The Watergate Scandal game (1973)

Following up the recent post on Irish Free State Monopoly here’s another game with historic resonance preserved for posterity. The Watergate Scandal dates from 1973 and cost a less than scandalous $2.99 at the time. It is a card game with political points made in a mild satirical fashion. 

The cast of characters

The penalties

Strictly Confidential Instructions: Enhanced by playing in an echoey carpark

Made in 1970s paranoid USA

This (Washington) post is dedicated to Alfie Dennen, creator of Evil Corps game, which features thinly veiled portraits of the likes of the current owner of the Washington Post. A post on the excellent Evil Corps will follow shortly. 

As with the vintage Irish Monopoly set, this card game also features in Google Arts & Culture thanks to The Strong National Museum of Play in Rochester, New York. 

For the youngsters among us, a brief reminder of what the Watergate Scandal was all about. It was the mother of modern political scandals, unravelling in Washington DC from 1971 to 1974. So it was ongoing when this game came out. It took down the grim administration of U.S. President Richard Nixon and led to his resignation.

The scandal was rooted in the administration’s hopelessly inept attempts to cover up its involvement in a break-in to the Democratic National Committee headquarters in the Watergate Office Building in D.C. on 17th June 1972. The five burglars were arrested and then the press (noticeably Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein of the Washington Post) and the Justice Department connected the cash found on the perpetrators to the Nixon re-election campaign committee. Witnesses at the subsequent Senate Watergate hearings testified that Nixon had approved plans to cover up administration involvement in the break-in and that there was a voice-activated taping system in the Oval Office hence all the tapping/bugging references in the game.

Later in 1973 the House commenced an impeachment process against Nixon. The Supreme Court ruled that the President had to release the Oval Office tapes to government investigators. The tapes cooked Nixon’s goose. The House Judiciary Committee charged him with obstruction of justice, abuse of power and contempt of Congress. Nixon resigned on 9th August 1974 before the house could impeach him and the Senate remove him from office. Tricky Dicky remains the only U.S. president to have resigned.

The name Watergate came to stand for a variety of clandestine and illegal activities by the Nixon administration, from bugging the offices of political opponents through ordering investigations of activist groups to using the FBI, CIA and IRS as political tools. Between Nam and Watergate the good ol’ US of A lost its trust and became the cynical and conspiracy-crazy place we know & love today.

Inspired by fork-tongued Nixon, The Watergate Scandal is basically a game of lying and bluffing (like many card games – and political activities). To see how to play it, this recent episode of Game Board Archaeology featuring Hunter and Rob Mattison captures it pretty well.

The game was produced in Illinois in Elk Grove Village, 20 miles northwest of Chicago, next to O’Hare International Airport. Its current population is some 35,000. Its original population were Potawatomi, speakers of an Algonquin language. They were booted off their land in the 1830s and relocated to Kansas, Nebraska, and Oklahoma. Stepping into the void created by men right up there with Tricky Dicky on the evil stakes came pioneer farmers from New England. Their civilisation reached its zenith when Elk Grove became the largest industrial park in the United States. The Watergate Scandal card game was the jewel in the crown of that mighty industrial estate.

Three years after the game we got the real silver lining of Watergate, William Goldman (scr.) and Alan Pakula’s (dir.) All The President’s Men, a film practically guaranteed to turn young viewers into journalists. 

All the President’s Men (1976) Dustin Hoffman & Robert Redford and a typewriter (youngfolk, it’s like a PC & printer, just no screen and often no electricity and if you get it wrong you just have to start all over again)

The Casting Game: Reservoir Dogs

To celebrate the arrival of Once Upon a Time in… Hollywood (which has grown on me since watching it last week) I’ve recast where it all began for Quentin, Reservoir Dogs

Jonah Hill

as

Nice Guy Eddie (Chris Penn)

Joss Ackland

as

Joe Cabot (Lawrence Tierney)

Dominic West

as

Marvin (Kirk Baltz)

Chris Isaak

as

Mr Blonde (Michael Madsen)

Malcolm Allison

as

Mr White (Harvey Keitel)

Paul Weller

as

Mr Orange (Tim Roth)

The Northern Line Game

‘The Northern Line Game’ was one of three street games I played with my friends in my 20s. ‘Secret & Obvious’ involved sitting at a cafe table with Stuart and first saying what was obvious about any selected passer-by and then revealing a secret of theirs (perhaps derived from clues in their appearance, perhaps belying how they project themselves). ‘The Name Game’ involved sitting on some steps with Katherine, usually in The City, and guessing the names of passers-by i.e. formulating rather fanciful handles inspired by their appearance. ‘The Northern Line Game’ was also played with Katherine, a fellow Northern Line native with a similar sensibility, now moved on from the shadow of Edgware Castle to Aspen, Colorado. You get on the black line in town and travel out to the suburbs, guessing exactly where each person will get off. The distinction between say a Hendon Central and a Colindale is a fine one but she was masterful in her judgments. Here’s a first stab at mapping out who is where on the Northern line these days. If you can help refine or improve the station names please feel free to add your thoughts below and I’ll amend the map. Also if you can help with the southern stretch which is out of my range…

It smells like …victory

I’m getting into the swing of the lovely Twitter-based word game Artwiculate – born in Belfast, thought of and designed by atto, improved and realised by Johnston North.

Diaphanous was one of my first gos at Artwiculate. I tried one a couple of nights earlier but it was only 5 minutes before the end of the 24 hours and it didn’t register – the word was Quagmire. “I admire a good quagmire, something you can really get stuck into”

The challenge of writing well in 140 characters is something else you can really get stuck into – it has something of the unities of classical drama about it. Some people really seem to shine at it like Russell no T Davies of Wired UK.

I came across Artwiculate because I’m always on the look-out for inspirational word stuff in my capacity as a non-exec (NED – another word game I indulge in is collecting TLAs) of Wordia, the video dictionary which is a quagmire in itself once you immerse yourself in all those lovely words and definitions like Vibrato, Neologism and Flannel.

Update 12.01.10

Some of my recent Artwiculate entries:

A John Osborne one…

The Avocado Bathroom Suite – a drama by Kitsch N. Sink. Jimmy looks back in anger on a miserable visit to Habitat with posh cow Alison.

A Steely Dan one…

Yesterday’s Ephemeral is today’s Ephem: no static at all

An Evelyn Waugh/Men at Arms one…

Lissome up, men, I want this march lithe, quick and graceful – by the left, lithe, quick and graceful march! left, right, left, right…

MindGym

Hooked up the other day, after a dog’s age, with designmeister Jason Loader (who has just set up on his own as Yeah Love). We made MindGym together way back when – a game about creative thinking. Jason has been kind (and patient) enough over the weekend to dig out some of the old design assets from a moribund machine…

MindGym: The Changing Room

MindGym: The Pool of Ideas

MindGym: The Pool of Ideas - Deep End

MindGym: The Think Tank

MindGym: The Games Room

MindGym: Spy sim

There are some more here

All these 3D environments were designed by Jason Loader (at a time when they typically took over 18 hours to render, so a bit on the frustrating side if you didn’t get it right first time).  MindGym was a concept I came up with at Melrose Film Productions in the wake of making a series of films about Creativity.  I nicked the title from Lenin or one of those Ruskies, who used the term with reference to chess. So Jason and I started work on it, then the pair of us hooked up with NoHo Digital to realise a bastard creation of great energy. Rob Bevan (now at XPT) did the interface design and programming, skilfully combining this kind of rich 3D with elegant 2D inspired by You Don’t Know Jack. His creative partner Tim Wright led the writing team – him, Ben Miller and me – it was a comic script with serious stuff underlying the gags. I couldn’t help chuckling recently when I heard someone refer to Rob & Tim as the Jagger & Richards of new media. Talking of which, Nigel Harris did the music and sound design – excellent audio was one of our explicit creative goals, again inspired by YDK Jack. And talking of Jack the lads, Paul Canty (now of Preloaded) and Mike Saunders (Kew Digital), who were just starting out, were also among the production team. The studio was infested with red ants (possibly flesh-eating), but it didn’t distract us from the task at hand…

Paper Scissors Rock of Ages

Paper Scissors Rock of Ages #3 – Dance Stance

Dance Stance

Intro to the game

And one to celebrate the 45th anniversary of Martin Luther King’s ‘I have a dream…’ speech:

We can not walk alone

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

Paper Scissors Rock of Ages – a new game

Here’s a new game – my first try. Feel free to join in…

paper scissors rock of ages 1

UPDATE: And here’s my second stab at it… (just finished reading Hitler’s Peace by Phillip Kerr set at the Tehran Conference in 1943)

paper scissors rock of ages 2

If you want to have a go, you can join in here or in the Comments or wherever you like putting pictures.

Meme Myself and I

Never done one of these meme things before but who am I to deny the luverly, busy & lively LJB. So here’s the deal: You list 8 facts/habits/things people may not know about you. At the end of the post, you tag 8 people and let them know via their blog comments (LJB cheated and only did half her tagging duties but then that’s where I peter out too so we’ll let that go). Seems like a cheap trick to drive traffic to your blog or turn you into a sheep (note to self: tag Herd) or am I just being silly&grumpy and it’s all just a big harmless game, talking of which it reminds me of a cafe game I used to play with my good friend and best-man Stuart called Secret & Obvious – (1) go to a cafe (2) find a table with a good view of the pavement, preferably outdoors (3) for each passer-by say something Obvious about them (4) then something Secret (5) alternate turns with your fellow player – that’s it, hours of good clean giggly fantastical fun.

So here we go…

(1) My first published photos were in An Phoblacht, the journal of Sinn Fein (they were of Gerry Adams and Ken Livingstone – who coincidently I saw in Strutton Ground at lunchtime today being accosted by a voter, occupational hazard I guess but it must be a pain if you’re trying to get somewhere on time) – so that’s the Ken & Gerry show in Conway Hall, how do I get myself into those weird situations?

(2) My cat is called Tommy Boy after the New York record label – the CD was behind his head when we were trying to come up with a suitable name

(3) I collect pictures of Lost Gloves – God knows why but it’s a bit addictive – if you think I’m weird, other people try to pair up my One Lost Gloves with matching partners!

(4) My grandfather worked for Picture Post (I have a lovely photo of him at work just across the room now taken by Thurston Hopkins) – he was a VSP (Very Special Person – just made that up but you can’t have too many Three Letter Acronyms)

(5) I’m a pantheist

(6) I have a lot of books and in my bookcase I have two Shelves of Honour – these include Tom Jones, The Complete Plays of Joe Orton, Clockers, The Riddle of the Sands, Black Box, Northanger Abbey, The Mystery of Edwin Drood, and a special section devoted to old copies of Ulysses

(7) I have put a sign above the front door, one of the old style Irish road signs, saying Donegal / Dun na nGall 1 which means one mile but I read as one day – whenever things get tough, it’s only 1 day to get to Donegal – I love North-West Ireland and my wedding reached Ramelton (The Bridge Bar) on Day 3

(8) I have 8 watches – one for every day of the week plus one for good measure – the best one is a 1920s mechanical digital one, but it stopped working properly on my wedding day, which is odd as it’s not electronic

So who do I tag? maybe that’s what the blogroll is for. I reckon it’s going to have to be Mark Earls of Herd fame (for reasons mentioned above); Alfie (likes playing and what else is he going to do in his sick bed); Jule (usually game for a laugh): Russell (has plenty of idle time in caffs on his hands); Oli B (somebody might as well work out how to make money out of it). That will do, enough already.

[Picture courtesy of Thurston Hopkins/Getty Images]