The UnWar Game

I was, and remain, a child of the 60's. Although I never marched in a demonstration, smoked dope, or took any kind of mind-altering drug, I embraced the core values of the 60's counterculture, the most prominent of which was pacifism. War, in that view, was the greatest evil mankind had ever created, and was to be avoided at all costs. As the 1984 electoral campaigns heated up, there was plenty of belligerent talk from the right wing, and a series of alarming events boded ill for the future of peace. And here I was, profiting from the sale of wargames, and contemplating designing even more. It was wrong, and I knew it. But what could I do?

LESSON 48

Don't struggle to find the answer, struggle to find the right question; the answer will then be obvious.

As soon as I had phrased the problem in that form, the answer was obvious: I would design an unwar game, a game about the prevention of war, a game about peace. After weeks of feckless hand-wringing, it all became perfectly obvious once I had phrased the question in the right terms.

Now, there have been plenty of "nice guy" games in which players are encouraged to love each other, be nice to the little bunnies, and throw away their weapons. Unfortunately, these "cooperation" games all share one crucial problem: They were BORING! Recall Lesson 10: A game, like a story, must have a conflict.

The taxonomy of play in Chapter 1, "Definitions, Definitions," shows that games are a form of organized conflict. So my task was to design a game that was full of conflict, but lacked war. This is not so difficult a challenge as it might seem at first. As von Clausewitz noted in On War, "War is the extension of policy to other means." In other words, it is an extension of geopolitical conflict, not the first manifestation of it. War arises when conflicts between nations cross the line from peaceful into violent expression. Hence, there can be plenty of conflict in an unwar game it's just not violent conflict.

I found my theme song for the project in Peter, Paul, and Mary's rendition of Bob Dylan's "Blowin' in the Wind." The killer line was this:

How many deaths will it take 'til he knows that too many people have died?

This project pushed me to my emotional limits; listening to that song gave me the strength to carry on.



Chris Crawford on Game Design
Chris Crawford on Game Design
ISBN: 0131460994
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2006
Pages: 248

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