Political games have a long history in the computer game world, but rarely a good one. Politics are hard to model well, and it's all too easy for a game designer to let biases overtake simulation. When this happens, it's nearly always to the game's detriment as both lesson and enjoyment. But even those failures can show us how a more compelling version might look; when the good ones do show up, they can be amazingly powerful tools for provocation.
You can't talk about political computer games without giving a tip of the hat to Balance of Power, by Chris Crawford. Probably one of the best political simulations around, it allowed the player to assume the role of leader of either the US or the USSR, and to navigate crises without unleashing nuclear war. Over 250,000 copies sold, a remarkable number considering the era. The original, from 1985, focuses entirely on the bipolar conflict; the "1990" update, from 1988, adds multipolar complexity and more nuance. Crawford, who continues to write and speak about computers and interactivity, has since put the Macintosh version of Balance of Power II on his website, along with a few of his less-successful games (the ecological sim Balance of the Planet and the economics sim Guns and Butter).
Few explicitly political games have come close to equaling Balance of Power in either quality or sophistication, although it was by no means perfect. Arguably, Balance of Power made it too easy to end up at war, but in that it was in good company; the RAND Strategy Assessment System, the heavy-duty political sim run by the RAND think-tank in the mid-1980s through early-1990s, was also constructed such that the Cuban Missile Crisis, by far the closest the superpowers got to outright war, would be the lowest possible conflict level.
Nearly all of the commercial post-Balance of Power political games added tank battles and animated explosions to the mix -- something Crawford intentionally avoided -- and reduced the complexity of diplomacy. Civilization and its various counterparts and sequels brought back some of the political wrangling, but disconnected it from reality -- it's hard to draw a useful lesson from Napoleon and Montezuma fighting over the lone oil resource on their shared continent. SimCity was arguably more successful as political simulation, at least in terms of trying to figure out a balance of resources and community needs; even there, the lack of strongly identifiable positions by the various civic voices undercut its power as a learning tool.
More recent political games are often much more limited in scope. We talked about A Force More Powerful in March and Food Force back in April. Both take on difficult topics (the first, toppling a tyrant with non-violent strategies; the second, the logistics and politics of delivering food aid) with relative sophistication, and are correspondingly fairly successful.
Some of the more recent political games are even more limited. Newsgaming.com has two games on its site, both intended to be triggers for conversation than actual games. September 12 has a small number of terrorists running through crowds of civilians; the player can shoot the at terrorists with missiles, inevitably knocking down buildings and killing civilians along with the intended target. Madrid is even simpler, a tribute to the victims of the Madrid train bombings, the goal is to brighten the on-screen candles; as the candles fade over time, the game is a "whack-a-mole" clickfest. It's more an interactive image than a game, really.
Another example of political argument made through simulation emerged this week. "Wild West Bank" is a computer game created by the Israeli peace group Back to Israel. Like Madrid, it's a simple "whack-a-mole" style game, written in Shockwave and playable online. Players are given the task of dismantling illegal settlements in the West Bank and moving soldier back to the border; as the player does so, more settlements pop up, and more soldiers are moved in to protect them. According to a BBC report, more than 45,000 people have played the game in the first four days it was available. As the game is entirely in Hebrew, a guide is helpful -- this review at Academic Gamers gives sufficient detail to allow readers to give the game a try, and the discussion at Water Cooler Games gives more context.
For me, the significantly more sophisticated A Force More Powerful and Food Force are far more successful than September 12 or Wild West Bank as political education, not just as games. In many respects, the overly-simple political Shockwave games are the digital equivalent of giant puppets carried by protesters -- you can admire the effort, even appreciate the message, but they're not going to change anybody's mind.
The lack of explosions and other kinds of flashy graphics militates against the possibility of another Balance of Power update. That's too bad, as the game was one of the better ways of illustrating the complexity of geopolitical relations. Ideally, such a modern version would be used in the kind of multi-stakeholder engagement employed with the urban sim MetroQuest. Getting people who have strong disagreements with each other to sit down and truly understand the complexity of the situation is hard, but not impossible. Even for solitary play, political simulations can be a tool for facilitating a better understanding of the world, if they're done right.
Sadly, too few are. We need to keep our eyes open for the ones that work.
