Chicago ‘68 Designer Interview with Yoni Goldstein
Chicago ‘68 designer Yoni Goldstein talks about how he modeled the three days of pandemonium during that infamous summer.
After interviewing Chicago ‘68 game designer and filmmaker Yoni Goldstein, I pinged The Moms — who grew up in Chicagoland with her four siblings — about it. She told me one of my uncles had been driving a cab in Chicago during that summer. He’d somehow been caught in one of the many fracases and had some teeth knocked out.
Chicago boils over: From one to four players can get a lungful of teargas as the establishment cracks down on the activist groups that descended on the city for the 1968 Democratic National Convention.
More than that I don’t know. But it was more than the setting and incidental family connection that got me on a recording line with Goldstein.
Encountering Vijayanagara: The Deccan Empires of Medieval India, 1290-1398 sharpened my general interest in titles that focus on other pockets of history, model other modes of conflict.
How did Goldstein choose to model the pressure cooker of the Chicago streets as activist groups — MOBE, the Yippies — tangled with the Chicago Police Department and Mayor Daley’s administration?
He answers that in spades. As he draws the system, the conversation turns to the era at large. I learn, among many other things, that French underground writer Jean Genet snuck into the country to connect with the leftist vanguard there. We touch on the William F. Buckley-Gore Vidal debates, a more genteel version of the Chicago clash mirrored on TV during the Republican National Convention in Florida.
We also learn about Yoni’s next project — a game that focuses on the Luddite rebellion in England — in this far-ranging and toothsome chat.