design a nonviolent game

... so much for giving it up…

Here’s an idea: a game system represents an economy. An economy can be designed to be stable or unstable. By unstable I mean something similar to the idea of ‘zero-sum’ but a little fuzzier: that disparities in the success metric lead to accelerating feedback mechanisms that favour successful players and penalise the others (not necessarily in exact proportion to the metric though which is what I mean by ‘fuzzy’). In the long run, playing in such an economy means that there can be only a vanishingly small number of ‘winners’ and a near-infinite number of ‘losers’. Attempting to achieve a ‘win’ state is the same as survival. All players play for growth and survival but due to the structure of the economy, the only way to achieve guaranteed survival is to eliminate rivals.

The idea is to look at this another way: design a game economy which reflects an alternate system also present in nature: a chaotic system which requires active balancing. The point of playing is to achieve balance, not asymmetry, between players. The nature of the economy may or may not reward balance (my feeling is that the balance point must be a dynamic equilibrium which requires constant adjusting, otherwise there’s no point to playing) but it strongly penalises asymmetry. The fewer players remain in the game the less viable it becomes for the survivors. This seems more like how an actual ecology (and economy) functions.

To restate: by ‘nonviolent’ I think I mean ‘dynamically balance-seeking’ and by ‘game’ I think I mean a ruleset that revolves around the challenge of constructing and maintaining equilibrium in a complex multiactor economy where both personal and group survival are important.

I’m sure there’s a whole class of games that fall into this category, but they’re under-represented in gaming as a rule. The idea is that each individual score / survival metric is influenced by both personal achievements and by the actions of others, but not in a simplistic way.

The idea is still too vague and my game-design skills still are too lacking.

http://www.solaroof.org/

Not as a game, but as a real thing – the sort of thing I can see springing up all over in the next few decades.

The idea of the next decades being turbulent and Interesting, I think, is what I want to portray.

I don’t quite know how to describe what I want, even to myself, but the phrase ‘nonviolent roleplaying game’ comes close.

Something like a cooperative game (and most RPGs are cooperative, less ‘winning’ obsessed than most boardgames, so that’s halfway there) but based around the principles and practice of active nonviolence. Kind of like how wargames are based around the idea of recreating famous historical battles so you can test strategy and tactics, I want a sort of simulation kit for testing and demonstrating nonviolent social transformation/mediation strategies.

That would first assume that there exists a coherent body of nonviolent strategy and doctrine, able to be expressed in the hard logic of dice rolls and counter moves, and that’s where it gets tricky, I think, because I’ve yet to distill, even to my own satisfaction, anything like a coherent tactical approach from the multitude of peace / nonviolence / antiwar materials I’ve read so far. I’m not just talking about free trade or less-than-lethal police actions – those are both substitutes for outright war that merely mask the underlying violence of zero-sum competition, and they don’t make as interesting game scenarios as full-on conflict. I’m looking for a way of simulating the idea of peaceful revolution or some kind of transformative engagement between two initially opposed parties who yet manage to broker peace against the odds. Something that can be used as a useful training tool for peace movement activists, but more importantly is fun to play as a game and as a scenario, and can be extended in a modular open-source fashion.

The resolution of opposed goals and the interpersonal conflict it generates seems to be a large part of the RPG dynamic (it works particularly well in LARPs) but I’m looking for something more… something more like, I guess, the ‘roleplaying’ scenarios used in actual conflict-mediation training, only ported into a populist game format.

IE: Scenario. You are a field team worker for an Internet-based global environmental/social activism group. You’re attempting to achieve a certain goal (stop a war, change a corporate policy, etc). You’re also trying to do so in a manner consistent with satyagraha ethics: intrinsically non-confrontational. What are your options, how do the scenarios play out, do you win or lose (or can all actors satisfy their goals with minimal losses?)

I guess I’m talking about a political simulator, though I’m still thinking in primarily non-political (or trans-political) terms: not about party politics so much as about social and spiritual transformation and how to implement it, what the danger lines are likely to be, where a ‘gentle revolution’ might succeed and where it might fail, what losses are acceptable, what strategies might be self-contradictory. If a Rachel Corrie goes under a bulldozer, does that advance your movement? Does it threaten it? Does it depersonalise your leadership to endorse tactics which endanger the lives of operatives? More importantly, how can you plan to enter and leave a conflict zone without loss of life and with accomplishment of mission objectives? Can an unarmed NGO work in association with a national military, a religious militia, private mercenary agents or a criminal/terrorist organisation for security reasons, while maintaining mission credibility? Are peace operatives limited to working on the fringes of a violent conflict due to their lack of armed support, or are they more likely to be accepted by both sides due to their nonpartisan nature? How do you deal with the political, religious and economic dimensions of conflicts which may contradict your organisation’s internal values and beliefs? Can Buddhist, Islamic, Christian and radical Marxist organisations work together in the pursuit of a joint peace, or is such an alliance likely to crumble from internal contradictions? At what point might an NGO conglomerate turn into the same system it opposes? How might operatives from vastly different cultural and philosophical viewpoints cooperate in an ideological battlefield?

These are the sort of issues the antiwar counterculture is facing right now and I’d love to explore them in a game format somehow.