About Errata & Commentary English Edition Commentary Errata and Commentary on Debord's Published Rules Compiled by Alexander Galloway and Stephen Kelly If you have contributions to this discussion, please post them in the forum. Guy Debord published booklets containing the rules for his "Game of War" in both French and English: Société des Jeux Stratégiques et Historiques [Guy Debord and Gérard Lebovici], Le Jeu de la guerre: Règle / The Game of War: Rules (Paris: Société des Jeux Stratégiques et Historiques, 1977). While the booklets carry copyright dates of 1977, it is likely that neither was physically published in that year. Given Debord's written correspondence, the French version likely appeared some time after the middle of 1978. For the English booklet, it might be as late as 1980, since in May of that year Debord was writing to Gérard Lebovici about the proofs of this English version. Debord's account of the rules was later republished in French as an appendix to the following book, which also features a complete record of a particular game played by Debord and his wife: Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, Le Jeu de la Guerre: Relevé des positions successives de toutes les forces au cours d’une partie (Paris: Editions Gérard Lebovici 1987) This book was republished, with some corrections and short additional documents, by Gallimard in 2006. This book (including the rules) was translated into English in 2007 by Donald Nicholson-Smith: Alice Becker-Ho and Guy Debord, A Game of War (London: Atlas Press, 2007). There is one additional source for the rules in English, published as an appendix to the following biography of Debord: Len Bracken, Guy Debord: Revolutionary (Venice, CA: Feral House, 1997), 240-249. None of these different versions, French or English, have been entirely free of errors. When the first edition of the book appeared in 1987, alert readers quickly informed Debord of at least five mistakes in the diagrams. These were corrected in the Gallimard edition of 2006, but a few other errors remained unnoticed (see below). Format and Title—Comparison of French and English Editions The Atlas Press English edition of 2007 takes liberties with the format and presentation of the book. In the French editions, the rules appear at the end of the book. In the English edition they are given more prominence by being moved to the beginning. The English edition also omits the subtitle of the book (which one might translate most naturally into English as "A record of all the movements made by the forces in the course of a game") from the cover and the title page, although a version of it does appear as a section heading within the book ("Record of a Game: The Successive Movements of All Forces"). The change from "The Game..." to "A Game..." is not unimportant, and goes against Debord's stated desire that the most "generalizing and glorious" title should be chosen for the English translation (see his letter of May 9, 1980 to Lebovici, in Guy Debord, Correspondance, volume VI: janvier 1979 - décembre 1987 [Paris: Librairie Arthème Fayard, 2006], p. 55-56). In that letter, written after he had reviewed the English proofs, Debord states that (given his ignorance of English) "the only question accessible to me is that of the title: The Game of the war or The Game of war? We must choose whichever is the more generalizing and glorious title. Even if kriegspiel = wargame is correct 'linguistically,' it isn't so historically, because Kriegspiel has connotations of 'a serious exercise by commanders,' but wargame suggests 'an infantile little game for cadres.'" (Note: Cadres is a very difficult to translate French term meaning roughly "white-collar employees"; it's always used disparagingly by Debord.) The final tangible difference is that the English edition of the book is in fact a box set that includes a fully playable cardboard edition of the game. Details of the 2006 French Edition for Gallimard While five errors in the diagrams (or perhaps more?) were corrected for this second French edition, it still contains some others which hadn't been noticed in the 1987 original. The first concerns turn 28' on page 69. The South's mounted "transmission" unit ("Tc") ("relay" unit, on this site) appears at M8 instead of the correct position, M9. On the page that follows, it is back in the correct position again. This is a purely graphical error: the unit can't have been moved by the player, as five other units have been moved, and that is the maximum allowed for each turn. A second error can be found in the text of the "Explanatory Diagrams" section (p.156, on the fourth line of the second paragraph): "la case-col E10" ("the mountain pass at E10"). This should be "F10". Surprisingly enough, the 2007 English version of the book has corrected this (p.31, three lines from the bottom of the page). Apart from these two purely graphical errors, there are a number of examples of what appear to be illegal moves, all committed by South, and which apparently passed unnoticed, both during the game and while the book was being prepared (and in any case, these couldn't have been "corrected" subsequently without falsifying the record of the game as it was actually played). The first illegal move concerns turn 9' on page 31. A southern infantry unit moves to position I17. However, this would require one of the infantry units to have moved two squares; infantry can only move one square at a time (many thanks to Jeff Geib for originally pointing this out). Then we have five examples of a more subtle kind of breach of the rules. Now, a combat unit can only move when it remains "in communication" with one of its arsenals, either directly or indirectly (see the rules). In the five instances listed below, a unit which has been put "out of communication" by the movement of another unit, in the course of South's five moves, is then used for another of these five moves, in spite of the fact that it is now "stranded" (no longer on a square adjacent to those occupied by other units which are still "in communication"). Turn 14' — K15 infantry out of communication Turn 17' — L12 cavalry out of communication Turn 35' — I9 infantry out of communication Turn 36' — J10 infantry out of communication Turn 46' — J14 infantry out of communication For these moves to be regarded as legal, one would have to accept the existence of an "unwritten rule" that Debord somehow forgot to mention: that a player need only concern himself with whether his units are in or out of communication at the start and at the end of each set of five moves; that he is not bound by the rules on communication as he makes each of these five moves in sequence. But such an interpretation is hardly plausible. First, it seems unlikely that Debord would not have specified such a rule if it existed. And why would only one of the two players (South) exploit this supposed rule, in the game recorded in the 1987 book? Even more importantly, it seems to us that such an idea runs counter to the very essence of how the system of communications operates in Debord's game. We feel sure that, just as the units move in "real space" (i.e., only through empty squares, and with no "swapping" of two adjacent units which are "boxed in" by other units occupying all the squares around them), so they also move in "real time" (i.e., in a real sequence of five moves, for each of which the player must take account of the consequences of the preceding ones). Thus it is reasonable to conclude that these five cases were indeed accidental breaches of the rules. Details of Donald Nicholson-Smith's English translation for Atlas Press The six illegal moves described above, as well as the first of the two purely graphical errors, are preserved in the English edition. The corrections made to the diagrams in the 2006 French edition will also have been carried over into the English edition. Nicholson-Smith's translation is respectable but not without mistakes. Whereas Debord indicated that a charge consists of any number of cavalry in a contiguous, straight line, with the foremost cavalry unit on a square adjacent to that occupied by the enemy unit attacked, Nicholson-Smith states that "all four" cavalry units must be involved in a charge. For other problems in this translation, please refer to the commentary provided by Stephen Kelly. Details of Len Bracken's English translation contained in his book Guy Debord: Revolutionary Len Bracken's translation is stylistically inferior to that of Nicholson-Smith and contains more specific errors. He allows for non-continuous lines of units in the cavalry charge. Bracken also mischaracterizes the mechanics of combat when he states that, after successful destruction of the enemy, "the destroyer must occupy the empty square." In fact Debord stipulated the opposite, that it is not obligatory to occupy the empty square; nor could it be, given how movement and attack function more generally in the game. Bracken inverts another rule when he states that communication units can destroy arsenals by occupying them (they cannot).