My favorite tabletop game of all time is Star Wars: Armada, a Star Wars themed ship combat wargame.
Armada has many deep and tactically interesting features, but one of my favorites is the unique suite of defense tokens available to each spaceship to protect itself against attacks, from among the following six options:
- Scatter – the attack is completely canceled. “I wasn’t where you were shooting”
- Evade – cancel an attack die at long range, or re-roll one at short and medium range. “I dodged your attack, so it missed or became a glancing blow”
- Brace – halve the damage. “Ouch, you hit me! But it wasn’t as bad as it could have been”
- Redirect – move some damage to an adjacent hull zone. “You hit me, but not where I was weakest”
- Contain – downgrade a critical hit to normal damage – “My damage control efforts turned the potential catastrophe into just a normal crisis”
- Salvo – return fire. “You hit me, but I hit back”
There’s way more information here for people whose military nerd curiosity has been piqued.
Anyway, this is well and good for games about spaceships, but what’s the relevance? Let’s imagine that we humans have these defense tokens, too. And today I’d like to talk about how they relate not to physical attacks, but interpersonal ones.
You negligent fool! You nit-picking jerk!
Someone has blindsided you with unexpected criticism! The monkey brain sees this as an attack:
Imperial Star Destroyer by topcat at Wallpapers.com — https://wallpapers.com/wallpapers/imperial-star-destroyer-hus8fir1xr6vldsn.html
Red alert! Shields up! All hands to battle stations! Your blood pressure rises. You see red and gear up for a fight:
Bull Image from FreePNGimg.com
And what’s the most satisfying defense token to use? Salvo, for sure. Hit back:
Oh yeah, that’s pretty rich coming from you given how you messed up that other thing last week!
The angry email. The “call-out” social media post. The sharp reply on chat. The hyper-critical blog post. They feel good, right?
But Salvo doesn’t actually avoid any damage. in Armada, if you Salvo every attack, your ship explodes, with the only other effect being that the attacking ship gets hurt too — usually a lot less.
From the perspective of minimizing interpersonal friction in a group setting, Salvo is the worst defense token. It didn’t end the conflict created by this unexpected criticism; in fact, now the conflict is bigger and louder, because the criticizer has also gotten hurt. Other people may leap to their defense, or yours, and pretty soon the battle lines are established. What started as a community soon feels like a war zone.
Redirect isn’t great, either; in a community context it’s basically blame-shifting, which similarly doesn’t prevent any damage; it just moves it around, and the community still suffers.
Neither is is not what we want for our community if the goal is to remain friendly and welcoming!
Prevent and reduce damage
If we want to keep our ship flying community alive, we need to prefer the defense tokens that prevent or reduce damage:
- Scatter: prevent conflicts in the first place by meeting expectations, being mindful of other people’s feelings, and maintaining your relationships.
- Evade: notice impending conflicts and help make them fizzle out early. Be humble.
- Brace: mend fences and fix problems so the conflicts that do erupt shrink over time.
- Contain: keep conflicts localized to the participants, and prevent them from spiraling out of control. Don’t let drama spill out into the larger team or the whole organization — or heaven forbid into the media! Accept valid criticism and let others have the last word.
These social defense tokens are harder and less satisfying to use than Salvo and Redirect. But over the long term, they do a much better job.
Which brings us to KDE
Today I think KDE is known as a pretty friendly place. And when I look around, I see a lot of examples of people — consciously or unconsciously — using defense tokens in their interpersonal relationships that reduce harm rather than moving it around or sending it back.
It’s not perfect, of course. We all mess up sometimes. And a culture like this takes years to develop. But I think the strong social bonds between contributors inside KDE are self-evident, and represent a significant part of the organization’s success today.
So I want to congratulate KDE and encourage us all to keep it up! I know times are tough and a lot of things in the world feel like they’re exploding, or getting ready to. Things suck more than they should, and there’s always more we can do to improve it. But as long as we maintain our relationships with one another, it becomes a lubricant that makes all those things so much more possible to survive or achieve.
Adventures in Linux and KDE 