PeaceMaker

In Jagoda and McDonald’s piece, I was a little stunned and more than a little troubled to learn of the game PeaceMaker. I wondered: Did Jared Kushner play this game during the prolific research process that informed his recently unveiled “peace” plan? I decided, due to self-hatred, that I would sacrifice my morning to it. After all, the IDF’s operational logics of ‘late’ occupation were inspired by Deleuze and Guattari’s accounts of agile, mobile, emergent modes of organization; why not look to (representations of) dynamic systems for corresponding diplomatic tools?

“Inspired by real events,” the game simulates governance and diplomacy in Israel-Palestine. It gets me wondering: what kinds of truth claims do games make? And what conditions or claims must be in place for us to characterize games as operating in a documentary mode? The MIT Game Lab offers an eclectic list of ‘documentary games’ without limiting the concept to a specific definition. The Lab’s speculative inventory of potential attributes includes: historical accuracy in world design; simulations of social issues or historical events; and game mechanics that reference and try to reproduce real affective experiences. PeaceMaker possesses all of these features in a general sense. So, where might we identify its politics and implicit truth claims?

As Jagoda and McDonald suggest, the game lends itself to a proceduralist analysis, and it is from this perspective that I find its politics to be most troubling. While ‘making peace’ is a nice phrase that underscores the requisite generativity in ending a conflict, PeaceMaker’s politics are narrow-minded and subtractive. The game’s procedures are ideological; they arrange the ways in which the world is to be apprehended and acted upon. Inviting us to play from the perspective of one of two potential players (the Israeli Prime Minister or the Palestinian President), PeaceMaker constructs a false equivalence between two powers and narrates conciliation as being the outcome of a heroic leader’s calculative actions. In defining the game’s objective to be a two-state solution, PeaceMaker forecloses the possibility of other (democratic) futures and disregards the de facto one-state reality that already existed on the ground, even when the game was released in 2007.

The game’s premise is that solutions to entrenched conflict can be achieved with better top-down public relations that balance the countervailing interests of a national population and the ‘international community.’ Seemingly aleatory events (attacks, demonstrations, hostile media reports) intensify the pressure to act, however a player’s actions do not contribute to nor can they meaningfully respond to these events in the simulation; instead, violence and dissent erupt as if completely random. Gameplay unfolds through the interactions between a player’s decisions related to security, diplomacy, or governance, and those decisions’ effects on public opinion. Responses to decisions, represented in approval indexes, are premised on the total rationality and predictability of homogenized social forces’ quantifiable degrees of support. Popular movements and ideas, insofar as they exist in the simulation, exist as contingencies to be eliminated. Just in case we have any doubt that the game is proposing a financialized approach to addressing historical injustice and military conflict, the designers seal the deal with a scrolling stock ticker that reports the latest market trends in public approval. This quantitative logic forms the basis of the game’s allegorithm that one must interpret and master to win. Its code (or law) is nothing remotely close to justice, nor even (more conservatively) international law or human rights discourse. Neither legality nor justice nor rights exist as concepts in this simulation. In this sense, the game is deeply nihilistic. Despite its pursuit of a “solution,” principles do not exist and it’s difficult to win if you play according to any. Procedure—the game’s ideological truth claim—dictates that players must control the market forces of public opinion in order to ‘win’ peace.

While I could have continued endlessly with the proceduralist critique of the game, and while I think that many aspects of its procedural rhetoric are irredeemable, the middle path that Jagoda and McDonald chart between proceduralist and play-centric approaches does nuance matters. Their call to explore the meanings of mechanics emphasizes the playful experimentation required to uncover a game’s allegorithm. Although PeaceMaker‘s premise and visual design establish an erroneous symmetry between two sovereign actors, game mechanics sometimes convey the very unequal power relations between the two governing bodies. Before the game’s market logic becomes clear, perpetual denials of requests for financial aid or diplomatic engagement and outraged reactions to every decision convey a potent sense of hopelessness. Limited options, conflicting interests, and seemingly incompatible stake-holders present the player with lose-lose-lose scenarios that can leave one feeling exasperated. In other words, game mechanics produce a kind of affective truth claim that indexes how others may feel when confronted with a similar menu of dismal options. I can see how there could be political value to this kind of affective experience, however I am unable to accept the ethos of the ‘middle path’ when considering this particular game. I suspect that this may be because its documentary underpinnings—its claim of representing reality—requires a different set of ethical considerations and a different analytic orientation.