Higher Levels of Play

The great majority of players were happy to play the game with my own value system; I encouraged them to try higher levels of participation and some took me up on that offer. The next higher level of play involved the concept of political bias. I offered the player several other sets of values representing certain common points of view, such as Environmentalist, Oil Company, Pro-Nuclear, and so forth. Players who tried out these value sets quickly discovered that the only way to win was to follow the kind of policies embraced by proponents of each bias. For example, in the Pro-Nuclear bias, nuclear power plants are safe, clean, and cheap; building lots of nuclear power plants generates lots of cheap energy that propels the world economy to new heights. By contrast, other forms of energy are polluting or dangerous; using these energy forms will lead to much suffering the world over.

The highest level of play invited the player to alter the coefficients in the model. This provided the greatest challenge and required the deepest thought. For example, I am particularly proud of the two formulae shown in Figure 25.3.

25.3. Formulas for starvation and lung disease points.

Forcing the player to explicitly assign point values for human life puts a lot of stress on people, stress that most people avoid by refusing to think about it. This game shoved the problem right into their faces. It turns out that, if you assign equal values to both forms of death, you can never win the game, because the number of people who die from starvation each year is overwhelming.