     |
 |
 |
 | | | | |
 |
|||
 |
||||||
          |
 |
 |
||||
|
If you’re playing the Palestinian side, the game doesn’t let you attack Jewish settlements or send suicide bombers to Israel. The Israeli PM can be a hawk or a dove, but the Palestinian President has no choice but to be a dove. I suspect that this was a political decision by the designers: a game that let you launch suicide attacks against civilians would raise too much of an outcry. As the Palestinian President, the only really violent action you can take is against your own militants – the assassination that I mentioned at the beginning. Winning from the Palestinian side requires a great deal of careful diplomacy, and a lot of sucking up to third parties like Egypt and the European Union, for mediation and financial support. The only other political computer game I’ve ever played that had this level of subtlety was Balance of Power, which I consider one of the greatest games ever made.
Balance of Power was a zero-sum game: the object was to maximize the United States’s geopolitical prestige at the expense of the Soviet Union, or vice versa. You had to be careful not to ignite a nuclear war, but apart from that, the more you humiliated the other guys, the better. It, too, was asymmetric: the United States had loads of money and rich friends, but relatively few troops, while the Soviet Union had huge armies but very little money. PeaceMaker, however, is not a zero-sum game, and it’s a richer and more difficult challenge. You have to achieve a win-win outcome, and that’s hard when many actions that your own citizens approve of will be deplored by the other side, and vice versa. The trick is to identify those actions that benefit one side without hurting the other too much, and I know what they are, but I’m not going to tell you.
No matter who you play as, you’ll often get accused of being soft on the enemy, especially by the more radical members of your own government. But since the game is about making peace and specifically rewards those efforts, there’s little point in being a hawk on either side. I tried it. I lost in about five minutes flat. |
|||||||||||||||
Previous
|
|
|