War Games.(The Talk of the Town)(Le Jeu de la Guerre)

The centerpiece of the recent "Form as Strategy" exhibit, at Columbia's Buell Center, was a copper- and silver-plated board game called Le Jeu de la Guerre--a kind of modernist take on chess conceived in 1977 by the Marxist philosopher and filmmaker Guy Debord, with inspiration from the military theorist Carl von Clausewitz. Toward the end of his life, Debord, who led the situationist movement, in the late nineteen-sixties, wrote of the game, "I fear that this may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value." By that point, a cardboard edition, intended for mass distribution, had been produced, along with a book detailing the rules. But the game's fate was to be more like a cult object--a Dungeons & Dragons for scholars of the Parisian avant-garde.

Only a handful of the metal originals were ever made. Securing one, from Alice Becker-Ho, Debord's widow, was a cumbersome ordeal that took months and required an intermediary in Switzerland, as Diana Martinez, who helped curate the exhibit, explained recently. Becker-Ho does not readily communicate by telephone and does not use e-mail, Martinez was told. "Then, one day, we randomly received a fax from her--amazingly," Martinez said. The center had arranged, in the meantime, to feature Kriegspiel (German for "war game"), a computerized version of the old Debord invention, which was created by a local programming collective called the Radical Software Group. At the exhibit's opening, a few weeks ago, a six-minute documentary about the making of Kriegspiel was shown on a video screen beneath the Jeu de la Guerre board itself.

"It was a commercial flop," Alexander Galloway, the founder of the Radical Software Group and an associate professor of culture and communication at N.Y.U., said shortly after the opening, while standing over the Jeu de la Guerre board, and describing the roles of the different objects--arsenals, fortresses, artillery, mountains, cavalry. The two sides, he explained, are referred to as the ...