In January 2021, thousands of Donald Trump supporters stormed the Capitol building in Washington DC.
But four years later, in one of his first moves as President for a second term, Trump issued mass-pardons to all those who were charged and convicted in relation to the insurrection.
So, what’s the best way to tackle the all-consuming frustration, grief and despair over Trump’s decision?
Create a tabletop wargame about it, of course.
Enter Fight for America! – an immersive art installation where players are invited to revisit the moments leading up to the storming of the Capitol and are faced with questions of ‘division, democracy, and dialogue’ as they take part.
It was created by the American Vicarious, an American not-for-profit organisation that makes pieces designed to grapple with America’s identity crisis.
Their past work includes a theatre reproduction of the famous Cambridge Union debate between the writer and civil rights activist James Baldwin and William F. Buckley Jr.
Last week, they launched the game in the UK. The creators told Metro they felt it was right to relocate its premiere due to the turbulent political situation in the US, one which they had ‘never imagined’ when they began production two years ago.
How it works is, players are broken up into sides – the ‘red team’ or the ‘blue team’ – and asked strategy-based questions about how they’re going to proceed, similar to Warhammer.
In fact, the game was designed by Alessio Cavatore, a renowned Warhammer games designer responsible for penning the rules to Games Workshop’s flagship three tabletop titles – Warhammer, Warhammer 40k, and The Lord of the Rings.
If you’re a bit lost here and need a sense of how important this guy is, he was given a cameo in Lord of the Rings: Return of the King.
There’s a running question throughout that the players need to bear in mind when making their controversial moves – What about America is worth fighting for?
As members of Metro’s GameCentral team, we were invited along to take part in one of the games at their month-long residency in central London to see what it was all about.
Owen was assigned to the ‘blue team’, representing the police officers who were on duty to defend the Capitol building that day, and faced off against Izzie, who in her own words, ‘magnanimously’ volunteered to join the ‘red team’. She took charge of a host of tiny painted figures of The Proud Boys and QAnon, who were intent on breaching the doors to overturn an election that they considered was ‘stolen.’
We were also assigned real-life individuals who were at the Capitol that day. Owen was given the role of Commander Robert Glover of the DC Metropolitan Police while Izzie was appointed Enrique Tarrio, chairman of the Proud Boys.
Neal Wilkinson, co-creator and designer, told Metro the game was created in consultation with DC police officers, who were present on January 6th.
The tabletop battle was, to put it bluntly, totally one-sided. Just like on the day, police officers at the Capitol were vastly outnumbered by the insurrectionists, hell bent on forcing their way inside the building. Needless to say, the only way the police could win any clashes at all was through sheer luck.
While playing it, we found it gave us just a small glimpse into what the mindset of the police must have been on the day – it was soon no longer about ‘winning’, it was about buying time for the people inside to get out with their lives.
Even against the overwhelming odds, only one Proud Boy unit made it inside the Capitol before time was up, although Owen’s forces had been reduced to just a single riot police squad to guard the doors.
The final minigame now was to find then-Vice President Mike Pence, hiding within the Capitol Building. One mad scramble later and he was discovered.
But the highs of winning were short-lived. Almost immediately after victory was declared, TV screens in the venue displayed real-life footage of January 6th – showing the maiming that we had been so gleefully recreating for the past couple of hours.
While we had not devised the game, its rules or its irreverent tone, it was hard not to feel a sense of guilt at taking part in it.
Christopher McElroen, one of the games’ directors, emphasised that despite being a fun time, there are serious messages about the current state of American democracy at the piece’s heart.
‘We decided to pursue this as a game, as a metaphor for democracy because a game only works if people participate,’ he told Metro. ‘Democracy only works if people participate.’
Neal added they had initially planned to premiere the piece in New York City on January 6th earlier this year. But these plans changed after Trump was re-elected.
‘We quickly came to realise that a New York crowd would not be willing or interested in gaming about those events,’ he said. ‘We thought a critical distance of an ocean would be good for us.’
Certainly none of the audience showed any signs of trepidation about the evening’s premise.
Before the game began, Christopher said: ‘It was a violent insurrection and that history is actively being rewritten. On the President’s first day in office, he chose to pardon or commute the sentences of everyone who participated in that act of violence.’
Indeed, this included Izzie’s ‘character’ for the evening, Enrique. He is currently suing the US government for $100 million alleging that they ‘violated his constitutional rights’.
It seems that even if we did, for a moment, consider the events of January 6th a game, there are quite a few who have never taken it seriously at all.
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