In the past, I’ve commented that it is my belief that the political programs of the future are going to borrow from game design. This is, perhaps obviously, driven by my interest in how tabletop games are designed and played: it’s also an assertion that might seem baffling to anyone who has looked at a game of Dungeons and Dragons from the outside and seen people rolling dice to persuade an imaginary fish to do some kind of action, or something similarly absurd.

But if you scratch the surface of indie game design and move a few steps outside of the mainstream, you’ll find that these games are well-crafted sets of overlapping procedures that encourage those participating in them to generate a shared fiction that no one individual involved could have on their own – which is not to say that it’s necessarily better, but it is an important and valuable experience to those involved in it.

This is because these games are – as I’ve commented – a form of art that takes the social contract as their medium. As such, there are ways of altering, stretching, and fine-tuning this contract that are developed in the course of designing these games.

However, without a corresponding analytical tool, one would be flying blind. This column is an attempt to (begin to) rectify that.

Recently, I finished reading Johan Huizinga’s Homo Ludens, and that provided me with a starting point. He defines “play” as follows:

Play is voluntary; even when coerced, it can only be a simulacrum of play. (p. 7)
Play takes place – in an important sense – “outside” of regular life, and is thus – in a likewise important sense – is “unreal”. (p. 8)
Play is separated from regular life in time and space. (p. 9) [sometimes called “the magic circle” by theorists.]
Play is generative of “order” – that is, it creates a utopian space where all things are potentially legible to the participants to one degree or another (p. 10)
It is connected to no material interest, and no profit can be achieved by it (p. 13)

I will draw more from the text and from each of these as I go on.

Of these, the last of them seems to be roughly similar to the Parallel Postulate of Euclid, at least in form, if not in content: it is independent of the others, and is potentially insupportable – present more for the taste of the person formulating the criteria, rather than due to an objective answer.

This is a worthwhile consideration, because in Huizinga’s exploration, he occasionally brings in gambling as an important point – meaning that the door is open to play that generates material benefit. There are, of course, issues with this: is a soccer match between children, undertaken in their free time, the same sort of activity as the semifinals of the World Cup?

I don’t know. It’s an ontological question, and I’m fundamentally interested in other questions right now. However, I cannot pass by this question without commentary. I do, personally, believe that student athletes should be paid for their efforts, which means that I’m invested in the fifth postulate above being more negotiable.

A photograph of the reconstructed Mesoamerican ballgame, taken from Wikipedia — from de:User:Sputnik and used under a CC BY-SA 2.5 license.

An intuition has struck me for a long time that many human activities that are not directly survival-oriented are – on some level – games. Of course, games can be survival-oriented, as is famously the case with the Mesoamerican ballgame, where – some of the time, and often not to the same degree as popular consciousness would have it – human sacrifice was an element in the proceedings. We may also look at the interactions of people in the workforce and see a certain amount of “gamification” at play (my own intuition is, largely, that this is forced by those for whom the activity is already somewhat game-like in that it is on some level non-serious.) Gamification, of course, is the process by which activities separate from play have game-like elements imposed on them: the introduction of “scoring”, competition, achievements, and team-based cooperation.

It is the first of these elements which seems significant to me: what separates most of what can be termed “games” from simply “play” is the presence of a score. This introduces what a friend and classmate of mine, Byron Gillman, once referred to as “the bureaucratic pleasure of watching numbers get bigger.”

A screenshot of one popular game, “cookie clicker”, notable because it briefly had some very weird anti-masking material peripherally included in 2020. The maker acknowledges that it was in poor taste.

As an aside, this is the raw attraction of so-called “clicker” type games: programs where the primary interaction is clicking a button to make a score get bigger – and then accepting deductions of that score to make your click work twice as much, or to automatically click the button once every few seconds or second, with the end result being that the “game” plays itself to a greater and greater degree as time goes on. This is the game of the age of Depressive Hedonia: the player is superfluous to the play experience, and if any enjoyment is being had, it is not being had by a subject.

However, most games, with the scoring stripped out, do not really default to “play”, but to a kind of toy – there is an in-built expectation for how it is to be interacted with and which conditions the user for a particular kind of behavior. I am reminded of the following section from Roland Barthes’s “Toys”:

It is not so much, in fact, the imitation which is the sign of an abdication, as its literalness: French toys are like a Jivaro head, in which one recognizes, shrunken to the size of an apple, the wrinkles and hair of an adult. There exist, for instance, dolls which urinate; they have an oesophagus, one gives them a bottle, they wet their nappies; soon, no doubt, milk will turn to water in their stomachs. This is meant to prepare the little girl for the causality of house-keeping, to 'condition' her to her future role as mother. However, faced with this world of faithful and complicated objects, the child can only identify himself as owner, as user, never as creator; he does not invent the world, he uses it: there are, prepared for him, actions without adventure, without wonder, without joy. He is turned into a little stay-at-home householder who does not even have to invent the mainsprings of adult causality; they are supplied to him ready-made: he has only to help himself, he is never allowed to discover anything from start to finish. The merest set of blocks, provided it is not too refined, implies a very different learning of the world: then, the child does not in any way create meaningful objects, it matters little to him whether they have an adult name; the actions he performs are not those of a user but those of a demiurge. He creates forms which walk, which roll, he creates life, not property: objects now act by themselves, they are no longer an inert and complicated material in the palm of his hand. But such toys are rather rare: French toys are usually based on imitation, they are meant to produce children who are users, not creators. (emphasis added)

This seems significant, because play – as Huizinga defines it above – is ultimately generative. It creates an order that would not otherwise come into being: what we see in Barthes’s piece is a lament about the narrowing of the horizons available to French children in the middle of the twentieth century. They are not so much being allowed to play as they are being encouraged to engage in what might be called a kind of “socratic” play. The doll or the model car has a specific way that the user is encouraged to engage with it in.

This might be the only positive context for the adjective “demiurgic” I’ve run across.

Breaking from this prescribed style of play, insisting that the baby-doll is a prison guard or an opium dealer, or that the model car is actually a mars rover or remote-operated bomb, is a kind of early perversion (note: in this context, I feel the need to specify that I am using “perversion” in a non-sexual way, read my prior piece if you don’t understand): a willingness to break the horizons narrowed about the toy’s usage and asserting the demiurgic primacy of the user’s imagination.

It is, in a way, the authority of the toy that this perversion undermines. There is always a dialogic interaction with such things, and the user can decide to throw off the authority of the toy at any time. However, this leads to a curious thing that I feel needs to be maintained, a postulate that Huizinga fails to acknowledge: play conditions our behavior.

Perhaps this is an extension of the fourth postulate, but I am reluctant to extend it so far. Of course, we also need to understand that children aren’t the only ones conditioned by it, despite the fact that one can’t really discuss toys without children being part of the mental landscape: Huizinga clearly places most ritual and religious observances in the realm of “play” – and he makes a rather firm comparison between play and ritual magic in his use of the term “magic circle”, which was picked up and expanded upon by Professor Edward Castronova in Synthetic Worlds: The Business and Culture of Online Games, and expanded on by Roni Linser, Nina Ree-Lindstad, and Tone Vold in the conference presentation “The Magic Circle – Game Design Principles and Online Role-play Simulations” (admittedly, Linser, Ree-Linstad, and Vold reference a pair of scholars named Katie Salen and Eric Zimmerman. I have yet to find their work, but will be looking into it.)

All of this is hyper-focused on not just video games but online video games. I’m going to take the concept in a different direction. The “magic circle” is a boundary that is selectively permeable to players. In a sport, the game takes place on a field, court, or pitch, delineated visually – this is fairly simple. In a board game, it takes place upon the board. In a role-playing or card game, it takes place at the table – and the intrusion of an outsider into the game (the Yiddish word “kibbitzer” is sometimes used for such an intruder) disrupts the functioning of the game.

However, the magic circle is not necessarily solely delineated in space and time to the same degree as Huizinga might have thought: take, for example, people engaged in Alternate Reality Games.

You must understand, seeing this in 2008 nearly killed me.

An Alternate Reality Game (ARG) is triangulated between a role-playing game, a scavenger hunt, and an academic decathalon: participants find a piece of media that is intended to act as a “Trailhead” – my personal favorite of these, though I never participated was “This is My Milwaukee” (link goes to a mirror of the original youtube video.) In the Trailhead, there is a second step: a phone number to call, a website to look at, and all of this leads to a series of clues and tasks that must be completed to proceed. As far as I can tell, the earliest of these was Ong’s Hat (1993), but it evolved into a much different form by the time that The Beast (2001) and I Love Bees (2004). Largely, these are used as an advertising gimmick, but there are some interesting developments separate from that which I can’t really comment upon, though I might recommend the Digital Folklore podcast as a good way to learn more.

ARGs seem to function in a very different way; their whole conceit is the dissolution of the magic circle, or perhaps its inscription upon the player – however, it’s important to note that many ARGs are directly managed by a “puppet master”, and this individual or group is tasked with keeping the players following a particular trail of breadcrumbs. In this way, the “magic circle” is more of a “magic funnel”, pulling the participants in a set direction, towards a pre-determined conclusion. In short, while reactive, ARGs are deterministic games – maybe not to the same extent as “Candyland”, but certainly more than most games.

Generally speaking, it’s good that ARGs use this structure, because the absence of a puppet master leads to some rather horrifying outcomes – as can be seen through the number of think-pieces that compare Qanon to Alternate Reality Games. What seems like a game at first can quickly become a mutant epistemology that causes you to burn away your relationships.

This is where the second postulate comes in: a conspiracy theory can be seen as a game where the magic circle has been dissolved and a piece of the nonsensical world of the game remains lodged inside of you. This is part of why it’s so difficult to dissuade intelligent true believers in conspiracy theories – they marshal all of their resources to defend the unreality that they have come to embrace. By this logic, cults present a mirrored problem – they tend to target the intelligent and established – not just because doctors and lawyers are wealthy enough to make them juicy targets for a grifter, but because they will do everything in their power to reinforce the cult’s Magic Circle. In both cases, it’s a failure of the permeability of the Magic Circle, either becoming too permeable (in the case of conspiracy theories) or too impermeable (in the case of cults.)

In either case, the boundary between the imagined reality of the game and the consensus reality outside of the game breaks down. Of course, what lies outside of the game is also an imagined reality – it’s socially constructed, but it’s agreed upon by a larger number of people. What lies outside of the game, here, is another, larger game. In this way, the bursting of the small magic circle is the socio-cultural equivalent of an infected cell breaking and releasing its viral payload.

Which might indicate that the second, third, and fourth of Huizinga’s principles are deeply enmeshed: we bracket off moments and sites of irrationality, and they become game-like.

Is this whole quote necessary? No. But I wanted to hit exactly 5.5k words before captions. Also: Doesn’t Emil Cioran look like Henry from *Eraserhead*. You know, the Jack Nance character?

Edgar provides the following translation of from Cioran’s A Brief History of Decay, taken from Editions Gallimard, pp. 125-127, originally in French:

As one arrives at the limit of monologue, at the confines of solitude, one invents – in the absence of another interlocutor – God, the supreme pretext of dialogue. However you name Him, your madness is well disguised, and… everything is permitted to you. The true believer is scarcely distinguished from the madman; but his folly is legal, admissible; he’ll end up in an asylum if his aberrations were purged of all faith. But God covers them, renders them legitimate. The pride of a conqueror pales in the face of the ostentation of devote who addresses the Creator. How can one stand such things? And how could modesty itself be a virtue of the temples when a decrepit crone, who imagines the Infinite within her grasp, lifts herself up by prayer to a level of audacity to which no tyrant has ever pretended?
I’d sacrifice the empire of the world for a single moment in which my joined hands might implore the great One Responsible for our enigmas and banalities. For all that moment constitutes the current quality – and, like the times, official – of whatever belief. But the one who is truly modest repeats to himself: “Too humble to pray, too inert to cross the threshold of a church, I resign myself to my shade, and do not want to offer a surrender to God before my prayers.” And to those who offer him immortality, he responds: “My pride isn’t unfailing: it’s resources are limited. You think, in the name of faith, to vanquish your self [moi]; in fact, you want to perpetuate it in eternity, this passage here doesn’t satisfy you at all. Your pride exceeds in its refinement all the ambitions of the century. What dream of glory, compared to yours, wouldn’t reveal itself to be trickery and smoke? Your faith is naught but a delusion of grandeur tolerated by the community, because it borrows the ways of transvestites; but you push your unique obsession: fond of the timeless, you persecute the times that it disperses. The beyond alone is spacious enough for your lust; the earth and its instants seem to you too fragile. The megalomania of the convent surpasses anything every imagined in the sumptuous fevers of the palace. That which doesn’t consent to its annihilation is a mental illness. And the believer, out of everyone, is the least disposed to consent. The will to endure, pushed so far, horrifies me. I refuse the unsanitary seduction of an indefinite Self. I want to wallow in my mortality. I want to stay normal.”
(Lord, grant me the faculty never to pray, spare me the insanity of all adoration, drive from me this temptation to love which delivers me forever to You. Let the void stretch between my heart and heaven! I wish on no account for my deserts populated with your presence, my Siberias melted under your sun. More alone than you, I want my hands pure, counter to yours, soiled forever in kneading the land and meddling in the affairs of the world. I don’t ask anything of your stupid omnipotence except respect for my solitude and my torments. I didn’t want anything to do with your words; and I fear the madness which makes me hear them. Dispense me from the miracle garnered before the first instant, the peace that you could not tolerate and which you incited to preserve a breach in the void to open this fun-fair of time, and to condemn me thus to the universe – to humiliation, and the hatred of being.)

As Cioran argues here, religion is a socially acceptable way for people to behave irrationally in public,la and it’s not hard to see certain similarities between games and religious rituals, to the point where it seems to me that the only primary arguments against them could be that religion is something solemn and games are – by definition – not. Of course, one only has to point to the wild excesses of Heathen Jule, Pagan Saturnalia, Christian Carnival, and Jewish Purim, as well as the self-serious pageantry of the Olympics to feel that the distinction is a bit overstated.

The rituals of any faith have their own logic, their own magic circle set off from real life, and many people behave differently in their day-to-day lives than they do when observing their rituals. Other people, however, largely do not. The game of faith shapes their behavior, and they carry some of the altered reality of the game out of the magic circle of the religious ritual. In many ways, it can work like the suppression of the “normal mode” of reality that Merlin Sheldrake noted in Entangled Life as one of the primary effects of psychedelic mushrooms.

If I go two weeks without talking about the Satanic Panic, my anxiety gets worse. Consider it mentioned.

In many ways, games are psychedelic experiences: you are carried out of the normal mode of reality, but you can set it aside – in this way, properly handled, it becomes psychedelia with a safe word (and we can just point back to the fears about games not letting their players go, whether in the cyberspace of films such as ExistenZ, or in the steam tunnels of the terrible Tom Hanks movie Mazes & Monsters, based loosely on the popular understanding of an incident involving Dungeons and Dragons in 1982.)

Okay, let’s wind back to the starting point and try this again. Let’s look at Huizinga’s original wording. For the second postulate:

A second characteristic is closely connected with this, namely, that play is not ‘ordinary’ or ‘real’ life. It is rather a stepping out of ‘real’ life into a temporary sphere of activity with a disposition all of its own. Every child knows perfectly well that he is ‘only pretending’, or that it was ‘only for fun’ . . . This "only pretending" quality of play betrays a consciousness of the inferiority of play compared with "seriousness", a feeling that seems to be something as primary as play itself. Nevertheless, as we have already pointed out, the consciousness of play being "only a pretend" does not by any means prevent it from proceeding with the utmost seriousness, with an absorption, a devotion that passes into rapture and, temporarily at least, completely abolishes that troublesome ‘only’ feeling. Any game can at any time wholly run away with the players. The contrast between play and seriousness is always fluid. The inferiority of play is continually being offset by the corresponding superiority of its seriousness. Play turns to seriousness and seriousness to play. Play may rise to heights of beauty and sublimity that leave seriousness far beneath. (p. 8)

Okay, so, there’s always an interplay of seriousness and play – it can be all-consuming, and at a certain point of this consumption, the switch flips and what was something undertaken on a lark or a laugh or whatever becomes the only thing that matters. However, this doesn’t change the fact that the field of play is, in many ways, the product of the rigor of chess masters and not of angels.

The reference to Borges (“Enchanted by its rigor, humanity forgets over and again that it is a rigor of chess masters, not of angels,” from “Tlon, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius”) is entirely intentional, because that story – a horror story about social construction – is essentially about this: people being entirely consumed by a dream invented by other human beings.

The Third Postulate:

Play is distinct from ‘ordinary’ life both as to locality and duration. This is the third main characteristic of play: its secludedness, its limitedness. It is ‘played out’ within certain limits of time and place. It contains its own course and meaning.
Play begins, and then at a certain moment it is ‘over’. . . more striking even than the limitation as to time is the limitation as to space. All play moves and has its being within a playground marked off beforehand either materially or ideally, deliberately or as a matter of course. Just as there is no formal difference between play and ritual, so the ‘consecrated spot’ can not be formally distinguished from the play-ground. The arena, the card-table, the magic circle, the temple, the stage, the screen, the tennis court, the court of justice, etc., are all in form and function play-grounds, i.e. forbidden spots, isolated, hedged round, hallowed, within which special rules obtain. All are temporary worlds within the ordinary world, dedicated to the performance of an act apart. (p. 9 – 10)

This is the Magic Circle principle, discussed above, and it is at this point that the definition of play is at its most ritualistic – the demarcation in time brings to mind liturgical calendars and the horological rhythms of religious communities, as well as the difficulty of scheduling times to get together with friends to play a game of poker or a role-playing game, which, famously, either doesn’t happen or develops into a regular ritual that is engaged in.

I feel I’ve gone into a reasonable amount of depth on this, so I will let what I’ve already said stand.

Finally, the fourth postulate:

Inside the play-ground an absolute and peculiar order reigns. Here we come across another, very positive feature of play: it creates order, is order. Into an imperfect world and into the confusion of life it brings a temporary, a limited perfection. Play demands order absolute and supreme. The least deviation from it ‘spoils the game’, robs it of its character and makes it worth less. The profound affinity between play and order is perhaps the reason why play, as we noted in passing, seems to lie to such a large extent in the field of aesthetics. Play has a tendency to be beautiful. It may be that this aesthetic factor is identical with the impulse to create orderly form, which animates play in all its aspects. The words we use to denote the elements of play belong for the most part to aesthetics, terms with which we try to describe the effects of beauty: tension, poise, balance, contrast, variation, solution, resolution, etc. Play casts a spell over us; it is ‘enchanting’, ‘captivating’. It is invested with the noblest qualities we are capable of perceiving in things: rhythm and harmony. (p. 10)

Here, I am struck by comparison to two other anthropologist’s work, where it interfaces with play and its capacity to generate order.

The “creation of order”, for me brings to mind the process of making the world legible that James C. Scott describes states as engaging in throughout the book Seeing Like a State. The imposition of regularized, universalized forms of knowledge over the local, experiential modes of understanding the world – techne vs. metis – is just the sort of order-creation that Huinzinga describes here. One could see a “game” as play that has been made legible.

On the other hand, I’m going to pull several paragraphs from The Utopia of Rules where David Graeber directly comments upon Huizinga’s work and connects it to his project in that book – namely, explaining the origins and purpose of bureaucracy:

Bureaucracies create games—they’re just games that are in no sense fun. But it might be useful here to think more carefully about what games really are, and what it is that makes them fun in the first place. First of all, what is the relationship between play and games? We play games. So does that mean play and games are really the same thing? It’s certainly true that the English language is somewhat unusual for even making the distinction between the two—in most languages, the same word covers both. (This is true even of most European languages, as with the French jeu or German spiele.) But on another level they seem to be opposites, as one suggests free-form creativity; the other, rules.
The great Dutch sociologist Johann Huizinga wrote a book called Homo Ludens that is ostensibly a theory of play. In fact, the book makes for a very bad theory of play, but it’s not at all a bad theory of games. According to Huizinga, games have certain common features. First, they are clearly bounded in time and space, and thereby framed off from ordinary life. There is a field, a board, a starting pistol, a finish line. Within that time/space, certain people are designated as players. There are also rules, which define precisely what those players can and cannot do. Finally, there is always some clear idea of the stakes, of what the players have to do to win the game. And, critically: that’s all there is. Any place, person, action, that falls outside that framework is extraneous; it doesn’t matter; it’s not part of the game. Another way to put this would be to say that games are pure rule-governed action.
It seems to me this is important, because this precisely why games are fun. In almost any other aspect of human existence, all these things are ambiguous. Think of a family quarrel, or a workplace rivalry. Who is or is not a party to it, what’s fair, when it began and when it’s over, what it even means to say you won—it’s all extremely difficult to say. The hardest thing of all is to understand the rules. In almost any situation we find ourselves in, there are rules—even in casual conversation, there are tacit rules of who can speak in what order, pacing, tone, deference, appropriate and inappropriate topics, when you can smile, what sort of humor is allowable, what you should be doing with your eyes, and a million other things besides. These rules are rarely explicit, and usually there are many conflicting ones that could, possibly, be brought to bear at any given moment. So we are always doing the difficult work of negotiating between them, and trying to predict how others will do the same. Games allow us our only real experience of a situation where all this ambiguity is swept away. Everyone knows exactly what the rules are. And not only that, people actually do follow them. And by following them, it is even possible to win! This—along with the fact that unlike in real life, one has submitted oneself to the rules completely voluntarily—is the source of the pleasure.
Games, then, are a kind of utopia of rules. (p. 190 – 191)

This distinction – between play and games – is essential, primarily because there is a subtle difference between the two that the anglophone speaker draws. Play is open-ended, games are directed. Play is generative, games are demarcated.

It seems to me that many activities in human society can be likened to both play and games, and that a deeper understanding and more nuanced approach of these actions can be created by bringing in a critical eye sharpened upon the problems of game design. This is not me advocating for “gamification”, but me suggesting that a ludo-analytic lens could potentially be useful.

Normally long before I get here, I ask the question “so what”? But we’re at almost 5,000 words (admittedly, many are from quotes), which is the amount I normally make my students write in the course of a semester, and it’s just a bog-standard Wednesday (Happy Ides of March?)

But I’d be remiss if I didn’t offer at least a little “so-what” to you, so let me promise not to top 5.5k words and I’ll continue this theme next week. This rule is arbitrary; it’s a game.

Part of what led me to try to develop this tool is the idea that one could analyze the laws and Constitution of the United States as a game design document. I guessed that we could tell some interesting things about how USAmerican society functions by doing so. This is sort of the inverse of the piece I did where I analyzed Tabletop RPGs as toy political economies: could we look at a modern nation-state as a kind of game grown to leviathan scale?

You have players occupying different roles – citizens, resident aliens, bureaucrats, senators, police, all of that – and they are all working together to generate this game we call the United States of America. It has a “magic circle” – we call it a border, but if you think that American power is limited to that circle alone, you need to bone up on your history (we could extend this out and discuss a “game” of international relations – and in the 19th century, this term the interplay of power between Britain and Russia was called the Great Game.)

From this standpoint, political parties become teams, and we’re already primed to look at them that way due to the way that the media tends to cover political races (oh, look, another game.) However, the behavior of these teams in a ludic context reveals something: as Huizinga notes, “The player who trespasses against the rules or ignores them is a ‘spoil-sport’. The spoil-sport is not the same as the false player, the cheat; for the latter pretends to be playing the game and, on the face of it, still acknowledges the magic circle. It is curious to note how much more lenient society is to the cheat than to the spoil-sport. This is because the spoil-sport shatters the play-world itself. By withdrawing from the game he reveals the relativity and fragility of the play-world in which he had temporarily shut himself with others. He robs play of its illusion-a pregnant word which means literally ‘in-play’ (from inlusio, illudere or inludere).Therefore he must be cast out, for he threatens the existence of the play-community.” (p. 11)

What you see between the two parties can be understood as a meta-ludic dispute: the Republicans may be cheats, but anarchists, communists, illegal immigrants, transgender people, and other marginal figures like them are spoil-sports because they threaten the logic upon which the system is founded, and within the context of the game, it is the continuation of the game that is paramount: oftentimes, the attempts to exclude these individuals from “polite society” or similar constructions takes the form of technically-illegal violence, but because it works on the logic of defending the magic circle or the emergent order of play, it is considered to be in the spirit of the game by those who enact it. Those who disapprove of it but remain within the game often view this not as those enacting the violence abandoning the game – becoming spoil-sports themselves – but as them cheating in some way, shape or form. Because the violation is considered lesser, it is not worthy of being fought in the same way: it is playing the game wrong, instead of refusing to play it.

This is an insight that George W.S. Trow had decades ago, and formulated by him in a suitably pithy way: “remember, in the situation I am describing the referee always wins.”

It seems to me that this read on the situation is quite clear to those deemed “spoil-sports” by the system, but – and here is a simple argument for the utility of this tool – perhaps this framework might make it clearer to the supposedly uninvolved.

There, 5.5k exactly.

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Ludo-Analysis (Part 1)