Over at crispygamer, Troy S. Goodfellow decided to get political. Or at least, come up with 10 games he thinks “have lessons for people interested in foreign policy”. Presuming, of course, there are people interested in foreign policy.
His list is interesting, although I think item #4, Classic Sierra adventure games, is too much of a stretch. He includes this because those were parser-based, and illustrate trying to find the “right words in the right place”. Mmmm…no. Can’t agree they really relate to foreign policy or diplomacy.
Of the other games, I did play Pirates! (the original), which was fun for awhile, but eventually turned rather dull. Of course, I wasn’t looking at it as an analog for modern-day mercenary companies, but only as a game.
Anyway, take a look at the list. See if you agree with his take on the games. Aside from the above, I can’t really comment, as these aren’t quite my cup of tea.
of the 10 i played zero of them. so unable to comment
I’ve only played #6, Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. It’s too bad that you’re not a strategy gamer, Scorpia, as it offers a lot that RPG gamers would like: deep characterization, a very richly realized world and even something of a story in the form of a mystery that’s unveiled in stages. As for foreign policy Sid’s games have never slacked on this. You could form a United Nations of sorts or be ostracized by the world community for your lack of morality. The parallels with RPG moral paths and choices and consequences are very interesting.
I didn’t read past that first sentence in the #1 Defcon part. True, it may have been the “best game ever made” about the subject, but it and all the others are based on fantasy politics. A parallel world where people and nations work the way the designer thinks they work.
I’m not sure of the value of learning from such games. You certainly would never have guessed what really happened in the real world from playing Balance of Power.
Maybe I’m still just a little disgruntled from playing BoP in hotseat mode with a friend and always ending up with one of us pushing the big red button. I never did much better solo against the AI either. I hate it when a game seems unbeatable. ;)
I found it somewhat interesting that there were no Civil War games listed. Over the years, I’ve played a few and at least one had diplomacy and politics play major parts in the game — eg: Lincoln’s re-election, England & France’s neutrality.
Of crispygamer’s list, I have only played two — Pirates! & Imperialism — seemingly for thousands of hours each.
Of the two, Imperialism can be considered somewhat politically/diplomatically inclined. (It took me forever to play as France and beat the dickens out of England!) Except for any English/French pacts, treaties usually held, and almost always seemed RLish (Everyone would side the most powerful nation).
Pirates!, on the other hand, was mostly a war game; diplomacy was limited to keeping at least one country neutral so that you could land at a port. Whom you kept neutral didn’t matter, what did was having somewhere to sell loot and hire a fresh crew.
Insofar as Sierra, if ‘phrasing’ is the criteria, Zork would have been a better choice.
Games don’t model foreign policy very well, because they’re too artificial. In RL, America isn’t going to worry about Canada invading if we get ourselves overextended. We’re don’t expect Great Britain to switch sides in a global conflict, pouncing on any sign of weakness for an incremental advance in relative world ranking.
But in a game, especially a multiplayer game, you DO have to worry about such things. In RL, a country does best when everyone else does well, too. You generally WANT your neighbors to be wealthy and successful. But in a game, only one country can succeed, and it’s always dog eat dog. That can be fun, but it has little to do with real foreign policy.
That said, I’m surprised the list didn’t include Europa Universalis III (I didn’t play the previous two, but I imagine that they were similar). This is a very complicated game which includes detailed foreign policy options. If you like that kind of thing, try it out. (I’ll warn you, it’s VERY slow-moving.) I still wouldn’t say that it’s realistic, but it does try to model such things as cultural and religious ties.
If it had been last year, Duke Nukem could have been listed. “Come get some” isn’t that much different than the “Bring ‘em on” diplomatic policy of previous years.
Several of his picks had more to do with domestic politics (i.e., “Here’s a domestic political simulator where no one much cares about foreign policy”). Tropico is my number one pick for that - blocs of voters all angry that you haven’t spent money you don’t have for things you can’t prioritize for years, and the one saving grace is that one of the easier-to-please groups (the commies) is usually one of the more numerous…if you have high democracy expectations, you have a hard row to hoe, quite apart from your campaign goals. (And there, too, the locals have little care for foreign policy - two of the groups do care about your alliances, but they have other, higher priorities).
How highly you rate Peacemaker probably depends most on how you rate its underlying assumptions, but I did like the way you could spend the whole game trying to do the right thing, and get nothing but negative reviews for it ’til you’ve practically won.
To my mind, though, the spirit of the list was not “You’ll learn something about foreign policy by playing any of these games,” but, “If you find foreign policy interesting, these are some games you might enjoy.”
In that spirit, I’d have added that there’s a little feel of “real domestic and foreign politics” in the Geneforge games - in the sense that you typically end up choosing between sides that you disagree with strongly, whether as to ends or means or both, and even if you decide not to align with anyone, you end up favoring someone, and (until the last game) you’re never rewarded with a lasting “happy ending.” And, in these broad senses, how like reality that is.
(Even in GF5, at least the one time I played it, I got a good ending with the faction I favored the most, but I had to do some ugly things to get there.)
P.S. - Among non-computer games, Illuminati had the best feel for balance-of-power politics - deciding when to attack other players or intervene against them is a major decision, but the major casus belli is simply “How much potential does he have now?” If you wait ’til he’s a direct threat to win, you’re too late - and if you attack alone all the time, you’ll weaken yourself and have your best groups taken away. (And if you seem to be hanging back to let other people weaken themselves, they may attack you just for that.)
Trying to convince the other players that the right person is a threat, while at the same time not grabbing power so fast that you look like a threat yourself, mimics diplomacy as well as almost anything on the list.
Hmmmm. Interesting point about the GF series, X. I had not thought of those so much in political terms as moral ones.
Illuminati…you mean the card game? Wow, it’s been many a long year since I played that. As I vaguely recall, it wasn’t the easiest game to win. Must have been the diplomacy bit ;)
That’s the one! And indeed it is hard to win, if the other players are doing it right. (It’s also better without the board or the “change your groups’ alignments” options - both of which upset the balance terribly.)