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- A Force More Powerful:
Review
- "There is a great streak of violence in
every human being. If it is not channeled and understood, it
will break out in war or in madness."
- Sam Peckinpah
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Friday, April 28, 2006
- By Adam "The Fly" La Mosca
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- Underlying the inflammatory,
disingenuous rhetoric that drives politicians to pontificate
tirelessly on the potential of games to incite violence, there's an
assumption that might be worth exploring: that games can change the
way we think, and possibly even the choices we make. It's an idea
that recently captured the imaginations of a group of filmmakers
with a penchant for politics. After completing an acclaimed
documentary series examining the methods of nonviolent social
movements, they decided to build a computer game. The result is A
Force More Powerful: The Game, and like the films of the same name,
it aims to educate, inspire, and even train its players in enacting
social change through nonviolent actions.
Part strategy game, part simulation, AFMP pits the player against
oppressive regimes in a dozen different fictional conflicts, each
based upon real-world events. One scenario involves preventing a
military coup while pressuring an oppressive dictator to hold
national elections. Another involves obtaining women's voting rights
in a fundamentalist monarchy where the police restrict speech. In
each case, AFMP's protagonists are the leaders and groups
sympathetic to the cause, and their actions are directed by the
player. The enemy is the oppressive authority, controlled by the
game's AI.
At its most basic level, AFMP is a turn-based strategy game, where
the action occurs primarily within charts and menus. Each turn
follows a simple formula: select one of several available leaders
from an illustrated list, choose from a menu of available tactics,
then choose a target for that tactic from another list. Once you've
decided on the course of action, you advance time in whatever
increment you see fit. The game then gives you feedback on the
outcome, usually in the form of simple text messages. If your
tactics succeed, you'll gradually win influence and achieve reforms.
If not, your movement will be ineffective, or worse, it will be
crushed by the enemy regime.
It's a simple, conceptually elegant system that in practice can
become incredibly complex. First of all, the list of available
tactics is huge. You can task your characters with raising funds,
performing public services, recruiting other groups, or softening up
opposition leaders. Your message can be distributed via the media,
at public protests, or even at rock concerts. If necessary, you can
send your leaders into hiding or have them flee the country. And if
they're jailed, you can engage them in letter-writing campaigns or
have them perform hunger strikes. And these are just a handful of
the options available at any given time.
You'll typically have less than a dozen characters and their
accompanying groups at your disposal, but you can have them all
pursuing different tactics and targets simultaneously. You can also
schedule their actions far into the future, then advance time and
revise your strategy as events unfold. Each character and group will
enact and respond to tactics according to their abilities,
ideologies, and policy preferences, as well as their levels of other
variables like fear, enthusiasm, and public influence.
AFMP adds another layer of complexity by allowing character and
group attributes to be affected realistically by ongoing events.
Overworking a group will decrease their enthusiasm, but scheduling a
rally will increase it. Even apparently negative outcomes often have
unexpected positive effects: a brutal police crackdown on a student
march will cause the students to become more fearful, but it will
also decrease support for the police in the community where the
march occurred.
Each scenario offers a simple Sim-City style visual depiction of its
urban center that allows you to plan tactics and assess trends, but
everyday events are usually planned and occur within the game's
menus, charts, and lists. Some scenarios offer maps that depict
infrastructure, agricultural, or natural resources that can be
targeted. There's a ton of information to process, and despite
readily available color-coded charts and descriptions of individual,
group, and community stats, it's often quite difficult to see the
big picture. This is remedied in part with simple system that allows
the player to poll all the movement's leaders prior to scheduling
any tactic, and consider their input. Their advice isn't foolproof,
but for the most part, they'll steer you in the right direction.
AFMP isn't a pipe dream of a game that rewards shallow idealism or
encourages martyrdom. Instead, it challenges you to apply resources
thoughtfully, reasonably, and realistically. It wisely avoids
hot-button political topics, instead focusing on basic civil rights.
The only overt bias it demonstrates is a built-in intolerance for
violent action. In every case, nonviolent tactics are always more
successful. Fortunately, this never really seems like a contrivance,
because each scenario is thoughtfully crafted to portray a situation
in which nonviolence seems like an appropriate path.
Even though you'll never find yourself throwing Molotov cocktails or
smashing windows, AFMP is not without drama. Its conflicts include
plenty of intrigue, as a combination of quietly arranged meetings
and low-profile social tactics is often the most effective approach.
You can plan mass protests, blockade streets, and even occupy
buildings, but any action that involves a public demonstration could
potentially turn violent and hurt your cause. And, more importantly,
any visible tactic raises the profile of your movement, exposing its
members to scrutiny or harm.
How you coordinate your campaign will depend in part upon the goals
you've decided to pursue. Each scenario begins with a detailed
briefing, following which you must choose from a list of victory
conditions. The thing is, AFMP doesn't actually guarantee that all
the conditions each scenario offers are even attainable. You might
choose a single reform to enact, or an ambitious agenda of sweeping
social change, but either way, you'd better plan realistically. Even
though AFMP's difficulty is adjustable, it can be unforgiving if you
overreach.
In scenarios with aggressive police or military forces, poorly timed
actions can have devastating consequences. It's disheartening to
watch as the movement you've carefully and quietly built gets
crushed just as its influence begins to be felt. In one scenario I
played, as my tactics went public, peaceable and sympathetic
religious dissidents were rounded up and executed in the town
square. Soon after, all of my leaders were jailed, kidnapped, in
hiding, or dead.
Brief, primitively animated cutscenes portray key public events, but
otherwise pivotal moments occur without embellishment. When one of
your leaders is assassinated, you get a simple text message advising
you of the event, and an X appears across their portrait. There's no
gory visual or dramatic description. They're just gone.
An underlying theme in AFMP is the ability of the everyday person to
affect change. It's a concept reflected in the game's clever art
design, which depicts its content on mundane, workaday materials
like post-it-notes and coffee-stained notebooks. AFMP's graphics are
technically unimpressive, but the entire presentation evokes the
feeling that you're engaged in a hardworking grassroots movement
with ordinary people, where strategies sketched out in coffee shops
and libraries are the impetus for revolutionary actions.
AFMP is a masterfully complex, incredibly nuanced, and ambitious
game. Unfortunately, its methodical, research-heavy approach often
feels convoluted and cumbersome, and it's cyclical planning and
advancing of time tends to get repetitive. Instead of an in-game
tutorial, it comes with an impressive, full-color, 116-page manual,
but you'll have to spend at least a half-hour perusing it before you
can even begin to play the game well. For those interested in
exploring AFMP's full potential, there's even a full-featured
scenario editor that allows you to create your own conflicts.
In any event, this is not a title for those who aren't prepared to
invest substantial time and brainpower. And despite its developers'
aspirations, I'm not sure that AFMP would prove a useful training
tool for fledgeling revolutionaries. It's hard to imagine that
individuals engaged in real-life conflicts over human rights would
find playing such a game a valuable use of their time. For those
with the luxury of whiling away their hours with detailed
simulations of other people's struggles, though, AFMP offers
something entirely unique. Unlike the conflicts in almost every
other games, its scnearios unfold with depth and believability, and
they intelligently mirror what happens in the real world.
You can't play AFMP without thinking of events like Tiananmen Square
or the march from Selma to Montgomery, and you can't help but
consider what those events' participants risked and sacrificed to
achieve their goals. Given the time it deserves, AFMP will change
the way you think, about games and about society. And it won't have
you firing a single bullet. For a computer game, that's quite an
accomplishment.
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