Jim Kahan Oral History Transcript

James Kahan, 1964

November 20 and December 8, 2006
Donna Sinclair, 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 inter­view excerpt was con­tributed by Jim Kahan, and is used with his express per­mis­sion.]

Kahan: They did away with Davis, because they didn’t like what was hap­pen­ing. Anna Mann was my social room junior and senior years. Freshman and sopho­more years I main­ly hung out in Winch. The Winch social room was the card room. A lot of peo­ple played bridge there. It was also where the Empires game was. The Empires game was start­ed by J.D. Eveland, who was the ring­leader and Alan Arey, Class of ’65. I remem­ber them as being instru­men­tal. It start­ed out by peo­ple play­ing Monopoly and because these were cre­ative peo­ple, they went beyond just hav­ing indi­vid­u­als to start­ing hav­ing hold­ing com­pa­nies for prop­er­ties, and they could col­lab­o­rate and have hold­ing com­pa­nies and oth­er kinds of deals. So, you could cre­ate a monop­oly by hav­ing the hold­ing com­pa­ny with­out you, phys­i­cal­ly, per­son­al­ly hav­ing to have all three prop­er­ties.

And it sort of got out of hand, where if you could do this suc­cess­ful­ly, it would be to your advan­tage to just remain in jail all the time, because then you weren’t mov­ing and every­body pass­ing through had to pay your share of the hold­ing com­pa­ny and they’d go broke. And you’d be hap­pi­ly in jail, earn­ing lots and lots of mon­ey, sort of pre-fig­ur­ing the cur­rent polit­i­cal sit­u­a­tion, I guess. That merged with a cou­ple of oth­er games that were being played, one was a game called Risk, which was all about diplo­ma­cy and things like that. And anoth­er game was called Tactics II, which was a bat­tle­field game. In Tactics II, there were all the pieces of armor, infantry, and things like that, and it was a mil­i­tary strate­gic game. And so what hap­pened is, some­body got the bright idea, I think it was J.D., I’m not a hun­dred per­cent sure—of com­bin­ing the best fea­tures of Monopoly, Tactics, Risk, diplo­ma­cy and oth­er things, and basi­cal­ly play­ing this game. And they start­ed off with a flat map of the world and peo­ple would pick a cap­i­tal, and they would have a cer­tain num­ber of the pop­u­la­tion and they would have to have a cer­tain per­cent­age of their pop­u­la­tion engaged in agri­cul­ture, to feed peo­ple. Then they would have to cre­ate fac­to­ries and indus­try, and if you want­ed a bat­tle­ship, you had to build a bat­tle­ship fac­to­ry and then you had to put the raw mate­ri­als for this bat­tle­ship in this fac­to­ry, and two moves after, you got a bat­tle­ship, unless some­body bombed your fac­to­ry, or—

Sinclair: And why was this called Empires?

Kahan: It was called Empires, because each of the play­ers was try­ing to build an empire and the object was to con­quer the world. And in the ear­ly ver­sions of this game, the resources were based on the real world, so coal was where coal was, iron was where iron was, and pow­er was where big rivers were, and alu­minum was where alu­minum was, et cetera. In the first ear­ly games, it turns out that the per­son who start­ed with a cap­i­tal in North America won, because the resources of North America are so huge com­pared to the rest of the world. This just hap­pened, and then this led me to decide about pol­i­tics that—a lot of Americans think it’s about man­i­fest des­tiny and because our polit­i­cal sys­tem is supe­ri­or, America is a world pow­er. (laugh­ing) It’s because we’re in the right place. It has noth­ing to do with our polit­i­cal sys­tem. We’ve got all the resources.

Sinclair: So, through the games, you—

Kahan: We learned that! So, then the next ver­sion of it was, okay, you can’t have your cap­i­tal in North America. So, everybody’s cap­i­tals were in oth­er places, and then the game was a race to col­o­nize North America. So, that wasn’t real­ly what we were after. Then J.D. had the bril­liant idea of cre­at­ing an arti­fi­cial world. And the arti­fi­cial world was orig­i­nal­ly in squares, but became hexa­gons on a table that was six-by-twelve feet, and half-inch hexa­gons. So, that was our world, in which con­ti­nents were drawn strate­gi­cal­ly, and resources were sort of ran­dom­ly spread out so that there was no North America effect. And J.D. built lit­tle icons, oil cans and ships and things like that. It had about ten thou­sand pieces. I’m giv­en to under­stand that the box that J.D. built with all those pieces exists some place on cam­pus. I haven’t found it yet, but I haven’t looked hard. But it’s still sup­posed to be there. And the game evolved to being played in the Winch social room, so I had come full cir­cle to Winch.

Sinclair: So, this was your senior year?

Kahan: No, no, this was my sopho­more year it start­ed, with this inten­si­ty. And there were two games a year. One game start­ed in the fall and end­ed at Christmas break. The sec­ond game start­ed after Christmas break and end­ed near grad­u­a­tion at the end of the year. There were about six to eight play­ers and each play­er had a piece of this world that they were devel­op­ing, and it was still—in the­o­ry, con­quer the world—but nobody could ever real­ly do that. You had twen­ty-four hours to move. And nobody ever dropped out while play­ing the game. There were some peo­ple who played the game and then the next year they didn’t play because they had to study and they wound up drop­ping out. But nobody ever left Reed while play­ing the game. J.D. start­ed the phe­nom­e­na of “balka­niza­tion,” which might be a syn­onym for mas­tur­ba­tion, I don’t know. But basi­cal­ly, J.D. took his coun­try and split it up into small­er coun­tries and they played with each oth­er, rather than engag­ing with the rest of the play­ers. So, J.D. was hav­ing fun all by him­self. And, to earn [game, not real] mon­ey, one of the things he did in one of the coun­tries, was he built a casi­no. So oth­er play­ers could come vis­it his casi­no and gam­ble and they might earn more mon­ey that way.

I played once and I balka­nized, too. I had the fed­er­a­tion of Stratford. My coun­tries were Hamlet and Othello and Macbeth, and Henry IV, Part I, and Henry IV, Part II, which was sort of an India-Pakistan kind of thing, where Pakistan, before Bangladesh came around, was West Pakistan and East Pakistan. So I had my two Henrys, and Henry IV, Part II, which was ruled by Falstaff, was a coun­try whose sole indus­try was the brew­ing of beer. So, peo­ple could come buy [game, not real] alco­hol at Henry IV, Part II if they want­ed.

Sinclair: Well, what con­sti­tut­ed win­ning?

Kahan: Winning would be defeat­ing oth­er coun­tries. If you cap­tured the head of state, you would beat their coun­try, or if you over­whelmed and then occu­pied a whole new ter­ri­to­ry. The year I played, a weird thing hap­pened. At one point some­body threw open the door of Winch and it was windy out­side. A gust of wind blew in and upset all the pieces on the board, and so we declared this an act of nature and peo­ple put the pieces back as best they could. And it just so hap­pened that one of the oth­er player’s pieces wound up in my coun­try, so it was his col­or. So what I did was I deter­mined that I had brain­washed that piece, turned the mark­er over and put a stripe on it that would indi­cate that it was my piece, and I hid it by putting it under my own pieces so that nobody could see it and I put it on a ship. During one of my moves, because you could do this dur­ing a sin­gle move, I snuck the ship over to his land, unloaded my piece and then got the ship back, because I could move that num­ber of hexa­gons in one move. And then over the course of the num­ber of moves, my piece grad­u­al­ly wound its way up to his cap­i­tal, where I assas­si­nat­ed his head of state. And, so there was some dis­cus­sion as to whether or not this was fair and whether or not if I’d run across any of his mil­i­tary pieces on my ver­sion, whether they would have detect­ed him. But we didn’t real­ly care. We had fun.

Sinclair: It’s inter­est­ing, because it sounds like it was all competition—were there any efforts toward coop­er­a­tion?

Kahan: Yes. Just as in Risk, you can form coali­tions and team up against peo­ple, if some­body is act­ing as though they are going to real­ly be aggres­sive, oth­er peo­ple will team up against them. And J.D. avoid­ed this by balka­niz­ing. “I’m just play­ing by myself. Don’t both­er me.”

Sinclair: Were the rules writ­ten down?

Kahan: No.

Sinclair: No. So, there were just certain—he was in charge?

Kahan: Well, no. The rules were just sort of known. It wasn’t writ­ten down, it wasn’t dis­cussed. There was no arbi­tra­tor. There was no per­son. Any con­tentious deci­sion had to be nego­ti­at­ed. If there was a bat­tle, it had to be pub­licly wit­nessed because the tac­tics, the out­comes of bat­tles were deter­mined by the roll of a douse. So, here you had this piece against this piece and you roll it, and if it’s a one they have to retreat and if it’s a two you have to retreat, and if it’s a three, they’re destroyed. And if it’s a four, equal sides are destroyed and have to be tak­en off the board, depend­ing. Those were tac­tics to the rules for bat­tles. But then, because it involved rolling the dice, it had to be pub­licly wit­nessed.

Sinclair: So, do you have any idea how long this game was played?

Kahan: You mean in terms of cal­en­dar?

Sinclair: No. That went on through grad­u­a­tion?

Kahan: Yes. The Empires game, it was def­i­nite­ly played in Winch my sopho­more, junior and senior years.

Sinclair: Mm-hmm.

Kahan: I believe it went on for the next year, and after that I don’t know.

Sinclair: It sounds like it was pret­ty inter­est­ing.

Kahan: It was.

Sinclair: A con­ver­gence of hav­ing fun and the ideas you learned in school.

Kahan: Yes. It could be viewed as a les­son in polit­i­cal sci­ence, because in many ways it was that.

Sinclair: What was his major?

Kahan: J.D., I believe, was a poli sci major, or his­to­ry.

Sinclair: Either one would work. (laughs)

Kahan: Yes.