J.D. Eveland Oral History Transcript

J.D. [John] Eveland, 1964

September 25, 2008
Jim Kahan, 1964, Interviewer
Location: Portland, Oregon

© The Reed Institute. Electronic Oral History project mate­ri­als and tran­scripts are intend­ed for use by trained project par­tic­i­pants and rep­re­sen­ta­tives of Reed College. Do not dis­trib­ute or dis­play with­out per­mis­sion.

[This is inter­view excerpt was con­tributed by J.D. Eveland and Jim Kahan, and is used with their express per­mis­sion.]

Eveland: I sup­pose what I’m try­ing to say is that I was allowed to learn despite my best efforts not to. Despite my best efforts to thwart the sys­tem by try­ing to find, to probe, I would say to probe for weak­ness­es because I wasn’t real­ly intend­ing to be that crit­i­cal. It wasn’t as though I was intend­ing to try to delib­er­ate­ly try to slack off or sneak by. It’s just that I want­ed to do things in my own fash­ion and my own fash­ion was not nec­es­sar­i­ly the fash­ion that would be the approved aca­d­e­m­ic fash­ion, but I was allowed to pro­ceed.
And I think the Empire sto­ry that I was relat­ing ear­li­er when we were talk­ing to what’s‑her-name ear­li­er today [ed. note: Kara Sowles, 2010—chair of Association of Reed Gamers 2008–2009] bears on that. I mean, I can come back to that in the course of the Empire thing but this is where essen­tial­ly my eco­nom­ics pro­fes­sor was able to take note of the fact that I was able to gen­er­ate inter­est­ing eco­nom­ic ideas with min­i­mal involve­ment from the for­mal class and allow that this was a valid expe­ri­ence of learn­ing eco­nom­ics.
…

But there’s a pic­ture, the pic­ture that we have of the empire game that was used on the fly­er for the last reunion. It was a pic­ture of myself, Ron [Ronald W.] Hanks [1964], [James] Trosper [1965], Peter Clark [1967], and Lynne O’Connor [1967]. And every sin­gle one of us has a cig­a­rette in our hand (laughs) which is sort of an inter­est­ing com­men­tary on us, on that whole process. But on the oth­er hand cig­a­rettes sold for 25¢ a pack so it was a dif­fer­ent eco­nom­ic com­mit­ment at that point, and nobody real­ly thought about it much one way or the oth­er. I still miss my cig­a­rettes all the time. It’s a very com­fort­ing habit and I still miss it.

…
Kahan: Why don’t we turn to where you got the Oscar as best lead­ing man at Reed. Transcriber, you should put this in cap­i­tals. EMPIRE!

Eveland: That was my prin­ci­pal iden­ti­ty prob­a­bly for the last, at least the last cou­ple of years. The Empire Game. How much do you want me to repeat of what we were men­tion­ing ear­li­er?

Kahan: As much as you want. This is a great sto­ry.

Eveland: The Empire Game start­ed in fresh­man year with a sort of casu­al evo­lu­tion. I had brought with me a game of Diplomacy, which was a brand new game on the mar­ket then. It was not a very easy game to play and required sev­en peo­ple. Not many peo­ple were ter­ri­bly inter­est­ed, but one evening I dra­gooned a few peo­ple over in the Chittick Dorm where I was liv­ing to par­tic­i­pat­ing in this.

And a cou­ple of peo­ple came in. Dan Drake and Jim [James A.] Borders [1963] came in and Dan com­ment­ed that his father had played a game on a map some­thing like that that they called Empire back in the 1930s. Dan’s father was Stillman Drake, who was one of the major Galileo experts of all time, an invest­ment banker who made a lot of mon­ey and then wrote books on Galileo for the rest of his life. He told us a lit­tle bit about this and we thought this sound­ed inter­est­ing enough that it might be worth exper­i­ment­ing with.
So we agreed that I think it was the fol­low­ing week­end or some­thing we would sort of try to tack­le a ver­sion of this, rec­og­niz­ing that we were going to sort of make up the rules as we went along. And Dan remem­bered some things about this that his father had told him and we made up some oth­ers.

It was played orig­i­nal­ly on a stan­dard world map and it was played with evolv­ing rules off and on and a float­ing cast of peo­ple for rough­ly the next—about a year into—we recruit­ed some new play­ers into it with—particularly Arey and Trosper when the fol­low­ing year rolled around. They were fresh­man and they got inter­est­ed in this by observ­ing the game being played and so when they got roped in they became part of the cir­cle.

It became more insti­tu­tion­al­ized start­ing in the spring of at least sopho­more year. I was liv­ing in Doyle at that point so right around the cor­ner from—and so that’s when we began. The first game was played in Winch that spring of sopho­more year and we played a cou­ple of games.

And then the first extend­ed game was played and that became essentially—was played because we got to cer­tain point and decid­ed we need­ed a break but didn’t want to end the game quite. So I think the first extend­ed game went on for maybe like a week or so there­abouts and came back to it and again, at that time it was still being played synchronously—that is to say you’d have to have every­body there to do it, but we left it set up and amaz­ing­ly noth­ing hap­pened to it dur­ing the time it was set up. It was occu­py­ing most of the table in the mid­dle of this room that was one of the most pop­u­lat­ed and pop­u­lar social halls of the—

Kahan: The Winch Social Room.

Kahan: The Winch Social Room and where sort of every­body wound up soon­er or lat­er one way or the oth­er. And it—which was real­ly quite amaz­ing. The—

Kahan: Component games?

Eveland: Pardon me?

Kahan: The skele­ton. The com­po­nent games of Empire.

Eveland: Which?

Kahan: The pieces that make it up.

Eveland: Oh, the phys­i­cal pieces?

Kahan: No. The games.

Eveland: The games that went into it?

Kahan: Yes.

Eveland: What are you refer­ring to specif­i­cal­ly?

Kahan: Corporate Monopoly.

Eveland: Oh! Corporate Monopoly. Corporation Monopoly was one of the—a lot of things got fold­ed into this. Of course the mil­i­tary rules were large­ly adapt­ed from Tactics II which was played by a num­ber of peo­ple includ­ing myself at that time. And I’m not a par­tic­u­lar­ly good mil­i­tary strate­gist but I enjoy mov­ing a lot of stuff around. (laughs)
And one of the things you need to under­stand about me is that I am not a com­pet­i­tive game play­er. That is, this is some­thing pecu­liar to my fam­i­ly. My fam­i­ly nev­er played—we played a lot of games. We played a lot of things but nev­er com­pet­i­tive and the rea­son for this was rather sim­ple.

My moth­er and grand­moth­er were both avid Scrabble play­ers when it first came out. They want­ed some­body else to play with them, and they kept get­ting my father to play with them. Now my father was not a very good Scrabble play­er and when­ev­er they played Scrabble and kept score my father would wind up on the short end by a large mar­gin. And so my moth­er and grand­moth­er fig­ured out the strat­e­gy for play­ing Scrabble with my father and that was instead of play­ing against each oth­er for high score you would play for total score adding up the scores of every­body. And the aim was to get the high­est total score that you could get. That was the only way to get my father to play Scrabble.
So when I start­ed play­ing Scrabble with them this was a well-estab­lished pro­ce­dure, and it suit­ed me very nice­ly because I go out of my way to avoid being in com­pet­i­tive sit­u­a­tions. I don’t like win/​lose sit­u­a­tions and I have a vis­cer­al aver­sion to that. And so I tend—when I tend­ed to cre­ate games and to arrange games I tend­ed to find games that didn’t lend them­selves to win­ning and los­ing.

The nice thing about Empire was it would go on long enough that you couldn’t fig­ure out who was win­ning or who’s lost (laughs) and I sort of always when I was think­ing of ways to expand the game I was always think­ing of ways to make it less like­ly that you could tell when any­one was win­ning or los­ing. Not that peo­ple didn’t go up or down or not that there weren’t plays that you scored off of oth­er peo­ple, but that the game itself became an exer­cise in art rather than the out­come.

And it was the process of the game that—at the end of the term there was usu­al­ly a debate of a cou­ple hours as to who was in bet­ter posi­tion and who was going to do what, but sel­dom any— there was nev­er any need to come to a par­tic­u­lar con­sen­sus. And I think this is one of the things that I—at least this last­ed as phi­los­o­phy of the game as long as I was involved with it. I have no idea if that changed lat­er on but I was able to impose in a sense I think my ethos of non-com­pe­ti­tion into this. It’s not non-com­pe­ti­tion pre­cise­ly. It’s de-empha­sis on win­ning if you will—

Kahan: Mm-hmm

Eveland: I think it would be the bet­ter way.

Kahan: So how does that fit into Corporation Monopoly?

Eveland: Well, Corporation Monopoly was devel­oped as a way of keep­ing the game going and not hav­ing peo­ple go out of it. I made it up on the spur of the moment dur­ing a Monopoly game one night when I couldn’t fig­ure out what to do with a piece of prop­er­ty. So I sug­gest­ed to one of the oth­er peo­ple who was play­ing who had one or more of the same col­or prop­er­ties that we should form a cor­po­ra­tion that would joint­ly own these prop­er­ties. And since cor­po­ra­tions are legal enti­ties, indi­vid­u­als that could become play­ers in the game, they there­fore would be enti­tled to col­lect rents. And so we dis­trib­uted stock in the cor­po­ra­tion depend­ing on the val­ues of the prop­er­ties being con­tributed and thus you could land on a prop­er­ty and bank­rupt your­self but still make mon­ey (laughs) because you got a share of what it was you were pay­ing your­self.

What it tend­ed to do was to stretch out Monopoly games more or less indef­i­nite­ly (laughs) and make it much more dif­fi­cult for any­one to win because you spread the risk around as any good cor­po­ra­tion would do. And mon­ey kept chang­ing hands back and forth but the over­all posi­tion of peo­ple would change only very, very slow­ly unlike nor­mal Monopoly where you can go up or down very quick­ly. And it allowed large amounts of mon­ey to change hands and a great deal of activ­i­ty to take place with­out nec­es­sar­i­ly result­ing in any­one win­ning or los­ing. This is an exam­ple of the kind of com­pli­ca­tions that I tend­ed to intro­duce into games in the inter­ests of not win­ning.

That was one of the pieces that con­tributed to it.

There were oth­ers also that entered in. Risk was men­tioned ear­li­er as a game peo­ple played a lot of. I think it kind of went up and down. The major change was the insti­tu­tion­al­iza­tion of the game start­ing in the fall of ’62 when we were in Davis and that was when we start­ed play­ing semes­ter-long games. The first one was played in the fall of ‘62 and then there were four games played of that over the course of the next two years and again, they were left on the table in Davis.

Kahan: Winch, you mean.

Eveland: Winch, for the entire peri­od and it was nev­er molest­ed mali­cious­ly that I can recall. There were occa­sion­al events of nat­ur­al dis­as­ters that took place, but they had to be worked in and what­ev­er things could be—again, the rules were cre­ative­ly inter­pret­ed in many ways. And if you could do some­thing that was inter­est­ing enough and had enough style you could per­suade peo­ple that it was appro­pri­ate and there were lots of inter­est­ing vari­a­tions on this.

I was the one who intro­duced the phe­nom­e­non of Balkanization fair­ly ear­ly on which was the art of tak­ing your coun­try and break­ing it up into small­er units so that they could each have their own inde­pen­dent exis­tence and their own inde­pen­dent cours­es and you could be telling six sto­ries instead of one.

In a sense the game was about telling a sto­ry. It was about devel­op­ing a much—well, everything’s about sto­ries ulti­mate­ly, but this was real­ly a game in which the sto­ry was the impor­tant part. You devel­oped your sto­ry and every­body would cre­ate their own coun­try with its own iden­ti­ty. And part of the plea­sure of the game was cre­at­ing the back sto­ry for your coun­tries and why they would be inter­est­ing and why they were doing the things that they were doing. And peo­ple spent a great deal of time try­ing to fig­ure out appro­pri­ate back sto­ries that would rein­force these. And again points were award­ed for cre­ativ­i­ty if you will.

It became a very engag­ing kind of thing. It became cer­tain­ly a major com­po­nent of iden­ti­ty for myself and sev­er­al oth­er peo­ple for a cou­ple of years and it was regard­ed by the greater cam­pus as a phe­nom­e­non.

As I recall once in a great while a fac­ul­ty mem­ber would come to look at it but rel­a­tive­ly few. I’m try­ing to remem­ber. There were a cou­ple of occa­sions I know that Leigh came over and looked at it once. I met him there. I’m try­ing to remem­ber who else. There were a cou­ple of oth­er fac­ul­ty mem­bers who observed it peri­od­i­cal­ly and most­ly along the lines of com­ing in and sort of star­ing at it and shak­ing their heads and walk­ing out. (laughs)
But there were nev­er, at least to me, there were nev­er relayed any com­plaints or you know, “What the hell are you peo­ple doing here?” And to the best of my knowl­edge none of us who played the game ever lived in Winch! (laughs) Which was sort of an inter­est­ing com­ment in its own right, but then Winch was sort of the gener­ic social place for peo­ple, for gam­ing in gen­er­al, as you com­ment­ed ear­li­er, ever since it had the per­ma­nent bridge game and a num­ber of oth­er things and it was con­ve­nient for a lot of things.

Kahan: How about build­ing the pieces?

Eveland: Building the pieces. Building the pieces. I built most of the pieces, a lot of the pieces. I built a set, let’s put it that way, a set of pieces for the game dur­ing the sum­mer of ‘62 when I was back in Michigan. I brought it back with me that fall. Put it togeth­er in a small wood­en cab­i­net which has now become part of the archives. I built the cab­i­net around a set of plas­tic draw­ers and just com­posed a lot of pieces of dif­fer­ent kinds for all sorts of things. Some of them were made out of bal­sa wood, paint­ed bal­sa wood. Some of them were made out of met­al. Some of them were made of plas­tic.

I knew it was nev­er going to be able to keep up with demand. Things changed fair­ly quick­ly. We nev­er had enough pieces but it pro­vid­ed us a focal point for the thing. I think this is one thing that encour­aged us to leave it set up was it gave a sort of con­crete exam­ple of some­thing. It became some­thing, you know, that was clear with all these pieces, all these lit­tle pieces run­ning around.

Originally it was just put togeth­er entire­ly out of ad hoc pieces but I sort of stan­dard­ized them and made them togeth­er. Again it was kind of fun just to sit down and do them. I spent a lot of the sum­mer doing that when I wasn’t doing some­thing else.

That was the sum­mer when I was being a lab rat actu­al­ly. I was work­ing in the lab­o­ra­to­ry, one of the labs at the School of Public Health at the University of Michigan. My father had arranged a sum­mer job for me there. And my father need­ed some human serum that was hyper-immune to typhoid. He had the next lab over and he looked at me and I was work­ing for one of his col­leagues and he said, “You did okay with typhoid vac­cine, didn’t you?”

I said, “Yes. I didn’t have any prob­lems with that.”

So he said, “Come here.”

So he dropped me full of typhoid vac­cine until I sort of bounced off the roof and then for the rest of the sum­mer at reg­u­lar inter­vals he would bleed me and make human serum. I was hyper-immune to typhoid. And so that was my career as a lab rat among my oth­er duties as assigned. It was kind of enter­tain­ing. So in the inter­im of being a lab rat was when I made the Empire pieces.

Kahan: To the best of my knowl­edge there’s no con­cise overview of the rules of Empire. I was won­der­ing if you could pro­vide us with a bird’s eye view of that.

Eveland: There nev­er were, real­ly. There were things that got writ­ten down in var­i­ous places, var­i­ous places and times. The eco­nom­ic rules were cod­i­fied by Dan and myself that fall, and those actu­al­ly got writ­ten down but they were done in var­i­ous forms. There were sheets of rules that were used at var­i­ous points but there was nev­er any uni­form sin­gle cod­i­fi­ca­tion of things.

Kahan: I guess I asked the wrong ques­tion. If you had to describe the game, 50 words and a box top, how would you do it?

Eveland: It is a joint eco­nom­ic polit­i­cal mil­i­tary sim­u­la­tion involv­ing var­i­ous phas­es of units rep­re­sent­ing mil­i­tary units, pop­u­la­tion units, and resource units which get moved and trad­ed around. Resource units are extract­ed and con­vert­ed in var­i­ous ways into oth­er kinds of units includ­ing mil­i­tary units, which are then used for var­i­ous pur­pos­es.

And war was engaged in but sel­dom tak­en all that seri­ous­ly part­ly because the board was large and the num­ber of units one could deploy was rel­a­tive­ly small. So wars tend­ed to be lim­it­ed in scope and aimed at spe­cif­ic tar­gets rather than gen­er­al con­quest.

The com­plex­i­ties of the pro­duc­tion rela­tion­ships increased con­sid­er­ably over the course of the game. By the time of the last cou­ple of games mak­ing a sin­gle move could take any­where from an hour to two-and-a-half hours to com­plete all the trans­ac­tions that you had to do, in terms of mov­ing pieces around and get­ting pro­duc­tion and con­vert­ing them to oth­er things and mov­ing all your pieces and han­dling nego­ti­a­tions.

Somewhere along the line it moved from a syn­chro­nous game to asyn­chro­nous game in which turns were tak­en con­sec­u­tive­ly. And it rotat­ed around the board and when you fin­ished your turn you moved the mark­er, which is the drag­on, to the next coun­try and you’d walk in and find the drag­on sit­ting in your coun­try and you knew it was time to make your move. The tar­get was gen­er­al­ly with­in twen­ty-four hours you were sup­posed to do some­thing unless you had some real­ly good rea­son for not doing so.

And some coun­tries were larg­er and some coun­tries were small­er. Some coun­tries were added or spun off dur­ing the course of the game if some­body came in and want­ed to take over a coun­try for awhile. We might spin off a coun­try or turn over one of the coun­tries to some­body so peo­ple moved in and out of it. There was usu­al­ly a core of at least half-a-dozen play­ers and there might be two or three periph­er­al play­ers at any giv­en time.

There were very few women who played. Lynne O’Connor was one and Peter’s girl­friend Heather did a coun­try for a while and it seems to me there was some­body else but I can’t remem­ber who it was. I don’t remem­ber for sure but some­body else might remem­ber.

Kahan: Give me a fla­vor. What’s your favorite Balkanization?

Eveland: The favorite coun­try or the favorite episode?

Kahan: No. What was the—of all the Empire games you played which one was your favorite and why?

Eveland: The over­all game? Probably the one that was the most inter­est­ing was the first one where I split things up, the—there was a vari­ety of—the one where the coun­try was ruled by the leg­isla­tive assem­bly known as the Dadvana. And the rea­son that this came about is that I had a dream one night in which I woke up with the phrase ring­ing in my head, “We must blow up the Dadvana,” and I didn’t remem­ber any­thing about the dream beyond that except that I had the feel­ing that the Dadvana was some sort of leg­isla­tive assem­bly and we were sud­den­ly doing a Guy Fawkes num­ber on it. So that was actu­al­ly the ori­gin of the thought was that I cre­at­ed a coun­try where there was a Dadvana that need­ed to be blown up and it was arranged that even­tu­al­ly dur­ing the course of that game the Dadvana did get blown up on at least a cou­ple of occa­sions.

One of the fea­tures of the Dadvana that was devel­oped lat­er on was it met in a toroidal cham­ber so that all sev­en polit­i­cal par­ties could each share an inter­face with each of the oth­ers, but you need­ed a torus to be able to do that because on plain sur­face, five filler-two-dimen­sion sur­face, five fillers would be—but there were sev­en par­ties so you need­ed the toroidal cham­ber so they could each have a—a lit­tle bit of topol­o­gy worked its way in there some­where.

That same game also fea­tured The Mad Raphed of Cristobel who was an absolute ruler but he was also total­ly insane and many of his moves were deter­mined by the throw of a dice to sig­nal the ran­dom behav­ior. There were a few oth­ers, a cou­ple of oth­er coun­tries in that batch that I’m try­ing to remem­ber what they were at one point.

One of the coun­tries that was involved in that was a coun­try that con­sist­ed entire­ly of a fort sit­ting up on a penin­su­la some­where that had no resources and noth­ing else except under the eco­nom­ic rules in effect at the time it could gen­er­ate mon­ey each turn. And it would gen­er­ate large quan­ti­ties of mon­ey which could then be used for bank­ing pur­pos­es by oth­er coun­tries, so that became known as the Temple of Moloch and proved to be a remark­ably suc­cess­ful con­tri­bu­tion to the game. It served no func­tion what­so­ev­er except sit up there and gen­er­ate mon­ey but it acquired con­sid­er­able influ­ence over lots of oth­er things. At one point I believe it was sacked by one of the oth­er coun­tries (both laugh) who obtained large quan­ti­ties of its resources.

There were numer­ous vari­a­tions on this. A lot of peo­ple used vari­a­tions on this at var­i­ous times. Some peo­ple nev­er did this, but their coun­tries, some peo­ple did, you know, had a major coun­try and one or more minor coun­tries. Different peo­ple approached it in dif­fer­ent ways. As I said in my case it was pri­mar­i­ly I dreamed this whole thing up as a way of just intro­duc­ing fur­ther com­pli­ca­tions and ways of gen­er­al­ly increas­ing the oppor­tu­ni­ties for strange things going on because that to my mind was always the most impor­tant part. It was not, again, not who was win­ning or los­ing but what kind of strange twists were being intro­duced.

And one of the things that’s real­ly nice about that pic­ture that I keep refer­ring to, the five of us sit­ting around the table look­ing at it, is that it’s per­fect­ly clear that I believe it’s Ron Hanks explain­ing some—he of course was anoth­er one of the players—he’s explain­ing some kind of par­tic­u­lar maneu­ver that’s tak­ing place and every­body is sit­ting there with these great big grins on their face, just appre­ci­at­ing what it was he was describ­ing! And it’s quite clear that he was describ­ing some­thing that had a lot of inter­est­ing pecu­liar­i­ties and every­body was just delight­ed with it. (laughs)

And that was very much the spir­it with which the whole thing was played. I can’t recall any­body ever get­ting upset by any­thing one way or the oth­er. It was cer­tain­ly the friend­liest game I’ve ever been a part of. And it did fill a very impor­tant part of my life for the last—for cer­tain­ly the last two years.

Kahan: Mm-hmm

Eveland: I still man­aged to get my work done. Wrote my the­sis. Graduated.