This week, I played PeaceMaker by Impact Games. It covers the Israel-Palestine conflict, with the players taking on the role of either the Palestinian Authority President or the Israeli Prime Minister. The player chooses from a menu of political and policy actions. Each time they do, time passes. After time has passed, they learn whether their action succeeded, what results it had, and what positive and negative (mostly negative, since I played on the hardest difficulty) events happened in the interim. Given it was released in 2005, I’ll evaluate it for its modeling of the conflict at the time, without regard to current events.
PeaceMaker’s mechanical foundation is choosing a policy option and observing its effects on public opinion. While actions can fail, their results seem to be otherwise largely static. The game prevents you from repeating the same policy multiple times in a row but it does not prevent you from repeating the same series of actions. This creates a dynamic where the player is encouraged to experiment until they find a set of policy options that are reliably effective, and then repeat those over and over again until victory is achieved. From the Israeli side, I found I could cycle through providing civilian aid to Palestine, engaging in cross-cultural initiatives, and enacting stimulus for Israel’s economy. Later in the game, I sprinkled in some security actions: removing checkpoints, settlements, and portions of the wall. This turned out to be suboptimal, simply setting back my Israeli approval while maxing out my already higher Palestinian approval. I won regardless, but I suspect I would have won even faster if I had never deviated from my strategy. This seems to present the questionable conclusion that the conflict can be resolved through orchestra performances and economic stimulus alone- without ever addressing the truly thorny issues.
As best I can tell, this game is going for the aesthetics of Challenge and Discovery. Challenge because it is presented as a difficult puzzle to solve, with significant negative consequences for wrong moves, and Discovery because there is a giant menu of options presented to the player, naturally affording experimentation to find out what each option results in.
Unfortunately, the static nature of the game frustrates both of these aesthetic goals: once you have found a profitable cycle of moves, the game is no longer challenging. There is minimal risk and you never need to think again. Similarly, you are no longer encouraged to explore: all choosing different moves does is open up the possibility of a mistake.
I also played from the Palestinian side of the conflict, which I found somewhat more compelling. As the Palestinian Authority, your actions are extremely limited at the start of the game. You don’t control your airspace, coast, and water table, locking off many development projects. You also don’t have enough money to invest in much of anything. Instead, you must travel around the world meeting with partners and currying favor to unlock more effective options and help Palestine develop. This unlocking of options introduces some much-needed variety and effectively communicates the situation of the PA to the player.
Still, this also has the effect of making the game easier over time. You get options that are obviously better than those you used to have and come with minimal risk or downside. Just as the player achieves mastery, the usefulness of that mastery falls away- exactly the opposite of what you’d usually want to happen, albeit accurate to the fact that the beginning of any peace process or development project is often the most difficult. Still, one could imagine an alternate version of the game that asks the player to confront more and more difficult challenges in the conflict over time as peace nears, forcing them to carefully evaluate the political climate and time their big moves well.
One would hope that the events (suicide bombings, mass demonstrations, and so on) occurring throughout the game could break things up, forcing the player to respond and adjust their strategy. However, while these events set me back, directly responding to those events never seemed to have any particularly positive effect, and ignoring them seemed to come with no consequences. Thus, they served only as powerful emotional displays, serving the message of the game while failing to improve its dynamics.
Insofar as the objective of the game is to inspire the player that peace is possible, and to teach them that it must be achieved through dedication to small, concrete steps over time, it is successful. The experience of taking small actions, over and over again, to push towards resolution, and seeing that play out in a slow but meaningful reduction in violence over time was genuinely inspiring. To the extent that the objective is to model the conflict, and, as the website states, challenge players to “solve the puzzle,” the static nature of the game system holds it back as an educational tool.
