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 a forum for the uses of videogames in advertising, politics, education, and other everyday activities, outside the sphere of entertainment
ABOUT About This Site - RSS Feed Ian Bogost (editor) Gonzalo Frasca (editor emeritus) SPONSORS
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A Force More Complicated April 6, 2005 - by Ian Bogost
A Force More Powerful (AFMP) was commissioned by the International Center for Nonviolent Conflict. The game is intended to demonstrate non-violent democratic revolution and will be distributed to activist groups in countries pushing for democratic change. Break Away is a great group of developers whom I respect and admire (and not just for sponsoring the Serious Games GDC reception). But I'm worried about this game, and I'm worried about it because I'm not convinced it's ready to be put in the hands of potential revolutionaries. Don't get me wrong, this kind of openly biased game is exactly the kind of thing we've been calling for. But AFMP attempts to build a procedural model for any kind of democratic revolution. I fear that in our excitement about the game at GDC and in other forums, we've failed to ask hard questions about the political context for such an effort. As I said in the Personal Democracy article: "Is it possible to create a generalized representation of political overthrow? Can the computational representation of regime change overcome the geopolitical interests of the West?" What portion of revolutions can escape historical, cultural, and regional specificity enough to be computationally modeled? Compare AFMP to Peacemaker, a smaller game in progress shown during the GDC poster sessions by a group of CMU ETC students. Peacemaker specifically deals with the Israeli-Palestinian conflict in an attempt to abstract the systems at work in that particular conflict, like settlements and military occupation. The game's not ready yet, but the students put on a good show with their demo. It's a much narrower representation, but Peacemaker also wears its particular progressive, if optimistic, politics on its sleeve. The creators are using the game to express that frame and invite their players to consider it. Lead designer on AFMP Ananda Gupta points out that "If somebody sets up a scenario or represents a regime in a certain way, that format can be debated and reviewed, then played out." This is a good point. But I want to underscore the importance of also asking questions and making challenges about the ideological frame of games themselves, not just the possible frames they might afford for their players. AFMP can be located squarely in the pocket of Western interests. And even if Democracy might be good for people living under authoritarian regimes, hopefully our last two years in Iraq have taught us to think critically about such interventions. I'm hopeful that we'll see games about that topic soon. Comment from Frasca on April 6, 2005
Tsk, tsk. If I don't get my own friends to spell my name correctly, I guess all hope is lost. I think it's about time to change my name to Mickey ;) Comment from Ian Bogost on April 6, 2005
Comment from Darius K. on April 7, 2005
I was very excited about this game at the D.C. Serious Games Summit in October, but I really think it should be thought of as a teaching aid. At least in October, Ananda stressed the fact that this game almost *has* to be played with a trainer looking over your shoulder. On the other hand, this is a video game, and so potential revolutionairies will definitely be playing with it even *without* the proper training, which is scary, and may cause them to draw false conclusions about the model. Comment from Swen on August 24, 2005
I want to makie a comment with regard to developing a generic model to simulate regime change (democratic or otherwise).
Comment from Ian Bogost on August 24, 2005
Swen -- but aren't those patterns always presented from the necessarily biased perspective of a particular political agenda? I concur that a game that presents such patterns would be instructive, but such a game would still be seated within its own ideology. Comment from Ian Bogost on September 6, 2005
Comment from Pete Border on September 13, 2005
Separating social facts from interpretations is what historians debate about, and it's an open question whether such a thing is a)possible and b) worth the bother. Getting humans to see something as a kind of "interpretation-free fact" is basically impossible for all but the most simple of phenomena. "I think the gas gauge says we have a quarter tank left" is a fact; how to deal with that fact depends on who's looking at it - do we gas up right now, or is that plenty? In physics, where I come from, interpretation problems come up all the time- if a grad student KNOWS there should be such-and-such an effect in their data, they are quite likely to find it. If, heaven help us, they know how big the effect should be, they keep working on the analysis until they get the right answer; then they stop. The usual answer is to actively FORBID people from looking at the final answer until the analysis is absolutely done- then the answer is unveiled publicly. I dunno what happens if they get it wrong- presumably it doesnt get published much. Anyway, these problems all get a lot worse when people are playing with sims, especially so with sims of social phenomena. Sims need some sort of rules, and what those rules are depend on the preferences of whoever's making it up. I personally think you could learn a lot about someone by playing a sim they have made; it's sort of like reading a story someone else writes. I have no doubt that Will Wright loves public transportation after playing Sim City, for example. So maybe the thing to do is not to make one sim with one set of rules, but to make it easy for everyone to set up their own sims, with whatever rules they feel are appropriate. It would be an interesting experiment, anyway. Comment from Lilian on March 29, 2006
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