Let’s Change the (War) Games
Creative Concepts for Video Games without fighting
Way too many games are about fighting, expanding, building through extraction, and, almost fascist like, winning for one faction at the cost of all others. But there are many more very interesting games being played in the real world. Games that hardly ever get gamified. So just for once consider these game concepts. Many of them might include real world fall out of wars and expansionist economies or… helping to end or prevent them.
Note, reading the proposals may challenge your global outlook, political stances, or just be interesting by inspiring you. They may open eyes to perspectives you never though about before. All these games are being played in the real world by real people; some by many, others by way too few.
Message me, when you want to make one for real and wish more input, or to collaborate to make it happen.
1. ‘CORRUPTION: PLAYING PUTIN’
This game is not about being Putin, but ‘playing’ him to save your ass.
In this game you’re an ambitious and corrupt Russian Official. Can you skim millions of Russia’s economy and live to tell the tale? You have to please Putin with good reports to make promotion. Meanwhile you can make extra money skimming government funds for yourself, or even sell army stocks to illegal traders. If you succeed to keep everyone above you happy, you get promoted. Not corrupt, and you’ll be walked over. More corrupt means more money and more risk. How wild do you dare to go? But be aware, too close to Putin, and one wrong word may get you send to the front or have an unfortunate ‘accident’. Or if you get caught for your corruption, then it’s off to the front with you too. And if you’re an honest walkover, it’s off to front too.
At the front you have to start your career again. Send your fresh recruits ahead to be cannon fodder, while you as small officer can hide a bit farther from the front. Here you get confronted with the corruption above you. Your men have no gear, no training, while you get orders to get things done. These orders may have the intention to get you killed as well, so you can’t expose the corruption above you. Meanwhile the Ukrainians snipe officers, so you better not get caught by other side as well. Finish the game by successfully escaping Russia, without your yacht and money being confiscated by Western or Eastern authorities.
DLC is a multiplayer. Richest living player wins. Everyone is a corrupt official, but on what level? And everyone can betray everyone. Russian nationalists may play as well, trying to save their country, and fight the corruption. The richest player at the moment of log in, may play Putin. Then you’ll get all kinds of information to decide on, but you can never know what and who to trust.
Other DLC’s might include playing corrupt official in nations like China, Iran, North Korea, Brazil, Italy, Saudi Arabia and more. Each country has their own player tensions, ambitions and play styles.
2. ‘RIGHT WING IT’, THE AMERICAN ELECTION GAME
When money decides elections, smart investing helps elites win.
In this game you’re a Right Wing think tank. It’s your role to rile up voters to vote for your preferred candidates, left or right, as long as Wall Street wins. The more success you have, the more money you get donated by right wing billionaires and other interest groups with money. Your task is to create lies that stoke big emotions, like conspiracy theories or invent new threats only your candidates are willing to help prevent.
You also have to find and select narcissist candidates willing to be in office and follow orders by their super pac donors. Think big ego’s, little brains. Your task is to put the pressure on them to always stay loyal to their donors and their demands. Keep your candidates scandals under the hood, or come up with strategies to deal with exposed scandals, and lie your way out of corners.
Successes bring in more money to hire specialists, gain more media access, Gerrymander, restrict voting access for minorities, smear campaign the opposition or play all other dirty games currently allowed and used in US elections. ‘Democracy’ has never been this ‘playable’.
3. ‘DYING EARTH’, A GAME OF SHORTAGES
Can you make a difference when there’s less and less of everything?
All those growth games? Here’s a new reality for you. Humanity may not be able to save the climate. While the population of your country is growing, there’s less and less good soil, less clean water, less ecological healthy conditions, and less willingness of people to make it work together. meanwhile there’s more poison, more disasters and more stress in all systems. Meanwhile the very rich use their power to save themselves, not to improve the world, except for PR stunts or tax breaks. And the weather is getting more freakish too.
What will you do as the leader of your country? Will you keep pleasing big business and the elites, and save your own skin? Or will you try to make it work for as many as possible, and avoid civil war over last resources? Grow your capacity to make hard decisions, apply wisdom, calm emotions and get people collaborating rather than fight each other. Use real world data, and hire the right experts to get good advice. Beware of lobbies feeding you false information to protect industrial interests that keep on polluting.
In the DLC, ‘FAMILY’, you play a family that suffers the changing conditions at the bottom of society. As a family you face all the consequences of the decisions you made when you played as president. Can you keep ‘m all alive and have a future? Many games would do with such a DLC about the potential real world consequences of megalomanic gamers.
4. ‘HUMAN INGENUITY’, OVERCOME DINOSAUR ATTITUDES
Can you save your company when it needs to change course fast?
This game is about a large ‘dinosaur’ corporation that faces a deep crisis. Finally, finally, in the near future, politics makes some very hard restrictions against polluting industries. For years the ‘dinosaur’ companies knew changes had to be made, but rather looked the other way. But now politicians, pressured by desperate populations, don’t take their bribes anymore. As a manager of such a company that should have gone extinct years ago, it is become your task to deal with the consequences. Can you adapt the company fast to the new regulations that seek to heal nature or go extinct? How and with what can you contribute, towards regenerative design without going bankrupt? What new focus can you make?
You’ll have to reframe your core service. For instance shift your ‘oil company’ from oil company to energy company. Then all sources of energy can be your product. Or shift your ‘airplane company’ to a transport company and fly romantic airships or build railways. You’ll have to reassign your inventory and assets to new purposes, think planes into grounded restaurants and hotels along highways. You’ll have to take entrepreneurial risks again without being bailed out by your government ‘because of jobs’. And you may have to replace many who prefer to keep on being polluters because of their (previously) secure overpriced salary.
In the DLC, ‘HUMAN ADAPTIVITY’, you play as employee of this company. Can you stay relevant helping to make your company make the shift? Or will you get fired and need to adapt to a new life? How and where can you go, potentially as an outdated dinosaur manager in a new world?
5. ‘REVELATIONS’, UNCOVERING THE TRUTH
Getting the scandal published can be as hard as uncovering it.
You’re an investigative journalist, one of the last who goes places and speaks to locals to uncover dirty truths. The game is always played in two chapters. In the first you go on a mission of your choosing to lift the lid off a great scandal. This means interviewing, obtaining documents, finding clues, filming dirty deals, and avoiding being stopped or even murdered.
In the second chapter you need to find parties who actually want to run the news. Main stream media has rules. If it isn’t a juicy scandal or when there aren’t great images, it’s not news. It’s also not news, when advertisers on networks might be the target of the news. Also the ‘powers that be’ may prohibit airing it, or even hunt you down for seeking to spread it. During the game you improve your networks, reliability, investigative skills, reporting and going undercover, all to get the truth out there.
In the DLC, ‘REVELATIONS, HIDING THE TRUTH’, however you play as fake news maker. You pretend you’re doing real investigative work. Yet you undermine their work with fake stories, more explosive than theirs, countering the truth or making it unbelievable. Get hired by big business, dirty politicians, think tanks and intelligence agencies to protect big interests with lots of fun conspiracy noise.
In the second DLC, ‘REVELATIONS, WHISTLEBLOWER’, you play as a whistleblower in a very dirty military or oil industry, one that incites war and can be linked to war crimes. The game focusses on two chapters. The first is getting the truth out there. The second is about having a life when many try to destroy it. Also public opinion has many angry at you, because primitive tribal thinking makes that we should not expose our own war criminals, only those of ‘the other side’. Certainly not when it costs jobs.
6. ‘THE SYSTEMS GAME’, A GAME OF ECONOMIC MATHEMATICS
Get the world, nature and all humans flourishing with a new economy!
Design a mathematical working model, that creates a viable alternative money system to replace capitalism. In this new model doing good for the world has to be rewarded, and extractive plunder gets punished. You may calculate and test run ideas like gift economy, crypto economy, pure barter economy, etc. The game runs with hundreds of little people, businesses, governmental organizations, and more. They all will respond to your new ‘game rules’ based on their capacities to run their activities and have homes, food and security. Beware, there’s always those who try to rig the system to their advantage.
While growing and making a profit isn’t required, providing liveable wages and investments in healthcare and education is. You also need to be able to pay the clean up of the disastrous waste and pollution of the ‘old economy’. Note: See the last game concept ‘Game Designer for Good’ building on this idea.
7. ‘PEACE NEGOTIATOR’, MAKE DIALOGUE, NOT WAR
Real wars are often decided at the table that ends it.
Most men who wage war have an either tribal, nationalist, power hungry, self deluded, juvenile or even reptilian mindset. The people they send to the negotiating table are often hard boiled negotiators, who both are victim and culprits in the war. Others are fanatical believers in the ‘good’ of their own side, and the ‘bad’ the other side represents. Some are well willing people who know peace is the best way out, but fear saying so openly. The other side might see that as a weakness to prey upon. And now it’s up to you to get these people into a dialogue. Good luck with that.
In this game you have to do way more than work out deals. You need to soften them up. Some may respond to flattery, others to hearing about some relatives they have on the other side. You may pressure, even blackmail some, to get them to make some concessions. For these you need to know their secrets. Find out. Etc.
8. ‘PARADIGM SHIFT’, NEW IDEAS FOR A NEW WORLD
What if armies brought flowers and replanted forests?
You run a rich country as benevolent dictator. You seek to improve your own country and all those around you, from the belief system, ‘we only win, when everybody wins.’ In this game countries run on indexes of wealth, health, happiness, ecological greenness, safety, homes, and food & water availability. And you can do all kinds of actions and see how they play out. Have your army bring flowers and replant forests? Fine. Execute big polluters and demand green? Okay. Forbid or make sugar in food obligatory? Go crazy! The AI will show you the effect.
Einstein said you can’t solve a problem with the same kind of thinking that created the problem in the first place. Makes great sense. And history shows you can’t end a war with more war. Even when it seems to succeed, you more than likely lay the foundation for the next great conflict. Only the Marshall plan, rebuilding Germany after WWII, and all their victims brought many years of peace to Europe and even laid the foundation for the EU. So what mental belief systems need to be shifted? And how to go about doing it? Experiment and perhaps discover important insights.
9. ‘SPOTS’, THE CRAZY WISDOM GAME*
Make the world a more beautiful, natural, and magical place.
What if the players all used their game time to make a difference in a thriving community, all over the real world? Why wait for politics to change things, guerrilla beautify now. Bring life, colour, plants to places that need it. Show you want change and you’ve already started. In this app game you post ugly places and then beautify them. Fellow players support, rank, or even join your efforts. The more visible good you do, the higher your ranking. High rankings give more influence and potentially real world rewards.
The game has also integrated ‘how to’ instructions. For example, how to guerrilla garden? How to photograph your contributions, how to rally your community? Etc. Indeed, the game is a real world activist ‘Gentle Revolution’ towards change. Show that it is possible. Show that it is feasible. Show that flourishing, thriving, art and nature are the most satisfying achievement humans can go for. Spots seeks to help boost that energy.
10. ‘REFUGEE’, THE LONG JOURNEY TO SAFETY
Escape a war and find a safe haven.
You can play as Ukrainian, Sudanese, Syrian, Iranian, or North Korean. Play as man, woman or trans, with ages between 14 and 74. You have to flee either hunger, violence, oppression, war or all of them. Plan your escape, cross borders illegally, travel across the planet without status, use or avoid people smugglers. Avoid new forms of slavery, police brutality and accept long walks, cold nights, long waits and many hearings where people tend to not believe your story. And finally maybe find a safe place to call home.
Meet many dangers and possibly fail. You may drown in the Mediterranean Sea, get sold as slave in Libya or end in a tent camp with a 275.000 people, where corrupt officials deliver bad food and water. You may have a medical condition and or trauma that worsens travel and or hinders social skills. Through lessons like these and more, you’ll learn with each new attempt: nature survival, social skills, food and medicine thievery, who to trust and who not, sneaking, patience in waiting, suffering paperwork in strange languages, and suffering long hearings.
DLC’s will deliver new content like new situations to escape from. Play as Russian draft dodger. Here you first have to escape Russia, then make a living abroad without anyone willing to offer you a refugee status.
11. ECO INVESTOR
Get rich by putting your money where the world needs it.
In this game you try to earn money by investing in social and ecological projects that make a difference. Beware of sabotage by big money invested in dirty business, like oil, that protects itself from change. They may (try to) buy you out and then corrupt any good intention. They may make your investments illegal. They may jump into your market with terrible capitalist alternatives that advertise you into invisibility. So how can you stay long enough under the radar while growing businesses that really make a difference? Or when to go very public and viral? And then again, is the business you invest in really viable?
Survive the mine field of big capitalism. Expand your business through hiring investigative journalists, economical detectives, hackers, whistleblowers, great bookkeepers, and befriend many who matter or have new ideas. Beware of false promises, backstabbing, betrayal, scams, manipulation, corruption, and bankruptcy. Or discover only money has become your guiding principle and you’ve become as dirty as the worst of them. Therefore, not only watch your money meter, but also your global impact results.
12. GAME DESIGNER FOR GOOD*
So you want to make a game that makes a difference? And get it sold?
Are you making games with alien worlds or fantasy societies? I suggest you make a massive online multiplayer (MMO) game based on alternative economic systems. If you have strange world, why not use very different economic rules? Like, try gift economy, or other alternative economic models beyond capitalism. This is what many look for: Can you discover an economic system where helping earth and society is rewarded more than extracting, robbing, stealing goods? Where living with and in nature is more powerful than getting the corner office. See how players respond to your economy. See how behaviour changes when helping others is valued more than having more. Thousands of economists and activists seeking to change capitalism would love to help or learn from your experiment.
What other game concepts can test, stimulate, inspire making a positive difference in the real world? Most games are power vs power, trying to beat each other. And while this is part of human nature, collaboration is actually the deeper and bigger part. Nations, corporations, alliances are all clusters of collaborators that can include more and more different people. In games like Minecraft fighting is an ingame experience, but the whole is a massive collaboration. Players contribute, admire, enjoy each others contribution, while playing, building, crafting. In many multiplayer games trolling or cheating is being seen as the real crime. So the values of making it work together are already there. Build on them. :)
Oh, and the video game called ‘Game Designer for Good’? That would help you experiment with unexpected consequences of new rules. Want nature to flourish everywhere? Oops, a jungle might invade your home. But perhaps nature on all flat roofs is already a huge changemaker. Find out in this game, on during building your own. :)
*) These games I work on for real. Spots, the phone app we, Milo Grutta, me, and a team, tried to create for real. Then we had to shelf the project for now. We got stuck in between investors who wanted to see a working model, and software writers who wanted to see money before they did anything. Meanwhile I work on board and card games that help make a difference in more subtle ways. The games seek to improve social interactions between players towards real conversations and becoming more creative in solution finding.
Side note: Meanwhile wonder about this. You know why dystopian games and movies are so hot? Simple. In these movies there’s a huge shortages of stuff, thus makers can limit what people can find and use as in most medieval games. And the surroundings are a threat full of dangers, which means tensions and fights. How strange it may seem, we also need stories of Solarpunk gone wrong! Like Horizon West. Why? Say we have a world where some nature has gone rogue (because of industrialists) and society is threatened by this. Weapons don’t work, but nature itself can help heal if the heroes find the source of the issue fast enough. In short we need images of a world we long for told in stories that have tensions and thrills, such as makers are looking for.
