Game Design: Introduction to Politics

Politics is one of those topics that you just don't bring up in polite conversation, and there's a good reason for that. History has led to experimentation on a wide scale with different forms of government, and hopefully progressed to better and better ones, but there is still the conflict between people who are happy with the status quo and those who are pushing for something that was dismissed in the past or seeking something better for the future. These arguments, rallies and debates, in a way, all come back to the philosophical field of politics, which is probably the branch of philosophy most grounded in everyday life.

The central aim of politics as a branch is to figure out what makes a good state/government/kingdom/polity. It's largely about the way that different parts of society interact with one-another and what they do to the whole. Some of the larger cogs that come up when discussing it are justice and equality- how does a perfect society handle justice, and how do we truly treat people equally? After all, not all people are born will equal abilities, so is it fair to give them all an equal playing field, or are we giving unfair advantages to some people?

This is, of course, a branch that comes very close to ethics. Branches like metaphysics don't need to be concerned with anything other than what is, but this is a question of what should be, and so in some ways it must appeal to ethics for guidance. Modern democracy is a result of attempting to make a better system and rejecting the flaws of the old ones, as was socialism, as was monarchy. Every governmental body exists because someone believed that it was better than what they already had.

So, where does this leave us game designers? While this is very like ethics, it's a different sort of beast. There may be dilemmas present, but it's not that easy to exploit them, and there are far fewer possible governments to choose from. What's more, while plenty of games show different political philosophies, none of them do much to demonstrate why they do or don't work. Beyond that, there's also a very punishing learning curve as you approach the modern day- it's very easy to say that an absolute monarch was a terrible idea, but what about flaws in our own systems?

The first and most straightforward way to teach these things is to have a game that runs the gamut throughout all sorts of governments, and portrays each of them as having strengths and weaknesses. An open-world game, for instance, where players transition from an oligarchy to an anarchocapitalist settlement to a totalitarian state and to all points in between. Actual mechanics are irrelevant- this could be a setting for a Dungeons and Dragons campaign, a very complex map for a Bethesda title, a piece of interactive fiction, a 2D platformer or anything else. It could be improved greatly, though, by adding different quests that would benefit one government and weaken the others, letting the players choose for themselves who they support and seeing the consequences of letting their powerbase grow.

Second, a game that gets further into the guts of a government, and shows what they look like from the inside. Civilization and plenty of other simulation games of the same stock make the player the head of a state and show them warfare and diplomacy from a top-down view. It would, of course, be very easy to make a Civilization-like game, because plenty of them already exist, but while this has the benefit of ultimate responsibility it isn't the only method. A recent game named Papers, Please shows the struggles of a Soviet-inspired nightmare state by putting the player in the position of an immigration officer. It's easy to design a game where the player acts as a minor part of the machine, and use that relative insignificance to drive home points about something that they otherwise wouldn't think of.

But we could create something that delves further into questions of justice. A whole game could be built around the question of when it's alright to cause someone pain, or what measures should be taken against criminals. There wouldn't need to be large-scale cities and realistic settings to portray something like this, when it could come down to the way that law enforcement targets certain areas of the game, or the manner that different sections of a post-apocalyptic wasteland are run.

There's a lot of potential for teaching these things all at once, and that's important, because looking at them one at a time, or even devoting a game to a single form of government, is creating a form of propaganda, and game designers should be very wary of propagandizing to their audiences in the name of education.



Sources:

Lane, Melissa. "Ancient Political Philosophy" 6 Sept 2010. Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 5 Oct 2014.

Leupold, Tom. "Spot On: Games get political" 12 Aug 2004.  Gamespot. 5 Oct 2014.

Papers, Please - Trailer. dukope1. 11 Apr 2013. YouTube. 5 Oct 2014.

(and partially...)

Propaganda Games. James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, & Allison Theus. 17 May 2012. Extra Credits/YouTube/Penny Arcade. 5 Oct 2014.