In 2002, the United States government detained a Mauritanian man, Mohamedou Ould Slahi, and sent him to Gitmo. As Slahi waited to be charged (he never was), he penned a 446-page memoir that detailed the many strategies he employed to endure his years of confinement.

At Play in the Carceral State is a week-long series investigating play in, around, and about prisons and prison culture. Learn more here .

But the library remains a labyrinth, a facility full of thorny questions. This summer, Waypoint sent me to the Detainee Library, to figure out what happened to the games at Gitmo. From that trip and from my previous research, the following is a short list of everything I know about the Detainee Library.

Slahi is one of the roughly 780 detainees known to have passed through the Gitmo detention facilities; as of July 2017, 41 remain. Over the past 15 years, many detainees have requested and read books from the Detainee Library. Journalists have actively documented what titles appear on the shelves, and in recent years, the inventory has grown to include not only DVDs, but also PS3 games.

"Before prison, I didn't know the difference between a pawn and the rear end of a knight, nor was I really big gamer. But I found in chess a very interesting game, especially the fact that a prisoner has total control over his pieces, which gives him some confidence back."

In it, he talks extensively of his fascination with games, an interest he developed only after his arrival to the detention facilities.

On September 13, 2013, Michael Morisy filed a Freedom of Information Act requesting a "copy of guidelines for accepting donations of books for Gitmo inmates." In 2017, after a bit of a wait, he received JDG Procedure #40 . There's this one sentence that I read and re-read, because on the surface, it seems like such a simple declaration.

Commander John Robinson, Director of Public Affairs of the Joint Task Force Guantanamo, tells me in a letter that those "electronic games" are PS3 games, which were added to the Detainee Library in the late summer of 2011.

He says, "They request the games just like a book. They can have up to ten in their possession to share with their communal bloc. Once they want to return the games, they can return them in exchange for one for one basis."

I turn to the guy giving the tour, a twentysomething who tells me to call him the Detainee Programs Officer. I ask him about the PS3 games.

I raise my hand in the Detainee Library. The building I am in—the building that houses all the PS3 games for detainees—feels a little bit like the trailer in South Carolina, where I took my Gifted and Talented classes in elementary school. So, surrounded by men in military garb, I feel very much like a student. It helps that I wrote my Master's thesis on this very building—the Guantanamo Bay Detainee Library. But there are still so many things I don't know.

"We're constantly trying to increase the amount of games that we have," he tells me, adding that "Some of the games have to go through the screening process, just because of the material that they have in them. But if they are approved we are constantly trying to grow our inventory through games."

Standing in the library, I asked the Detainee Programs Officer whether or not board games might be added to the collection.

The Detainee Programs Officer has been here—at Gitmo—for a little over a month, and I've spent over 2.5 years studying the protocols, policies, and practices of the Library. We spend thirty four minutes in this space that has kept me on my toes for over thirty months. The land that we stand on has been under the control of the U.S. government since 1903.

I ask plainly if they're planning to shift to the PS4, but the duo simply reiterates that for now, the detainee library will continue to operate with PS3 games.

**"**It progressed, just like the systems did," says another trooper. "It started with Nintendo. They actually had a Nintendo 64 system; it was the first one received, and it just progressed as they went outdated. Common knowledge right now is that they're coming out with PS4, that's the next migration, because these are becoming obsolete. So they progressed."

Yet the library offers no board games—not chess or checkers, let alone more complex games. And when I push on this, the officer tells me that the only games the library deals with are PS3 games.

Yet in his memoir, Known and Unknown, former Secretary of Defense, Donald Rumsfeld notes that "detainees had access to a basketball and volleyball court, ping-pong tables, and board games." Kyndra Miller Rotunda, a former officer in the JAG Corps, echoed his sentiments and in her own book, Honor Bound: Inside the Guantanamo Trials, criticized lawyers for misrepresenting their clients' conditions. "If they believed that the conditions were so deplorable, " she asked, "why did they raise menial issues like speeding up the mail and purchasing checker board games for detainees?"

Though I see none, board games have been part of the detention facility for years.

Games make multiple appearances in the Review of Department's Compliance with President's Executive Order on Detainee Conditions of Confinement, a document that was prepared in 2009 in order to brief then President Obama on the state of Gitmo. The Review—frequently called the Walsh Report, after one of it's primary compilers, Admiral Walsh—states, "Under DoDD 2310.01E, detainees will be treated humanely and respected as human beings. Additional reference material may be found in GPW (Art. 38, 98), GCC (Art. 94, 125), and AR 190-8 (6-7), which provide that detainees are encouraged to participate in intellectual, educational, and recreational pursuits, as well as sports and games."

Though the hyperlinks to the appendices of the Walsh Report broke long ago, the Wayback Machine has on archive a image series of images labeled "detainee items" that show some of the board games provided to detainees back in 2009: checkers, backgammon, and chess among them.

But if there are board games at Gitmo, why aren't they stacked alongside the PS3 games in the Detainee Library?

I email the Joint Task Force this question. At first, no one responds. Later, Commander Robinson writes this response:

The Joint Detention Group began providing electronic games to detainees in 2008 to provide mental stimulation as part of the overall mission to ensure humane treatment. As technology evolved, systems were upgraded from the Nintendo to the PS3 between 2011 and 2012. Currently, both JDG Detainee Programs and individual detainee lawyers provide games to be used on consoles provided by the JDG. Board games haven't been provided by Detainee Programs since 2007 or 2008. Detainees are not using board games right now due to a lack in interest. The board games are in storage.

When I ask how this interest is determined and what would happen to the games in storage if the detention center closed, Robinson refers me back to his initial response.

Maybe the games really are in storage.

When Waypoint asked Wells Dixon, Senior Staff Attorney at the Center for Constitutional Rights, what he thought might have happened to the board games in the detention facilities, he speculated that the Joint Task Force might be telling the truth.