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Militants don’t care about peace; they only care about victory at all costs. In the game, the best solution is for each side to squelch its own militants as best it can, and to use restraint in its responses to enemy attacks. The Israelis have to suppress their militants in a democratic context; the most they can do is arrest them. The Palestinian President can assassinate Palestinian militants, but he risks touching off a civil war among his own people if he doesn’t enjoy much popular support at the time. PeaceMaker illustrates some of the hardest lessons of leadership of all: that tough decisions are not always popular; that what the public demand in the short run isn’t necessarily the right answer in the long run; that responding with overwhelming force to punish every outrage produces nothing but more outrages. Knee-jerk reactions usually fail. In a political conflict you sometimes have to allow killers to get away with it for the greater good, especially when your mechanisms for going after them are likely to hurt innocent bystanders. This decade’s terrorist is next decade’s statesman, as happened with both Menachem Begin and Yasser Arafat.
There’s a great deal to learn from the game, both about political processes and in terms of simple facts about the situation. (I didn’t know, for example, that the Gaza strip doesn’t even have control over its own water supply.) The game will be invaluable in the classroom, if students, teachers, and perhaps above all parents and school boards approach it with an open mind. PeaceMaker does not praise and it does not condemn, and for that reason I’m sure there are those who will condemn it. But if it were to take sides or get preachy, it would fail. Instead it does something wiser and more useful: present the player with tough moral choices and then show the consequences of his actions, with visceral realism. Some will quibble about whether its internal mechanics are really accurate or not, but I think the designers have gone out of their way to be evenhanded and to attribute goodwill to both sides – perhaps rather more than either side deserves. They do want the game to be winnable, after all! Can PeaceMaker achieve peace? No. That depends on the hearts and minds of the people who live in the Middle East – both in the affected areas and the neighboring countries too. Can it promote peace, which it states as its goal? Definitely, if it reaches a wide enough audience. Impact Games wants PeaceMaker to be more than merely a classroom tool; they hope it will be a genuinely popular game and a springboard for discussion among many people, and to that end they are releasing it in English, Hebrew and Arabic versions. PeaceMaker is fun – challenging, tense at times, and extremely well-presented. But it’s also an important game with the potential to enlighten people about one of the great issues of our time. That’s a noble goal and one to which I would like to see more designers aspire. ---- Announcement! After many requests, I’ve finally created a database – well, OK, a file – of Twinkie Denial Conditions on my website, so they’re all in one place. You can read it on the page called No Twinkie Database. And I’m still collecting up game design mistakes for this year’s column, so if you know of one that’s not already on the list, send it to me at notwinkie@designersnotebook.com. |
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