Why is Risk called that? The board game should clearly be called War – there is no pretense, all the players want to own the whole map and it’s zero sum. Or maybe Risk is appropriate, if you consider what risk is. How much risk is left in your world if there are no more armies that you don’t control? Well, there’s a risk that if you don’t feed your armies enough, they will overthrow you in a coup. Beyond that though, your primary anxiety goes away; that your lines will be broken through at a weak spot and your nearly monochromatic control of North America might be disrupted through Kamchatka or some totally implausible path that apparently involves driving tanks over Greenland (maybe after a few more years of glacier-devastating climate change). So it’s fear of a bad outcome that one is trying to defeat by doing the full empire on the world. Checks out with the psychology of dictators: 1) have horrible childhood; 2) violently & manipulatively rise to power; 3) seek to make childhood-created fears go away completely by conquering the world (or at least your region if you’re a pragmatist and living in a post-Manhattan Project world). Main thing here is fear (and bad childhoods, but those are only obliquely related to risk). So dictators are the model for Risk, and beyond asking why the hell you would let children play a dictator-in-training game that teaches peer-fear, the game helps us understand the nature of risk in general.
Oxford (English Dictionary) and Cambridge (Advanced Learner’s Dictionary) have contrasting takes on risk’s definition:
(Exposure to) the possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance; a chance or situation involving such a possibility.
OED
The possibility of something bad happening.
Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary
The OED’s definition minces words; how we should think about values is made kindergarten simple in the latter definition (hurty no good) and Cambridge University leaves out the vector. Bad happenings could possibly happen in a forest, but if there’s no one exposed to them is the possibility a risk? The kind of question that will keep you up at night.
When thinking about risks there are categories of events, categories of bad outcomes, and some sort of prediction about how likely an event and outcome category pairing is to occur. For example, the event-outcome pairing of a windstorm and a given house’s roof being completely blown away has a likelihood based on location and other factors that home insurance companies have a decent idea of (or they should have a good idea). Concomitantly, that possibility is usually considered bad by both the person living in the house and the insurance company (concomitant is such a great word to misuse, particularly when adverbalized).
Beyond the definitions and predictions though, risk is about the valuation of an outcome. If it’s not a big deal for the owner of a home that their roof blows off, then they probably won’t have insurance for it (since they probably bought it in cash through a foreclosure sale) and won’t bat an eye when roof removal happens. It can be great fun (and pretty profitable) for companies and people (and dictators) to manage risk or transfer it to someone else, but imagine if those risks didn’t even exist. If the evaluation of an outcome were neutral or positive or non-existent rather than bad it would no longer be one of the OED’s “unwelcome circumstances”. A few examples. While there are probably always going to be terrible outcomes of driving a car that need to be insured (in addition to the possibility of getting pulled over and not being able to show the officer an insurance card), one could just not drive. No more risk. One could also work out their childhood problems in therapy or in a journal rather than becoming a dictator and “needing” to “eliminate” various risks by conquering your neighbors. No dictatorhood, no scare quotes or impossibly difficult coup & nationalism risk management.
The point is to return to the antecedent questions of is this possibility bad? Why is it bad? Does it need to be bad or could it be neutral or even positive? Creative valuation is necessary, just as for the player of the game of Risk. Ask yourself, is it actually bad if my territories are conquered and I am ejected from the game? Am I perhaps saving myself time, strife between friends, and a horrible slog about which both final players will either care far too much or far too little to continue? Maybe the real risk is to stay in the game and not end up baking oatmeal chocolate chip cookies with your friend who refused to even start playing such a frightfully vicious and uncivilized dictator-training game.
Roman Ryan 