I've set quite a task for myself in creating political matrix Games. I thought at first that it would be as easy as making a military campaign game. Campaigns though, are much less complicated Politics on the other hand spans the whole range of human experiences.
How does one go about making a game that can accommodate: revolutions, guerrilla wars, non-violent campaigns, business, political decision making, marriages and divorces, and any other human conflict which we call political? I have a hard time even understanding part of how all the different conflicts work outside of games. The task challenges me to understand more about people than I ever have before.
My problem with understanding people is figuring out when the system I've just made up has anything to do with "how the process really works" and when "I just made it up." I believe this is a problem for most people. After all we humans are particularly ignorant of how we really work. I used to think that somewhere out there there were some wise men who knew what was going on, and were running the show. I now know that humans are not in such positions, so I cling desperately to my old misconception by transferring all the power to God. I know I can't be disproved out of that stand!
Anyway, the method I've used to try and figure out what a political MG should be is to make games and try them out. This is experimental but not scientific. My measures of what works and what doesn't are purely subjective. i use history as a control since it provides a wide range of human behaviors that people thought were important enough to write down. Games still have to be aesthetically pleasing and fun so even history is not all powerful. It sticks me that this method is more like what a craftsman does than a scientist. Oh well, my great grand father was a cooper, my grand father was a musician, my father was an artist, so it makes sense that this method of thinking is well ingrained in my family.
I started off in the summer of 91 with a map of the ancient middle east. Three of us got together on weekends and played a sort of role play/political game. We had three different matrixes to chose from, a political one (the first draft of my present political matrix), a role play one (that was later melded into the first one), and the military campaign matrix. I set up no structure one the game beyond the MG rules of turn resolution. The game consisted of the three of us vying for dominance of Iraq. The game worked because all the players had some idea about how politics works and about power diplomacy. Also none of the players was a power gamer out to destroy the world.
What I learned is that political alliances between groups of people "win" territory without fights. The weakness is that alliances can be broken. Military power wins out over political decree, but concerted grass roots political action (guerilla war) can defeat military moves.
I've always had the notion (stolen from sociology and anthropology) that society is formed into groups of people who form power groups. Power groups are organized to unify human work to get things done. The basic unit of society then is the family. Families organize to raise children, provide food, do much of the education that kids need, provides emotional support for its members, etc. Families have been doing these tasks back to the stone age and before. A step up from families are peasant agricultural villages. These groups organize labor to raise crops and store grain. They also add on to the social aspects of family life. Then come cities!
Each step up in level of organization raises the complexity of interaction. Cities organize labor to produce specialized goods, and more importantly to gather together and redistribute goods coming from very far afield. I used to think that these groups were "organic" (ie they reproduced but stayed basically the same - a steady state world) I am wrong on this one. Events are as free wheeling and bizarre as the weirdest world wrecking matrix gamer can come up with. There are no monoliths!
So if there are no monoliths and the world never predictable, then how on earth can a game be made to play it?!! It can but it requires that the scope of the game be narrowed down. Lots of details must be left out. Other details are grouped together in abstractions. I figured that the crux of political situations was
- 1. gaining and maintaining power,
2. solving problems as they arise and,
3. expanding the scope of the world we live in.
With these thoughts in mind I proceeded with my next project, the French Revolution.
As you can tell by looking at the final turn of the French PBM in this issue, I tried to apply the things I learned to the next game. The country is divided into power groups who hold political power (an abstract for how much say a person has in what happens next). Groups are also divided up based their numbers in the country. Since there are more peasants than nobles, it is likely that the peasants will be doing the farming while the nobles play politics. The peasants have no real political power but because of their very numbers they are important to control. Groups are organized into coalitions which can be shifted by making "make friend/enemy" arguments in the MG. The one who has the most power gets to be president (until the next election is held), but what the presidency means is unclear.
I ran across the idea of the political agenda years ago. I remember watching the PBS series "The Adams Chronicles" Where John Quincy Adams was talking about slavery as the "hidden agenda" of the day. Political agendas are useful to the game maker since they tell people what their characters wanted to accomplish.
Today we have the violent debate about abortion raging in the country. So agendas are clearly a factor in mobilizing people for action. In the French Revolution I gave different political groups agendas of what they wanted to accomplish historically. I never said that a player had to do these things, but players have. I noticed in face to face games that the Girondists can ally with the liberal aristocrats and be "royalist" or with the Cordilliers and be "republicans" since their political agenda is very flexible in aim. On the other hand, the Cordilliers and the liberal aristo's never got together, since to do so would completely undermine one or the other's position. I did not take full advantage of what agendas can do in this game. They would make the best measure for victory conditions, for instance. They also tell uninformed players what their historical counterparts hoped to do.
I had an unclear notion that political action was somehow tied to who controlled the government. I was wrong on this one. All the games I've run of the revolution show that every player is doing political actions every turn whether in or out of office. Chris Morris started repairing the French economy long before the girondists took office, for instance. This severely undermined the position of president since one of the powers I gave was to "set the political agenda". I carried over from the campaign MG the idea that no than one argument can go through for one unit or group or problem in a turn. This seemed to hold more potential in organizing action since I could limit the number of forums/places to argue over, in future games.
Problems are the final area of difficulty in the revolution. i thought at first that I would have unsolved problems cause various groups the get "angry". This would work to break up political alliances and force people to fix problems of get kicked out of office. This did not happen in the runs, due to the difficulty of keeping track of who was angry at who and what for.
The thing that worked was the abstract system I used to cause and solve problems. I made it easy to cause a problem. It only takes one argument to make a mild problem. A second argument makes it moderate, and a third one makes it severe. Solving problems is much tougher. Three arguments in a row solve a severe problem. Two in a row reduce the severity to a moderate problem. A moderate problem is solved in two arguments in a row or reduced to a mild problem by one argument. only mild problems are solved in only one argument. This works to recreate the world since it demonstrates dramatically what severity means (it means it is harder to solve). It also rewards leaders who solve problems quickly rather than letting them get out of hand. This system is just made up, I know that, but it does make player use up their only vital resource in MGs - their arguments. So this part stays.
It is hard to do a political game that does not also have a military part of it. So having an area map, and using a combined political and military matrix set is useful. I think that battle should be very abstracted and underplayed since it is not the main focus of the game. I used a free kriegspeil approach with the revolution.
It worked but I am far from satisfied with it. This year I'm going to run "Et tu Brutus" a political game in Rome. It builds on the revolution. There are political power groups and alliances. Political agendas have become victory conditions instead of just suggestions for actions. I added in personal victory conditions that I use in military games since they add spice to the game. Man power is still a part of the game but its role is reduced. It consists of controlling provinces to be able to raise legionaries there. The big change in this game is that I am creating a "political forum" map. This has all the places that a person can chose to make arguments. Without a forum, no arguments can be made. So players must now vie for control over the limited resource of "argument forums". The Consul of Rome gets the perk of having a "free" argument slot that only he can use. We'll see how it works.
So political MGs are an on going project. They are far from perfect. Maybe I'll get them to a workable level in a few years.
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© Copyright 1993 by Chris Engle
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