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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.