Over on the Play This Thing games review blog, JZW wants to know why no one has made a game built around nonviolent revolutions.
Modern non-violent revolutions are very dramatic, very to the point, have excellent pacing, and are a perfect example of asymmetric struggle. You can interpret them as the state versus the people, or dictatorship versus the republic. But their most important aspect is the struggle between centralised technologies of the industrial age and distributed technologies of the information age. The state uses armed forces and television. The people uses crowd psychology and communication networks. The state exerts control by giving orders and withholding information. The people exerts control by spreading information and defying orders.
It’s also a fresh new challenge gameplay-wise, because you don’t get to give direct orders, and the situation can spin out of your control easily. You reach your goal by nudging people in the right direction one step at a time, giving them tools they need, and keeping them connected. It’s far more organic and fuzzy than the kind of direct control you can find in a first person shooter or a real-time strategy.
Tahrir: The Game (Play This Thing)
(Image: Feb4-12:49pm, a Creative Commons Attribution (2.0) image from 89031137@N00’s photostream)