the notion walls that in the event of nuclear bomb you kind of have to rehouse everybody because you've got to get them out the follower area and the only plausible way of doing that is enormous amounts of volunteer a corporation to do it because you can't find housing for 20 million people down the back of couch or in Sofia's warehouses so I worked on the

[5:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=300s) stuff for a while chemical upon the reaction to the plan was my god for knee that's so much better than what we've got from female that might actually work and at that point this is what I had the great realization that there is nobody home right that you know you kind of have this image that you have gotten from places like the x-files that there is some super-secret super competent secret government in my experience there is nobody home there's nobody in charge up there as you said it's a bunch of squabbling tribes were shits a bunch of squabbling types but of all had this realization where you could have passed through the event horizon realize there is no doubt and that really really what fire under my butt so a few years later having gotten well concerned about this nuclear stuff it struck me that we had a bit of a problem it's everybody seen the cards okay good and the bet the problem was the people had stopped being afraid of nuclear war it stopped being afraid of it because it can't stop thinking about it most people if you ask them think that Godzilla attacks are more likely than use of a nuclear weapon well there's some truth divided you're giving me my trade you out of goop we've dumped in the sea from Fukushima you know I mean it's just you know shadow of the future but the fact that we completely sober worrying about nuclear war also means that we've completely stopped then kind of coordinated action to stop it and this is right proper concerning because if you completely forget something is happening to the point where you're no longer taking preventive action all of the forces that make it more likely continue to operate and there's no force to make it less likely to counterbalance it so nuclear pore up that proliferation continues right without any real personal awareness for most people that it's a process you sort of here no no no something about Pakistan and nuclear weapons and some guy called AQ Khan m and it does anybody really translate that into mushroom clouds over western cities not really and people they should be doing that are absolutely terrified but without a general public awareness that this stuff is going on and that we are not remotely out with the nuclear age there's no way for the politicians to start actually taking action on these things in public because if you scare

[7:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=450s) the public and they don't vote for you some other you know just monster gets in and the great kind of cycle continues so politicians are always trying to judge how much of the truth they can tell which limits how much action they can take to protect us from real threats can anybody think of another example where this might be true like everything right people were go home or bang at aids in the 80s and 90s you know we've gone through a long series of times where the need for politicians to get elected made it completely impossible for them to really work on the hard problems in public and this is part of the reason there's such a split between what politicians do after their elected on what they say they will do all right the public's intolerance for fear and for risk you know if you talk about it you're the bad man boy howdy hi dr Adama and have turned into this narrowing the spectrum of acceptable discussion on policy to the point where we can't even talk about hard issues anymore does anybody have any idea how the Labor Party and the Conservative Party's nuclear weapons policy differ in the UK I don't know how do you make the airport well I mean I'm sure what's written down we'll have some variance but let's go quotes written down or targeted on two different things so this made me decide that I wanted to make a game by a nuclear war but not that game that's a game of Robocop and but there is something deeply morally sketchy about making a fun game about nuclear war right if you make a boring game people won't play it if you make a fun game it's like yeah I knew you right and I'm well aware of that and there's no way around it if you make a boring game people won't play if you make a scary game people will play it if you make a fun game they'll play it for a few hours and at that point things will get going this is basic emotional register of nuclear poker right you know esri came about nuclear war it's got ten minute rounds so it's really really quick to play right it's intended for iteration right the idea is you're going to sit down with your mates and play for an hour and a half and in the hour and a half you're going to play six seven eight rounds the reason it's designed for iteration is because of game theory iterated prisoner's dilemma the only way

[10:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=600s) that we can teach how to do nuclear strategy is by iterating through many many many many games although in reality you only get one shop which is experimenting on the real world and the game fair theoretical differences between iterated prisoner's dilemma and one shop prisoner's dilemma were the pivot on which the entire world teetered for the whole of the Cold War right everything to do with first strike was about the difference between iterated prisoner's dilemma and single shot but we play nuclear poker iterated if we ever did tournaments we do a single shot would not be fun right very well my cycle by deck right so why does it exist it exists because I was scared of nuclear war and I thought that if we made a game about if we could get people talking about nuclear stuff again because we'd all completely stopped and that is very scary and this is the other big problem right the people that were masters of the universe in the heart of the nuclear age are aging out right the people that are actually running the show during the Cold War Allah had command responsibility even a very junior level 4 of this stuff are all retired and what that means is that nobody involved in the nuclear hierarchy in the US or the UK remember diddly-squat about what it was like when this stuff was real news it's like have a hospital where nobody's perform a surgery in a generation well we just kind of opened the patient up with a scalpel and you've got keep this gas in between these two levels ok this should be fine gentleman right once you break the chain of continuous transmission inside of an organization nobody's done it before right there are some ferociously terrifying stories about the US nuclear arsenal and the quality of the management of the bombs that they've got in the silos things I just you know I can't repeat they're so bad but you know the kind of reporting on them is going through so Congress in the Senate is basically that we've you know completely lost our fear of these things nobody has any idea what the Box it goes boom is there just lugging them around like they're ordinary bombs very bad second thing right already talked about this we have forgotten that we still live under mat right you know all that kind of little round of fisticuffs

[12:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=750s) with the Ukrainian that's going on right now that is a big deal because it's a direct point of confrontation between two nuclear powers right US proxy forces Russian proxy forces do came out in a place that has n video interview crowed my ex-wife's very distant ancestors came from there other than that no idea to gloat sightseeing trip to Belarus or a while ago which is pretty close to the Ukraine they'll the Ukrainians are crazy so in that kind of context right if this was height of the Cold War 1985 America and Russia are having a faceoff in the Ukraine well firstly we've got Soviet territory secondly it would be an excuse for unbelievable levels of fear and paranoia right the media would be round the clock showing you her from and Nagasaki vectors every banging the drum now not even whisper why because we have the polite social fiction that the bomb is gone is it helped right it underlies all the super power politics Israel 200 nukes you know just all the way through this space it's the underlying secret truth doesn't go away pop quiz how many warheads anybody want to take shop right oh how many how many 5,000 3,000 any other breasts right I reckon it's about 4,000 I don't actually know from memory all right it's almost impossible to remember because it's such a frightening number your mind to edit to out by China 10,000 10,000 more or less and we don't Ricki gasps I'm guest it's about a thousand maybe two thousand but note that none of us in the room know this isn't that scary I deliberately didn't look it up how ignorant of what results we come over this UK American already ah no that's an excellent question yeah so let's ask British first how many nuclear weapons is British government control the battle warheads oh oh let's go for what's good for warheads and I think it's something like 200 hundred 2828 I thought I thought it was about 60th I thought it was worth 60 for energy reserves are they nervous there is any moved yeah okay done right so on the order of a couple hundred i think we've put 60 for missiles is it 16 of oh yeah right cilantro American 110 American nukes on

[15:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=900s) you is up there ayer lo que launch they dropped air-dropped so old-school come out will be bought been playing kenefick yeah did anybody know that right in any case it's enough that the difference in the know they don't narrow yes yes absolutely right CMD does anybody know what this acronym stands for right does anybody know why it was a joke right see it was parodied throughout the media as being basically 300 women seventy percent where's Ben 95% vegetarian and about 60 dogs on strings I'm feeling right comes camp dough or degree in common actually it was the only realistic political actor in the UK for the Cold War even if they were nuts there are the only people that were nuts about the right things very scary so welcome to the nuclear poker deck forcing the cards I'll just flip through them your objective is a player of nuclear poker is actually up to you you get to pick what you want to do with the tools available but usually the first thing players want to use go nuclear first you need some uranium then you need some refinement remember all the stories about a computer viruses sabotage and centrifuges in Iraq it have Stuxnet and all that stuff refinement and then once you put your refinement use of warhead technology the rumor is that the Second World War warheads basically big male tubes with an explosive in one end of two lumps of uranium scary then you conduct a nuclear text all the stuff of at North Korea like remember the North Koreans recently did a nuclear test maybe a year ago two years ago and it was not very strong so it may be a fizzle yeah all of the stuff is in the news but are we synthesized in the whole story in our minds about what is going on generally no short-range missiles India and Pakistan short-range missiles that can blow each other up but they can't reach you yet long-range missiles Israel long-range missiles not that many nukes maybe a couple hundred warheads but they've definitely got the ability to lock those suckers decent length away ICBMs you know the kind of crown jewels of the nuclear era pretty much the same Rockets he used to put men on the moon you just insert of them all the way up there in space and exploring and become Captain

[17:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1050s) Kirk you come all the way down become member um second strike UK specializes in second strike our whole nuclear arsenal second strike submarines that swim under the sea and hide an end event of the UK's nuked the captain has a letter from the Prime Minister that tells them whether or not to kill whoever did it right and every prime minister writes a letter sealed in a safe behind there are 64 layers of security with all that stuff of multiple keys and you know kind of this thing if you have funny handshake do to prove your mates and all the rest of that but once you actually get through all you guys are letter from the Prime Minister telling you what to do know that everybody's dead and this is what we've got you know all that stuff about Scottish independence Trident nor the rest of that that is what this is about right it's our ability to kill people after we're all dead amazing super power right nuclear power in office he's right we completely forget what it is to be a nuclear superpower because we pretend that our friends a nuclear superpower is nobody's friend it's somebody's dad that's gone psychotic with a shotgun and is threatening to kill all the children in the event of a divorce right it's a completely psychotic thing America is currently the reigning nuclear superpower that are at least two more kind of sore up the Russians for sure the Chinese maybe the Israelis maybe I was going to talk about the biotech cards or bonus cards but that's just too scary every time we play with biotech everybody dies so what new we're Booker is is it's a game that's about as complex that players gin rummy the rules are tying me pick a card pickguard pick or pick a card get enough cards for nuclear test mmm now everybody knows you got bomb and that's quite realistic because that's all the seismic stuff here in North Korea then once you've got bomb if you've got short-range missile you can blow up one of your neighbors per turn if you've got long-range missile you can blow up one of anybody for terror and if you've got second strike and somebody blows you up you can pull them up back and you can either conceal or reveal your segments rank and if your superpower you can do anything the help you like right and you can see you know you just accumulate cart until

[20:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1200s) you've got some capability and then comes the fun part which is you decide how you're going to use it okay I'm a nuclear superpower a gun nuclear first as I got a great set cards everybody disarmer I'm going to blow you up right now and some players will try for them they'll try and become a single superpower so they can govern the world in the just fashion if everybody agrees that's what should happen game ends with one superpower nobody got new piece declared everybody wins maybe somewhat more so than others usually people don't start getting their head around this until they've had some strong hands and some comes I'll come back to them or later but the element all the creative expression in the game is how hard you work to try and get nuclear and once your nuclear how do you choose to use it and if you've got a bunch of kind of adult rational actors this should be a very boring game when you start playing with small children or guys who had a couple of drinks you really begin to get worried for the world okay most people don't really understand like until you've played for a while the little thing in your head that said well this is serious doesn't go click but it is you know fundamentally it's a game about absolute power the other thing I should mention nuclear poker drinking game every time you just do a shot em good vibes of nervous let's get an inkwell right or if you could do things like your nuclear poker but there's nuclear strip poker there is no shortage of the ways you can make this obviously our stuff feel realer to the people in the room okay Liam move it so why did be the new game i think i've explained pretty well why we did the game you've got pretty good idea hope thing plays right how is Ian did the design I did the rules and we sent off to games crafts from a printer stacks and it's just not difficult anymore if you want to take some kind of complicated idea and just make it into something you can just slap on people's desks at a completely manageable cost I cannot over recommend print-on-demand card decks because you're going to do something like an app you're going to have to do all that graphic design anyway and for the cost of the graphic design plus getting some printed you can prove the idea works in face-to-face settings and potentially get an our poke back end of them so for no more wave of the graphic design

[22:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1350s) resources you can get playable game for a large class of things and I think it's just a superdex wave you know communicating ideas it's really simple to single method cat rule change the way of what people saw this stuff right so we played a ton of nuclear poker what really alone first learn the two most dangerous at nuclear poker pairs I know our Ian who designed the decks children they are beasts right I'm what were you really say right um I watched a bunch of kids play nuclear poker discover and mutually assured destruction well we've got both seconds from got second strikes if I knew q unique me in finding qu you can oh there's nothing we can do what's good what do we do now today what do we do now you've discovered with world works children have your red lightsaber because you know this is the world through these kids are actually living in mutually assured destruction is how the world runs how old you have to be in this society before it really hits you the mutual assured destruction is actually what's going on I think you could make it all the way up until maybe your maid therapies work when was the last time anybody ever really thought but it's going to balance a power that was negotiated between the u.s. and the Russians USSR with nukes really before we were born for the most part right it was well established by 72 but I was born could be born 10 years earlier cuban missile crisis without razor's edge thing right we've completely forgotten how the world on to Iran's terrified and I'm the whole thing about small children trading uranium like waving cards I guess I'm uranium lots of your radio are you sure it ain't rocket ah it's amazing no reason I should show right second thing right really seriously right I'm tempted to do the next game about something like cancer and health insurance in America how's it was card game yeah evason focus i'm getting market developments somebody else help educate health education game why but it's basically rushing to work for health insurance amazing so people just freak out right because you know

[25:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1500s) the two times what I've seen people really genuinely emotionally crack were one very ideological very utopian anarchist kid who really got very angry that people would not cooperate in his plan to create a non-nuclear world these their attitude was just like yeah but what if you're not telling the truth make me right and once he hit that thing of if I don't go nuclear I have no negotiating power entire world moral went back which I consider to be a great victory and because if you grow up thinking that use of forces in some sense inherently wrong or inherently unnecessary it's really shocking to get into something which is kind of like the real world but no and discover the use of force might turn out to be if no legitimate was necessary and this is really core axiomatic stuff we cannot wait to think that we're nice people but were nice people who are protected by these awful tubes of death swimming around in the ocean under the nuclear reactors right yeah I know it was really bad terrible right second one I saw was somebody who discovered an intelligent but this is the best game we've ever played a nuclear program at intelligent pacifist strategy which was the discard every card that he got so he had nothing in his hand was no threat to anybody and was diminishing the global stockpiles of uranium missile technology and everything else right so towards the end of that game they wound up with a multiplayer mutual assured destruction at minus one component stand off the world winds up with no short range rocket technology and everybody's got everything they need except short-range rockets and there are two super powers that are attempting to manage the world for everybody's nuclear particle train and I have some short-range rockets and I attempt to trade them into a proper multilateral stable peace and the resulting nuclear exchange kills both of the super powers on me leaving the world in the configuration we'd never seen before which is they had no cards left to go nuclear wave and they had an enforced peace because they know rocket technology so imagine the world and watch out for a nuclear exchange you don't have enough of the necessary components make missiles and there if you get de facto peace but you could never go to the Stars and the thought hit me like a hammer oh you know proper like you'll be discovering new

[27:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1650s) equilibrium point I've never seen that right now and but in the process you know people get enormously emotionally invested because they realize that the game is a microcosm over very dark macrocosm right and it hits people right in the values quite a scary thing right quite a scary thing but how are we ever going to get a political discussion going why would enough to reexamine this threat if we are not consciously worrying about these things with our friends and our neighbors if we're not worrying about them on the internet if we all pretend that the stuff has gone away I guarantee you that if there's a future flare up with this stuff and all the last 10 or 15 years of war have been about that future flare up right in that event right I guarantee you the politicians will have no public mandate to do anything intelligent and the whole thing will be done behind closed doors because the public is not ready so the one thing that I learned from this is if you don't get the sodding public ready if we don't actually put this stuff back on the table we're going to get loads of decision-making when it comes and we can't wait for it right this right that's sort of queasy grim oh my God we're all gonna die healing right after about hour and a half two hours three hours playing nuclear poker there's a sort of wall that adult the kids don't hit they just sail blithely through give another five years sorry I'm such as the price in political awareness team down gently and the adults get per point really just have to stop playing and go like that right it's like something at the back of their mind it's like a fire that's died down it's getting raked with a spook and eventually light and it's just like oh my god I can't do this anymore and they have to stop right and sometimes it's days or weeks before they can play again something just goes sprink and at the end of that usually what happens it is a memory that people have repressed surfaces and it's something that happened just about everybody in my generation and quite a few younger which is the point you realized as a child that mutual assured destruction was actually real that the world was filled with nuclear bombs that are all pointing them each other and at any minute it could go flash and everybody would died

[30:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1800s) and most of us had that experiences kids it hit me when eyes are eight or nine something on the tallies Adam off we have the experience and then we get over it by decided not to think about this stuff anymore and the game reliably operates as a can opener to open that up it's like an astonishingly a responsible kind of gas dog therapy right here is this hidden thing that you knew that you shouldn't forget have a perfectly innocent looking deck cards on mmm right and I think that makes this a good game but then I'm a sociopath and I really think it's important because it's the only time that I've seen the game have that strong an impact on people both emotionally and politically it is proper disturbing to people and I think that it's important finally right without some sort of warm up and cool down a game that tends to produce such strong emotions is actually inherently kind of dangerous and it's a bit hard to have a proper cooling down process with a card game right how do you basically have a situation of which players are going to do something which is inherently extremely simple and easy but at the same time enormously terrifying dirty under scary like this thing will freak you the hell out more alive with emotion horror movies like tripping right and at some point you've got to find some we've put in a bounding box around the which says this is a scary game we're going to play the scary game afterwards we're actually good we kind of kind to each other in a way that allows us to internalize in process what we've learned from the scary game and after you've done that you can get competitive about it and you can wear lots of new strategies and you can really play with them but that sort of initiatory process where we go from being unaware of the truth aware of it again in a conscious way is like an initiation it's like the discovery of sex the discovery of drugs the discovery of violence there's a there's a crossing point where before on one side and then there on the other side up and once they're on the other side of it they're different condition different state of PA and it's the first time we've seen a game that had that impact on people I think some people got it from bioshock

[32:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=1950s) for quite a lot of people think bioshock was a real political awakening something that really changed how this all the world and and there might be other games out there but the need to build a social container around game which in some way encodes an almost religious truth you know the fact that we're all going to die and the fact that we've got the ability to kill all simultaneously are inherently very deeply connected and it's just interesting to me that we've can lost the social art of making a container around an experience which will permanently change your identity and so which kind of limped a woman through this but I wonder when the game is released in on a wider scale under how we do it any suggestions post and so that's it that's a nuclear program thank you any questions will never need to drink I could think about bringing a bottle of whiskey yes you can't play you kroger com we currently only have decent distribution in America we are probably going to try and figure out some way for Europeans to get hold X a lot more easily I suspect that we're going to take the game down again either after Halloween or before Christmas and have all think about what to do with it next because it clearly works but Paul is not necessarily we won't do this indefinitely Messiah interested about container tank after you know how you top and tail if you if you're looking at that in-depth experience all that's coming out of it you seeing that developing its finding a way of getting drawing it out that's an interesting challenge yeah I don't know how to do it it's an awful lot punch for altered so you come even if you put instructions on the tin about how people manage that shop you'd have to kind of have some other liar game liar so that's a that has a bigger picture getting people to be reflective you can almost imagine it's a crazy situation where you can only buy nuclear accord ex from authorized nuclear broker-dealers right so you have to hang around outside schools and well sorry this one's pretty

[35:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=2100s) first ones free you know like you've got play you've got play a few rounds at the dealer's house Yeah Yeah right until you've had the psychological crack and they behave ever in my house I thought it's game on a chain I mean I never play risk again and I probably will not be a video knows why won't my pipe organ you don't know someone until you play the game that's very true bad things happen hey I can recommend some phone numbers for some point therapy began go for that what I guys I went to school with went to university with his father was a diplomacy player and when he was in college so you know so we were sitting around playing diplomacy in Edinburgh with his father's tradition which was from his time at University here generation before which was you only ever played diplomacy as long as you had kitchen knife surrounding the board just to keep people in the right frame of mind yeah so will you be marketing this in game stores are we be like trying to get me that University different programs in it you know the discuss these issues or you want to bring it up like it's an educational tool or entertainment that make sense or all the above or how precisely all right we have no idea right because it the expectation that it would work this well for getting a plant material was not reasonable right you know I kind of thought you'd be game that my teacher some of the strategic analysis stuff and it'd be quite fun it's of intellectual exercise now you too can understand the Cuban Missile there the absolute kind of like headbutt force of the damn thing emotionally I don't really integrated as a possibility I never thought about work I never thought using designing for right it just appeared so now there's this question but what do you do with the thing that works that way I think it'd be fantastic for example there are still a bunch of anti-nuclear groups out there right I think would be very interesting if they played it I think it'd be very interesting if the military played it yeah you can imagine one two day workshop right it even if it was our so the way it's a visa versa if is you

[37:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=2250s) know I might get a copy of having my back pocket at some point and just say hey guys I've got you got ten minutes about this I want to run into the convention for a day in below 200 klicks mind and I like that was really you passed 200 people through a table Union at a convention be part due to the subversive ways probably good ways of getting it out there but I mean in my mind right ten years out it becomes hold people like playing some need to events after hours yeah right in or so the fact i can pack inequity and it's easy enough to do like a custom deck so we can serve the people of challenge cards or challenge coins we can do like you know custom back for then somebody cultural crazy hand alone I mean I don't know exactly how to do that but you see this or talk afterwards I've got Act I think I've got an idea for me in my mind I absorbed myself before it um yeah but you know if we don't bring these conversations back out right academic contexts you know and technical elite nerd contexts northers been taking equipment is maintained by the nerd right we need to take responsibility for that do the engineers have a political responsibility for the weapons or designer course just following the odds right huh yeah but I Bertram flight simulators for the US Air Force I didn't expect them to every use them for owning people that was the 90s it was unthinkable yeah i'm at the time I thought I was taking money from basically wasting taxpayers money but it was like you see America good cause except I'm Ted what happens oh so imagine if we had a language for talking about nuclear stuff that was spoken cross-culturally because players of the game all understood the nuclear strategy they interested the language the interesting the options and then when you start talking about there you've got canna cross cultural bridge in language even if it's very crude I mean this is what's interesting where I've been involved in games or obscene games work locate where there are nuclear weapons involved mm there's a there's a dumbing down there's a sanitization that goes on that makes them trivial and so gamers if you say I've got this game and you can happen you yeah we're going you something and without context it becomes

[40:00](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=2400s) it's like the pornography of violence you have the experience that context and this is what's I think lovely about this is it created you can quickly simply create context what this is about one folks that's the powerful at the had somebody suggest to me that after after a new kids used for countries taken out right you should have an egg timer that enforces minute of silence which I thought was quite interest was it there was a one nuclear warfare simulation that I thought was particularly good which is a board game a bald war game came out and 70s about NATO versus also packaging and they had a special rule for what happens when you clear war broke out which was to soak the map in light of fuel and set fire to which I thought made a lot of sense of its axial be okay if you want to stop nuclear war gotta go away you're gone it's all over us they sort of on maps no because nobody when you can if somebody has blown up our new game does it affect like if any clear bond was up in our world it would affect the neighboring countries yes are those players next to the new do they get affected at all we have not put that India so possibilities will include that M so we're going to do this so having players on either side lose cards represent and radiation damage is definitely possible and we could also do something particularly evil like having the prevailing wind go clockwise the only people downwind lose cards and yeah this is one aspect the other thing is if you get a situation where you've got a single superpower who just nukes everybody you know the world that they're going to be inheriting is going to turn out to be rather poisonous so how do we want a model that the tricky part about this is that if you introduce if you introduce an evaluation function for what constitutes victory people will play the evaluation function so if we say one point for surviving around one additional point for surviving around as a superpower or 1.4 be nuclear one more point to being super power then all the people will do is focus on the point system they played in the point and similarly with this notion kind of consequences for actions everything we do that complicates the rules means that

[42:30](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_e9JHcA4MWA&t=2550s) people will play slightly fewer rounds and it's the iteration that really drives home how fluid and complicated and just the dynamics are you know you play one round your superpower really play the next round you've behalf the rods uranium reserve before the next round when you have nothing at all and it's the rapid iteration through the rules that really drives home like oh my god this is actually there is a conversation no it's pointed back is the conversation that comes out either your internal world or with your friends other players if they are friends but that is the starting point is now I mean that may be talking about a container they may be something about having a conversation somehow what what all the support happened yeah still return yep so I guess on that so you play the first time you play with the group you play around do you been talk about him or you just shuffle and play another route and get through five rounds before you say a word about what's going on well how do you usually solicit it we just play and we play and we play until people crap you should become self-evident without conversation just no means people will say right I'm gonna need you well boomed out and just go but you know I tend not to make the link to the real world stuff until the emotional issues begin to laugh like whoa i just realized what we did we are very bad yes hmm but people and in terms of what they'll do or in terms of the fact that they will eventually go prank in terms what they do they tend to be very predictable so the people that are genuinely freaked out about nuclear weapons don't want them to be used it usually stick to that people don't often change their position in or change their strategy what occasionally happens is the doves will become hawks okay I've seen enough of this game to know the only way to get pieces to be the first superpower give me the weapons and I'll stop something else using and there's a trading dynamic repairs can support each other what and you know quite often you wind up with right you know these sort of ultra Dolf will turn into a hawk and then you'll wind up with the people that are playing the game for power versus the ultra knife which is actually one of the most interesting facts messy

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Continues in https://guptaoption.com/texts/776-2.md (part 2 of 2).
End of [776] Vinay Gupta presents "Nuclear Poker" to the London Educational Games Meetup, Sep 23, 2014, part 1 of 2. Its connections are at the top of this file; the map is https://guptaoption.com/llms.txt.