Hello everyone! First of all, thanks to everyone who has supported this project in the last couple of days. Come to think of it: once again thanks to all of you who supported it in the two days before that! All of you are greatly appreciated, and I look forward to hearing your ideas on how to make Argumentation the best game it can be. And as long as you have an account on Backerkit, please consider supporting some of the other great creators participating in Pocketopia. 

Today I want take a moment to talk about the origins of Argumentation. Starting in 2020 I began to get very interested not so much in history (that’s been a lifelong passionate interest), but in theories about how the historical process functions. So I spent several years reading and listening to thinkers advocating various ideas about that process, with some of those ideas being rather well known, other far less so. And for a while I became rather fixated on the idea that Friedrich Hegel’s theory of Historical Romanticism was basically true, and that history had a sort of “forward motion” created through cycles of revolution and reaction creating a new synthesis which, in turn, are revolted against, furthering the motion. And that what one needed to do to predict the future in broad outlines was to spend an extraordinary amount of time absorbing current events and contemplating them to see the underlying patterns. It all seemed very sensible to me. 

Fast-forward to GenCon 2023; specifically, to a table in the excellent restaurant Greek Islands where myself, author and game designer Ken Hite, and other friends were yelling “Opa!” together as various cheeses were set alight. Like the dilettante that I am, I began to expound my theory to Ken that Hegel had basically gotten it right, and that the other theories of history were either incorrect or commentary on Hegel. And which point Ken commented “Well, if you like thinkers responsible for most of the butchery of the 20th Century, then Hegel is your man. But really, there is no one, single correct theory of history...” And proceeded to convincingly demolish my argument, punctuating his sentences by stabbing forkfuls of spanakoptia upward as a sort of visual punctuation mark. 

Being overly inclined to enthusiasms but not hubris, I went home and thought about this for several months. And when I was done thinking about it, I began designing this game to help other similarly enthusiastic people think about it. Which is why this game is dedicated to a conversation I had with Ken Hite.