Eschaton combatants

The all-caps bloc designations of Eschaton (see that entry), the juniors' four-court thermonuclear war-game. Of a given day's players, "three compose a theoretical Anschluss designated AMNAT, another three SOVWAR, one or two REDCHI, another one or two the wacko but always pesky LIBSYR or more formidable IRLIBSYR," and the rest "can form anything from SOUTHAF to INDPAK to like an independent cell of Nuck insurgents with a 50-click Howitzer and big ideas"; "Each team is called a Combatant." (p. 323). The teams are "arrayed in positions corresponding to their location on the planet earth as represented in The Rand McNally Slightly Rectangular Hanging Map of the World" (p. 323), lobbing lobs in which "each of the 400 dead tennis balls in the game’s global arsenal represents a 5-megaton thermonuclear warhead" (p. 323). The designations are transparent pre-O.N.A.N. Cold-War shorthand — America/NATO, the Soviet bloc, Red China, Libya-Syria (with the more formidable Iran-Libya-Syria upgrade), South Africa, India-Pakistan — a real-map geopolitics the Interdependence era has officially superseded, which is part of the game's joke. In the disastrous I.-Day game, Timmy Peterson plays the SOVWAR premier, Kieran McKenna is AMNAT staff, and Josh Gopnik plays SOUTHAF (see the character table); afterward the capital-C usage walks off the map — "The I.-Day Combatants had been out there of their own volition." (p. 515). The game's wider all-caps apparatus follows the Combatants into play: a controlled game consists of "Spasm Exchanges—SPASEX", which can metastasize into all-out "Strikes Against Civilian Populations—SACPOP"; the winner is the "Combatant with the most favorable ratio of points for INDDIR—Infliction of Death, Destruction, and Incapacitation of Response—to SUFDDIR—self-evident" (p. 324); the pre-game summit haggles over "DEFCON-gradients, city-trading, and so on" (p. 325); and every escalation is argued in the rulebook's game-theoretic idiom of utility — a strike is chosen because it "has the most utility in the old game-theoretic matrix right now" (p. 335).