GRBAC, SLOVOPAKNIA—Political satire has proven itself a powderkeg elsewhere in Europe this spring. In the tiny Eastern European nation of Slovopaknia, a cartoon has unseated the local government of its capital, Grbac.
Three weeks ago, Slobodan Popovic, a local student group leader in Grbac, was arrested following his publication of imagery mocking the city’s mayor, Radomir Gavrilovic. While Mayor Gavrilovic denied the arrest, on a misdemeanor charge, had any link to the political caricature, Popovic’s student followers thought otherwise.
In the intervening weeks, following a carefully orchestrated series of events both public—political street theatre and a free rock concert—and private—quietly politicking the local judiciary while pressuring security forces not to intervene–the student group succeeded in galvanizing popular support, inciting a citywide general strike. On the heels of these events, the courts acted: a special corruption enquiry has been launched targeting the mayoral office, Popovic has been freed, and a call has been issued for general elections later this summer.
Slovopaknia does not exist, but for a slight change of names and datelines, there is no reason to believe otherwise, claims Ivan Marovic.
Mr. Marovic should know. The 32-year-old Belgrade native is a self-described “retired revolutionary,” and a founding member of Otpor, the Serbian student-led resistance movement credited, in one of recent history’s most smoothly-engineered regime changes, with peacefully removing President Slobodan Milosevic from power in 2000.
Mr. Marovic is also creative consultant for the small team producing the computer game A Force More Powerful. The game, which shipped March 1st, plays as an unusually dense, realistic simulation of modern political activism. The game contains several detailed player campaigns, including the trouble in Grbac. It is the brainchild of the Washington, DC-based International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and filmmakers York Zimmerman Inc., whose eponymous film and Bringing Down a Dictator were the documentary precursors to this project.
In the game, a player picks one of several scenarios, guiding a cadre of amateur revolutionaries—an embattled religious minority, disenfranchised women, students, unionists or the old-fashioned proxy, the disgruntled bourgeoisie—through complex social interactions and outright struggle on the path to political change. Over the course of many turns, a player attempts to achieve objectives that he or she has set for themself at the game’s outset.
Winning often involves achieving political consensus among diverse groups, from the middle class to the courts to the college radio station, and outsmarting the opposition in acts of political theatre. A “resistopedia” schools players in methods for handling kleptocrats and military juntas with pamphlets, sit-ins and other stand-bys of civil disobedience.
“This is not only a game that is nonviolent,” says Mr. York. “It’s about promoting nonviolence.”
Beyond the guns and butter world of similar strategy games like Civilization or Age of Empires, AFMP rewards players who skillfully plot their moves according to principles of nonviolent resistance, the same strategies employed from British India to civil rights-era Selma, Alabama.
The team behind AFMP has been dogged in its attempt to bottle the algorithm for peaceful revolutionary action. For the ICNC, it has been at the heart of its mission. Peter Ackerman, 59, the founding chair of the ICNC, cultivated his own thinking on strategic nonviolent resistance through the theories of political scientist Gene Sharp and the economist and Nobel laureate Thomas Schelling. Adapting Schelling’s game theory approach and Sharp’s 198 tactics for nonviolent conflict, Ackerman believes AFMP will find serious use among repressed communities, think tanks and academics alike. “I want this tool to have common currency with these constituencies,” Ackerman says.
Mr. Gandhi might blush.
“This game is fun, but it’s not for fun,” says Mr. Marovic.
Might the game actually work? The 62-year-old Mr. York, whose films have been cited as propaganda by various governments such as Iran and Cuba, suspects the game will certainly be taken seriously, both by those who are agitating for change as well in power who oppose it. “Don’t try this at home,” he laughs, knowing that his films have been used as instructional texts, circulating as pirated copies around the world.
As Miriam Zimmerman, his 42-year-old partner and wife, explains, “We can anticipate how the game will be used based on how our films have been used. Besides recently appearing in Kurdish Northern Iraq and within a certain repressive African regime, they’ve been translated into Farsi and broadcast repeatedly into Iran.”
“One man’s information is another government’s idea of propaganda,” Mr. Marovic adds, who concurs that the game may be seen as subversive by some governments.
Mr. Marovic remembers his Otpor colleagues struggling with the relative scarcity of training materials available to them. “When you’re involved in pro-democracy work, your resources are pretty limited. Your experience is, too. You’re hungry for information. We read books, watched movies, read news from different countries. The Internet was obviously instrumental.”
For this reason, AFMP has been designed to travel far. Besides distributing a few thousand copies among colleagues worldwide, York Zimmerman and the ICNC is retailing the game inexpensively at 20 dollars. Profit will go directly into providing non-English translations of the game.
Furthermore, the game has been designed with no prohibitive copy protection, allowing it to be duplicated and distributed with relative ease. “Piracy,” Mr. York notes, “is one of the predominant means by which software is obtained in some parts of the world.”
As a game about grassroots organization, AFMP is also highly configurable. “It is entirely editable. Maps, images and character—the whole thing can be modified.” The accompanying scenario editor, typical of such games, is more detailed than most.
“We don’t consider this a finished product,” explains Mr. York. “We see this as the first phase of a continually expanding community.”
As game companies know, fan communities often spawn new extensions of play and interaction for a game, fueling the shelf life of a title or even turning it into a franchise, like The Sims. The so-called “modding” appetite of gamers is well rewarded by AFMP’s almost limitless customizability. Everything from the chief of police’s sympathies to civil liberties to the destabilizing effects of a dictator’s violent crackdown can be tweaked.
Ultimately, it may be less a game than a highly expandable wet lab for organizational management. “The game doesn’t teach you; you teach yourself through gameplay,” says Mr. Marovic.
In the age of satellite television and the Internet, pro-democracy movements are understandably attuned to the appeal of modern media like videogames. Nor is the use of such digital products limited to them. Games and music videos have been employed by groups such as Hezbollah as recruitment tools.
Even the supposed bad guys get it. During a talk show appearance on Serbian television last year to demonstrate AFMP, Mr. Marovic recalls receiving unequivocal praise from a former adversary and Milosevic apparatchik, also invited onto the show. Sharing spots on a couch in a tense moment, Mr. Marovic recalls the former Socialist Party official saying approvingly “that anyone who wishes to commit effective political acts will find this game useful.”
Winning in AFMP resembles the vagaries of defining success in the real world political stage, where movements can have diverse and very different visions of achievement. In contrast to a retail videogame market dominated by the unilateral vigilantism of Grand Theft Auto-style “shooters”, AFMP focuses on a series of open-ended possibilities for gaming out a victorious result. Game turns, played out in weeks, can stretch out into years. In one scenario a player agitates for free elections. In another, it’s as simple as removing a jailed dissident, or as elusive as easing ethnic tensions across the region. Violence is simply not an option, with resolution involving careful study and observation of characters’ behaviours and abilities.
Not surprisingly, as Mr. York says of the game, “It has a very steep, cerebral learning curve.”
Mr. Marovic, a videogame addict from his youth, agrees that AFMP’s difficulty is a marker of its realism. “A game that models complex social, economic and political interaction shouldn’t be easy, and players would reject it if it were.”
Franklin Foer, the editor of The New Republic Magazine, who has written about the ICNC and Peter Ackerman, played early demos of the game and agrees. “This game could be dangerous if it truly did inspire people to the streets naively, but fortunately they’ve done a lot to ensure a highly realistic sense of what constitutes real-world success in these movements.”
“I was very impressed by the game,” Foer, 31, explains. “I think it’s an avant-garde concept in Washington policy circles to take an abstract idea like nonviolent resistance and package it this way as a game. It’s admirable.”
AFMP is among a series of games produced in the last few years to which the moniker “serious gaming” has been attached. Serious games such as America’s Army, Incident Commander and Pulse!! were designed initially or primarily for education and training, not entertainment. Most commonly, they are military in nature.
One of the crowning ironies of AFMP is that its game industry partner, BreakAway Games, is a major producer of such military training applications, including Virtual Convoy Trainer and Incident Commander. (BreakAway Games was contracted solely to provide the coding and game engine necessary for implementing the game mechanics, which were determined by York, Zimmerman, Marovic and Ackerman.) Military adventurism has been a staple of bestselling videogame titles in recent years, blurring the already indistinct line between game adaptations of Tom Clancy properties, such as his Splinter Cell, Ghost Recon and Rainbox Six series, and US military recruitment and training “games” like America’s Army.
Mr. York concedes the irony while suggesting their affinity. “Nonviolent strategy and military strategy have a lot in common. They’re both about assessing strengths and weaknesses, understanding the sequencing of events and dynamics of relationships.”
Mr. Foer agrees. “Obviously, the military uses scenario training games all the time. It’s the model for a game like this in a sense, and part of why it’s as sophisticated at it is.”
AFMP is also subversive for it use of the videogame medium to reach younger people with a serious intended purpose. “The whole medium is underestimated by the general public,” Mr. Marovic says. “People have a hard time understanding that a game can be both fun and instructional. But young people get it, and I believe this game will speak to them.”
Gaming, adds Foer, is “the lingua france of youth worldwide.”
Reflecting on his strange journey from revolutionary to game designer, Mr. Marovic says, “It’s really hard for me to put these things together—my life experiences and this game—on an emotional level. I tried to include in this game a sense of the uncertainty and excitement we felt in our own struggle. I think we managed to translate how overwhelming the emotions of this kind of political action can be.”
Long before talk of the revolution being televised, blogged or podcast, Ralph Waldo Emerson wrote, “Every revolution was first a thought in one man’s mind.” Thoughts and ideas also travel further, if not faster, than bullets. Perhaps computer screens are bound to replace the barricades as the proving grounds of the thinking person’s regime change.
As a frequent speaker on fostering student political movements, Mr. Marovic travels to places such as Lebanon, Iran and the Ukraine, where he helped counsel student leaders of the Orange revolution. That is, for as long as he is welcome. “Whenever you travel to certain countries, there are security concerns,” he says. “I was in Lebanon for seven days and then I was strongly advised to leave the country.” No stranger to unwelcome visits, Mr. Marovic chuckles that a little victory has already been won with AFMP’s completion.
“No one can exile this game.”
[KILLED by Ariel Kaminer: New York Times Arts & Leisure, February, 2007]
