The Quiet Year is going to make ten years by the time this article is being released. It is a game dear to my heart, and whose influence cannot be denied: not only has influenced countless designers, has been starred in many a podcast or actual play, and has been a world-building tool for many a campaign. It is still so present and relevant that has been not once, but twice, picked as the best tabletop game people played in 2022.
This article started as a defense of one of the most derided mechanics of the game, but it became apparent over the course of writing it that The Quiet Year, perhaps more than any other game, has been a victim of influencing and mythologizing. Advertising, marketing, tertiary art-form associated with it and the dynamics of inluencer hype have shaped a different The Quiet Year in the minds of people and shaped the way people interact and play the game.
This made the article pointless the way I was thinking originally. How can I talk about Contempt when people don’t even know I’m talking about something from The Quiet Year as it is, rather than as an ideological figment produced by its own image as an icon of 10s design? So before we get into that, we try to do our thing and meet The Quiet Year at the level it is at , what it says it does, what it actually does and what works or not on the engine. Again, usual caveats of off-week less indepth critics apply1.
The Quiet Year
The Quiet Year introduces itself as a map-making game. As a game about community, the problems they face, the difficult-decisions they have to make and the landscape they must inhabit.
When that is all that The Quiet Year claims to be, it is remarkably on point at being about it says it is: “we” have been at war with the Jackals, and have got a year of peace; the Frost Shepherds will arrive Winter and “we” won’t survive the encounter. But we live in the now. The Quiet Year has one of the strongest systemic connections between framework and engine: the framework (the map) and the engine (the deck of cards) may as well be one, and when the game gets running, pretty much is, to the point you focus in taking your turn and forget they are there.
Each turn, a card is drawn, introducing problems. Then, ongoing projects advance; you may then take a single action, of which you may have up to 51 total. You can use that action to hold a discussion about a single topic, start a project or discover something new as a map element.
The only hiccup where is not that good at meeting its declared goals of community, mostly due to the Imperial, Anglophile assumptions about those it has internalized2, which I’m pretty sure most of its audience would not blink twice about. However, like every game, it has stress points that can cause issues3. One is communication: the game has very few rules other than the back and forth between map and deck, and almost all of them involve restricting communication. You are not supposed to incarnate characters but you are supposed to also be the community from a “bird’s-eye view4”, but at the same time you are supposed to only discuss the game when reading cards, assigning project clocks and when holding discussions — and those conversations are themselves limited by the rules.
This is a stress point because… that’s not very entertaining! That’s not really how humans interact, how communities organize, or more important to this point, not a very fun thing for people to do for three/four hours of their scarce free time. In my experience, which seems to be common according to social media, people tend to relax the communication restriction5; I only met a couple of other facilitators that stick to the rules as close as possible, and even then I have to take measures to avoid getting the table stuck in a fey mood6.
Contempt is usually the first thing thrown out of the game. It is a brilliant mechanic, that offers something better than discussion: what in cybernetics is called an algedonic signal: a simple, immediate feedback that carries no biases to the answer it demands and allows for actualization of planning synchronously. When Contempt is working with the engine and the limits on conversations, it is actually serving as high-speed conversation! It is, however, a stress point by itself and becomes a secondary one coupled with the human need for communication tendency to circumvent the restrictions on it. Do you know how rare this is on systems science? Extremely! It is such a joy to see it out in the wild.
Contempt loses its value as an algedonic signal by a baffling decision to not be a tracker of tensions within the community, but being a tool to act selfishly. Which goes against the engine and framework of a distant bird’s-eye view; what it means to act selfish like this? This causes it to chaff against the rest of the game, causing many groups to see it as a cumbersome obstacle to fun instead of a communication tool. Couple that to more people than not openly speaking around the game, and Contempt falls to the wayside as something often house-ruled out of the game together.
When these two stress points can cause people to modify/ignore about two-thirds of the rules, people are playing and reproducing a different The Quiet Year, it is going to change the art they made collaboratively, and the design they come up with is going to take more from this impression than from the actual game design.
Plain and simple they are “playing it wrong” a completely different game7.
Where does that takes us?
Cozy Town
Cozy Town may be one of the most recent The Quiet Year-likes and showcases pretty well the decay of Contempt. The game is less about the map-making and more about the community aspect of The Quiet Year. However, by taking one of its weakest features and making it where it builds its framework, the foundations of the town-hall are rotten.
Cozy Town is peak Imperial-cutesy, harmless, Wholesome (TM) that does not challenge any of the dominant hegemonic audience of tabletop roleplaying games, assumed to be white, middle class and liberal. It proposes to be a good Animal Crossing fun. However, while the game is quite toothless, it’s changes to The Quiet Year favor a less comfortable and safe play culture than the doomed post-apocalypse map-drama.
The game breaks the engine from the framework by divorcing stakes from time and projects; the events created by the deck skip all over the interesting parts, anything that may cause conflict, anything where the community may define themselves by how they tackle something to immediately in the aftermath of something been resolved. It has no interest in any of the questions that may emerge from an event. When the town takes part in a competition, it is a given it wins; when someone leaves town, what matters is what they take as they leave; when an accident happens, the only thing that matters is how they go back to health and the status quo restored.
When events don’t have any stake, or meaning, projects to lose it. In The Quiet Year, they are these tragic doomed things, of what a community values and cares and spends their limited time working on — and by doing so, they build themselves as community, and develop an idea as peoples. Without events that make the community look at itself, projects no longer can define a community in Cozy Town: you don’t make projects, you make celebrations.
Since one does not need to hold conversations, features just change purely on vibes, completely divorced from material conditions and labor8; alternatively, you can pick tourists to come in and somehow that improves conditions rather than alienating the existing community. It just is a thing that happens, you get the decide the general aesthetic elements of the gentrification process.
And now, the worst part: what they did to Contempt.
Contempt was a tool for communication. So it had to go for Cozy Town. Instead, you have Cozy Tokens. See, Contempt is a Bad Word for a Bad Feeling. Cannot have that, it is not Cozy. No, no, neglecting issues is the safe and comfortable thing. Unchallenged. Saccharine. Wholesome (TM). So let’s reverse the polarity on it, and immediately with the name change Contempt goes from yucky nasty to A Good.
YAY!
Except not. It becomes a fucking boot in your face. Whenever you feel cozy or are happy about how the game is going, take a Cozy Token. This engenders conformity: if you are uncomfortable with a decision, if you are even lukewarm and even if you just want to move on, you are pressured to be coooozy and say you love it! \ ^_^ /
Contempt was an algedonic signal. It allowed players to communicate how they feel and correct that as well as any safety tool and better than most. It was a good measurement of how much a community was a community — not by how many projects it has, and certainly not as how many parties it threw and tourists visited — by the number of Contempt tokens collected.
Cozy Tokens are not an algedonic signal. Baffling, in a game where nothing else has any stake or weight, is a resource and measure of success: the game rewards you for being cozy with whatever happens. Because if you don’t like the direction something is going, you have less say on how it goes because Cozy Tokens give you extra narrative control. The game punishes you for displaying discomfort, feeling unsafe, engaging in conflict to address that, difficult stuff and lack; be cozy, cute and charming or else.
Finally. Anti-safety tools.
Back To Quieter Times
We get Cozy Town from The Quiet Year as the mythology and influencer work about a game become more and more divorced from the paper intelligence within the game. As the tool is no longer a tool.
Again, this cannot be dismissed entirely as not a consequence of misunderstanding the powerful engine of The Quiet Year, and taking its weakest9 part: how it models community. When people read The Quiet Year as aspirational and/or the surrounding ideas in the current moment, it is quite the different thing from what we met at the introduction of the: a game about leftist organizing, debate — the thing all rules deliberately avoid — and a tool to understand other people.
If one sees it as such and goes back to the game, The Quiet Year is quite lacking. And if we take that it is about leftism and community at face value, we find out it does not have a high opinion of either leftism or people.
Before we get into that, let me take you aside to talk for a moment about models and frameworks. You may notice that I have not used any of my usual models; it is intentional, because I have been sitting on talking about the anti-safety of Cozy Tokens and how great Contempt is, but I had no fitting model. Still, the things I value on analysis (meeting it on its own terms, looking for how it reproduces itself, what it says it does and what it actually does) still come through because I’m doing my critic. So why the care to make sure it is adequate? Well, because you can easily apply a model to anything — that is, after all, what models are created to be good for, — but if you don’t adapt the model to what you are observing, you gonna deceive yourselves, and honestly, with a positivist approach can make anything say what you want it to say.
So, of course you can make The Quiet Year about leftist and community. That’s the straightforward part when you use it as model. The interesting part is what you say when you do that, and it if it is adequade, insightful, valuable modelling tool.
To put it bluntly, communities and organizing according to democratic and socialist principles does not work like that; humans do not work with that. This is not a problem with meeting The Quiet Year as the actual art-tool, rather than the myth: the players are not playing the community, they are not its members and the mechanics of the rules are not meant to replicate that — and they don’t. The only one that does attempt to do so — Contempt — actually works as an algedonic, homeostatic signal that actually models actual community-building.
Which is also the one that is dropped or circumvented as the myth grows.
If one sees its mechanics as representing not metapersons acting from a bird’s-eye, but at how the community and their organizers see themselves, they actually mimic a stadist, parliamentary point of view10: it is not a game about making a community.
It is a game about making a state.11
Taking this reading seriously, at best, makes The Quiet Year look like an Imperial parody of what leftism is: endless pointless meetings, arbitrary aimless projects, “people don’t matter under Communism, only the greater good”, machine-like nature in exchange of individual humanity, etc. You seen the propaganda, it is the dominant ideology of the hegemon: such is the paralyzing fantasy of majority consensus used to justify the status quo. At worst, this lens makes the work extremely necropolitical: the apocalypse hanging over them, and the community not a community but by those that excludes: it defines it identity over its vanquishing of the Jackals and the Frost Shepherds are the Other that threatens their very identity12.
Again, that is just not how people do things. People cannot avoid communicating, most decisions of daily life are done by the “communism of daily lives”, community is built from below and not from major projects13. Most institutions and communities rely on informal communication rather than formalized ones, making it the biggest challenge for proper human emancipation and cybernetics14. The selfish Contempt option then mirrors the myth of the "Tragedy of the Commons"15.
The main way for a community to decide on a thing is by doing the thing, be it from a small town managing its waste systems to an anarchist squad deciding on how to pay the bills; because things require labor and address needs, there is no making with decision making and those making the thing being on board since there is no coercion1617. The obsession with meetings codified in Hold a Discussion is a liberal fantasy imported into the left by managerial classes that wish to remain separated from actual life and material conditions18. It is, by itself, a historical aberration: across the world organic and tested means of cybernetic organization and marshaling of collective labor for the community through various modes of representation, rotating specializations, and synchronous control remain even to this day around my own people and our Basque cousins19.
Of course, that is not within The Quiet Year. That is only something the text starts saying when you push it as a tool modelling community, human relationships and leftism. But that’s the myth a decade in the making, and the criticism it opens itself to by claiming to do otherwise.
If we go back to The Quiet Year, and its modest claims, we find something else. Still one of the best map-making, whose engine remains as impressive and sturdy as it was ten years ago, that puts you into the shoes of metapersons observing the beautiful tragedy of people being people, finding meaning and caring for each other on their limited time on the dying world.
There is safety and comfort in Contempt; there is meaning and community in conflict. Take a shot and revisit The Quiet Year20.
Being an opinion is implicit to any critical analysis; these are not prescriptions and more rough off-the-cuff than my usual work; do not see the mention specific games or examples as any statement about them, they were just around and were part of the analytical process.
More on that later.
And I know they do, because this article started working from those and walking back, so I’m cheating here.
More on that later
It goes without saying that podcasts and actual plays featuring the game have to be have an entirely different relationship with the game rules.
Having a small break every round where we talk about literally anything else and “break character”, and substantial breaks between seasons are very important pressure valve releases that keep things going nicely while sticking to the rules as much as safely possible.
If you are reading us, you should know what we think about playing games “wrong” and how important that is to the art they create.
No added value, of course, making them worthless.
Which is no weakness at all when we meet The Quiet Year where it is at , as we will see soon. Of course, however, art is a living thing and it is quite clear which form it lives on as
Roberts, H. M. (1998). Robert’s rules of order.
Scott, J. C. (2020). Seeing like a state.
More on this on the article on Power Fantasies: Necropolitics.
Graeber, D. (2015). The utopia of rules : on technology, stupidity, and the secret joys of bureaucracy.
Beer, S. (1995). Brain of the Firm, 2nd Edition.
Appell, G. N. (1993). Hardin’s Myth of the Commons: The Tragedy of Conceptual Confusions.
Vanek, J. (1970.) The General Theory of Labor Self-Managed Economies
Nove, A. (1983). The Economics of Feasible Socialism
Baizidi, R. (2019).Paradoxical class: paradox of interest and political conservatism in middle class, Asian Journal of Political Science, 27:3, 272-285
Ascher, M. (2004) Mathematics Elsewhere
The Quiet Year may be a remarkable piece of art that still has a lot to teach us about collaborative storytelling and design. However, one may perhaps gain in asking that we cannot find any game in the last ten years that deserves to be the best game one may play the year 2022; there may be either something wrong with the games we have been making over the last years, or, who we let set reward incentives, who gets to design and who gets awarded and for what — and if this industry is worth preserving as it is.