When Doves Try

The theme of the “design challenge” at the 2006 Game Developers’ Conference was to design a game that promoted the ideas of peace and harmony, one worthy of a Nobel Prize. A Force More Powerful is not that game, but it lets you play Nobel Prize-worthy people.
In fact, the idea behind A Force More Powerful is so simple that it’s kind of a wonder no one has done it before. You control a nonviolent activist movement that opposes the government for one reason or another. In one scenario, the issue is widespread corruption. In another, you have to stop an unpopular war. Another puts your movement at the center of the fight to topple a brutal dictatorship. This is the Orange Revolution or Gandhi’s satyagraha come to life on your PC monitor.
Well, almost to life. The game moves in turns, occasionally punctuated by a cutscene to show the movement at work. A Force More Powerful plays a bit like Commandos without the killing. Your movement leaders have various skills that determine how successful they will be at certain tasks. Each scenario has a deadline, so you need to optimize your time. The peril is that, if you move too quickly, the government might break your group before it has the popular support necessary to reach your goals. In some missions, the government may just co-opt some of your less enthusiastic members. If the regime is brutal enough, mass executions or “disappearances” will break the spirit of the rank and file.
The game is intended as a teaching tool, though it’s not always clear what is being taught. The message of nonviolence is certainly a valuable one. Violent actions by your movement are the result of poor training and have the effect of discrediting your efforts. There is a strong emphasis on building a consensus movement by drawing allies away from the regime. But there are some dubious messages as well—mostly unintentional, but clearly a result of the game design.
Almost every mission plays out the same, for one thing. The tactics you use to win an election or force judicial independence are the same ones you use to prevent ethnic cleansing or stop a war. The cutscenes compound this problem, since they are the same no matter which scenario you are in. Identical tyrants give speeches to identical crowds; generic rock bands give benefit performances in generic town squares. The only differences that arise are the risks your membership runs and the amount of time you have to effect change.
For instance, control of a media outlet doesn’t seem to have much of a multiplying effect for your organization. You would think that access to a radio microphone would give your cause a major boost in effectiveness, but apparently not. There is also little effort to model the importance of the global stage in many of these struggles.
Approached as a management sim instead of edutainment, A Force More Powerful is compelling. The government response isn’t scripted, so you can experience different versions of earthshaking events as your visionary but temperamental leader is arrested again, leaving the movement in the hands of a young university student and an old priest. It is certainly a change of pace from those games that presume that the quickest route between two points is a bullet.
The best thing about A Force More Powerful is that it never preaches. It simply assumes that nonviolent resolution is the best way to move forward, in the same way that Civilization IV assumes that cultural assimilation is a force for good. You must accept the game on the terms it sets and play by the rules it presents. It not only gives peace a chance, it gives you no other path.
Some people will inevitably find the peaceful path constraining. As more and more games offer more and more choice, there is a growing assumption that everything should be possible. This is not that kind of game. But at least it forces you down a path you probably haven’t played before. In spite of its flaws, you should give peace a chance.

This article originally appeared in Computer Games Magazine #188