In order to win, a player must control seven areas that contain either a castle or stronghold with his or her military, i.e., at least one footman, knight, or siege engine must be placed in seven of these territories. Military plays an indispensable role in GOT. Second, I will discuss what players can learn about a Machiavellian conception of politics from their experience playing GOT. In order to demonstrate this thesis, I will discuss advice from Machiavelli’s The Prince on using a military, avoiding hatred, and conquering fortune and apply them to gameplay in GOT. First, I will describe how the application of relevant precepts from Machiavelli’s The Prince to gameplay in GOT are necessary for winning the game that is, the game all but forces players to play amorally. Each player who wants to win must strive to adhere to a Machiavellian strategy of appearing friendly to other players for as long as possible, or else be defeated early.
Thus, the game more than encourages players to break alliances, and all must be on their guard against one another. Only one player may win you win or you lose. All friendships made within the game are, however, quite tenuous. It provides plenty of opportunities for players to make friends and enemies.
The television series Game of Thrones is wellknown for its vivid depictions of political scheming and backstabbing as encapsulated in its oft-quoted tagline: “You win or you die.” A Game of Thrones: The Board Game (GOT) is a laudable effort to put in players’ hands the chance to exercise their inner Machiavellian in a (hopefully) nonviolent fashion. While this particular board game (A Game of Thrones, second edition) may be unfamiliar to many, it was designed as a streamlined version of Diplomacy, which is one of the few board games with an annual world championship and purportedly a favorite of JFK and Henry Kissinger. In this piece Matt utilized his proficiency in both political science and philosophy to develop an effective strategy for a board game. The transdisciplinary focus of this journal-and assignment-allows the students to leverage their personal expertise and interests towards writing this paper on board games. “I think the challenge is always figuring out how we can add new details and flourishes that will delight the viewer,” Wall said.This capstone assignment requires the students to write a research paper that follows the guidelines of submissions to the Board Game Studies Journal. The team has created close to 30 unique versions of the opening credits over the first seven seasons. It was imperative that the animated onscreen representations be made up of only materials you’d find within the show itself, such as metal, wood, parchment, leather and glass. Shintani and Wall took cues from various sources, from the primitive yet elegant mechanics of Leonardo DaVinci’s designs to the visual industrial gears-and-levers aesthetic of steampunk. We tried a lot of different looks, styles and structural components.” We spent quite a bit of time working out what each location would look like, so concept art was extremely important. From that we were able to understand what the locations looked like and how we might be able to adapt them to fit our design language.
“They provided us with tons of photography and concept art for the locations that we wanted to build for Season 1. “We started with references from production,” Shintani told Observer. Weiss initially toyed with an entirely different setup for Game of Thrones-one that might have caused more harm than good to the now record-breaking series. In fact, the very structure of Game of Thrones would have looked completely different had it not been for those credits.Īngus Wall, a film editor and the title designer, and Kirk Shintani, head of CG for a52 and Elastic, the animation and visual effects studios behind the series’ opening credits, revealed that showrunners David Benioff and D.B. Composer Ramin Djawadi‘s rousing theme song is, of course, a fan favorite, but the detailed animation of the show’s key locations is the foundation from which our base understanding of this fictional world has flowed. Through it all, we’ve had one constant: the show’s iconic opening credits. Beloved characters have lost their heads, and reviled characters have joined them in the great dragon pit in the sky. Over seven-plus seasons, fans have witnessed all manner of backstabbing, political jockeying, shifting allegiances and supernatural threats. Game of Thrones is back, ladies and gents, though we’re quite confident you didn’t need us to tell you that.
The Game of Thrones opening credits were created with a very specific purpose in mind.