-
-
-
-
Wanna Start a Revolution? Play
Videogames!
An activist who as a student helped
topple Serbia’s Slobodan Milosevic now is designing a game that
teaches players nonviolent tactics to overthrow oppressive regimes.
Thursday, October 27, 2005
By
David Kirkpatrick
Ivan Marovic's penchant for strategic thinking led him in 2000 to
help organize and lead Otpor, a student movement that was critical
to ousting Serbian President Slobodan Milosevic. Now, with a
few friends, including one who's very wealthy, he's creating a
videogame to teach others how to foment nonviolent revolutions.
-
Every once in a while I see something in
technology that blows my mind. It happened last Friday when
Marovic, 31, spoke at the
PopTech! Conference
in Camden, Maine. The game he demonstrated, A Force More
Powerful, is inspiring evidence of how many ways there are for
technology to continue changing all of our lives. One only
needs to think of Iran, Myanmar, Belarus, and the many other
undemocratic and authoritarian nations to be reminded of how much
the world still needs such change.
-
Marovic's strategy game, scheduled for
release early next year, attempts to replicate the complexity of
issues facing would-be activists going up against a repressive
regime. In his talk, Marovic said the game aims "to help
people make and refine strategies to change their own societies."
To achieve this immodest goal, it simulates 10 different
"scenarios." The player's goal can be anything from protesting
an environmental disaster to overthrowing a regime. The player
is a nonviolent strategist, controlling "the movement" as it faces
its adversary, "the regime." A special feature enables players
to import information from other sources, including maps, and
details of a city's infrastructure, to give it more of a real-life
feel. And it all plays out in rich three-dimensional graphics
that make it look a bit like the long-popular SimCity game (To see a
screen shot from the game, see the website of the game developer,
BreakAway
Games).
-
The game aims not to be a
revolutionary's recipe book, but rather a fun game that is also a
study tool (It turns out that many of the hyperactive 20-year-old
college students who become political activists also play
videogames. Marovic has been a gamer since he was 14).
Marovic wants to convey to potential insurrectionists elsewhere what
the Serbian movement learned about the power of nonviolent
resistance. He and colleagues have advised activists in many
countries since the Serbian revolution. Students in Georgia
and Ukraine took a number of cues from the Serbian protesters and
subsequently had their own spectacular successes. Georgia's rose
revolution in 2003 and Ukraine's orange revolution in 2004 overthrew
authoritarian governments in those countries.
-
Behind Marovic is an unlikely force—a
former Drexel Burnham Lambert investment banker named Peter
Ackerman. A passionate believer in the power of nonviolence
since his student days in the 1960s, Ackerman has contributed many
millions of his considerable fortune to aiding nonviolent activists
worldwide (Among his other investments, he was the lead financier
for New York's successful online grocery delivery service,
FreshDirect. For more on FreshDirect, see my November 2002
article, "The Online Grocer Version 2.0").
-
The International Center on Nonviolent
Conflict, a nonprofit group financed mostly by Ackerman, has put up
several million dollars to build the game. The
center
has been conducting seminars and conferences for activists for
years. It even held workshops for some of the Serbian students
before they faced Milosevic. With producer Steve York,
Ackerman also financed
A Force More Powerful, a TV series co-produced with PBS in
2000, and Bringing Down a Dictator, a film released in 2002 that
documents Serbia's revolt. Activists in Georgia and Ukraine
watched that movie intently and repeatedly (Even though the game and
the documentary share the same title, A Force More Powerful, the
game has a fictional story line. However, it does attempt to
embody the principles of nonviolence depicted in the documentary).
York and Ackerman now are making a documentary about the orange
revolution.
-
But Ackerman thinks that Marovic's game
might have even more impact than films in nations suffering under
tyrannical regimes. Like Marovic, he wants to bring scale to
the process of educating would-be democrats. "We're meeting a
demand from people around the world who live under oppressive
circumstances, but have no viable military option to free
themselves," he says in a phone interview.
-
Ackerman and York hired professional
game developers at a firm called BreakAway Games, which has worked
on entertainment products as well as training simulations used by
the U.S. military. Creating the game has been time-consuming,
partly because of the subtlety it aims to incorporate. For
instance, says York, who is overseeing the game's production,
engendering fear plays a huge role in the success or failure of a
despotic regime, so the game enables players to adjust fear levels
for individuals and groups in the game, and how that changes as the
violence escalates. York explains how you win: "You try
to build a coalition—a group of groups that is larger than the ones
on the other side." (For more information on the game, see this
site).
-
For the past year, York has flown
Marovic back and forth from Serbia repeatedly to advise developers
and serve as a sort of deputy producer. Initially, this
remarkable game will be sold on CD in an English version, and given
away to players from certain countries. Later, it will be
available online in multiple language versions.
-
Could such a game also help players
learn how to bring down good guys? York says there's no way
that could happen, unless those "good guys" were truly unpopular.
The game is designed specifically to teach nonviolent techniques and
democratic principles. Both would be effective only when the
citizenry is ready to join in.
-
"So we went from [nonviolent political
action] five years ago in the real world to now in the virtual
world," said Marovic at PopTech. "Who knows what will happen
when we put it up on the web?" We'll soon see. Beta
testing begins next week.
|