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In fairness to Statecraft I should reiterate a point I made in my earlier pos–namely that a great deal depends on how Statecraft, or any sim, is integrated into the course, and how it is briefed and debriefed.
A game can’t do everything, and it certainly can’t do everything well. However, the things it omits (or distorts, or poorly portrays) can themselves be very teachable moments if the debriefing/discussion/related course assignments are designed appropriately. For example, the tendency to war among UofT students could be used to generate a lecture or discussion on why the game behaviour might differ from actual state behaviours.
Jeremy,
the way Statecraft deals with domestic politics or interest groups is more of a sketch than a real simulation of the political dynamics in contemporary pluralistic societies (or, in fact, in any other regime type).
Statecraft attempts to deal with the push and pull of domestic politics by simulating in each country (even totalitarian ones) a set of interest groups roughly divided by core policy interests (Greens, capitalists, environmentalists, and so on) that reacts to the actions and policies implemented by the students according to these interests. In the end, everything comes down to approval ratings (which can be a motivating factor until the students realize that acquiring territories and military power are the dominant strategies) and an occasion strike or riot (which can have a negative effect for resource production).
Bureaucratic politics are also very thinly simulated by Statecraft. In theory, the students have different roles which control different bureaucracies in their countries, such as the military, intelligence, production, etc. In practice, the game does not provide any effective mechanism to make those roles work, unless the students themselves take the initiative and role-play them.
Unfortunately, in our case the students were more interested in gaming the game than role-playing and, when the bombers and ICBMs started flying, everybody stopped paying attention to what was going on domestically. Well, in fairness, at that point some of them didn’t even have a country to control anymore.
In my opinion, the main problem is that domestic or bureaucratic politics are not “internalized” in Statecraft. They are not inherent to what the students are doing, to their roles, or even to the policies they are implementing. Everything is still dictated by the “omniscient-benevolent-enlightened-dictator-player” with no real input from any possible interested parties, groups, selectorates, etc. As a result, these groups were seen more as a nuisance than a fundamental part of the “rules of the game” of political life in a realistically simulated country. As such, the students quickly learned to “solve” domestic politics by buying the support of the troublesome factions with token policies or specific city improvements.
There are many other issues worth discussing, some of which I only touched in the paper. As you, Rex and Brant mentioned, the way Statecraft portraits IPE in general, the global or domestic economies, markets, etc. is very problematic. It doesn’t simulate the role of the media properly, it doesn’t simulate knowledge and scientific research well, and so on. It may not even simulate conflict, arguably its core strength, in a thoughtful and realistic way. Digital World Construction may change and improve the game, but there are fundamental issues they need to sort out before they can offer a better product. In fact, one of the major ones is the very idea that Statecraft should simulate the whole of IR. Instead of (poorly) simulating everything, they should focus and try to better simulate fewer issue-areas. Food for thought.
Naturally, these problems are not particular to Statecraft. My paper attempts to go beyond it to discuss issues that may be common to other types of commercial video games (or even “analog”, pen and paper, simulations). But they certainly clouded our experience with Statecraft.
You know, it’s interesting, Rex, because from the talk I sat in on, I actually had an opposite set of concerns about Statecraft:
1. Fighting is simulated as mere paper-rock-scissors. Not that there is anything wrong with PRS, but I would think a computer program developed over several years that includes a relatively sophisticated set of war-fighting units available for production would also include a more nuanced approach to armed conflict. One of the presenters actually said, “We don’t want them playing Risk,” which I appreciate, but I don’t think the answer is to build steering players away from conflict into the game;
2. Statecraft seemed to be all about domestic politics! The talk went for about 45 minutes covering how players could order their internal politics, invest in domestic economic development, and manage social welfare systems. Finally, I asked what these states actually do to each other, and that led to about two minutes on the PRS system described above. There is also, as far as I could tell no terrorism, civil war, or intervention. There is some espionage and a bit of territorial war-fighting, with the caveat that resorting to nuclear weapons automatically produces bad grades.
3. There wasn’t enough discussion of IPE for sure, but as I said above, there was a lot on domestic political economy.
Of course, I have never played the game or even seen it played other than the brief videos they showed at this talk, but I was, and I think it worth repeating, definitely underwhelmed.
To follow Rex’s comments on what IR ‘sims’ don’t do well – they rarely, if ever, model the sorts of mass-mood-altering effects of the media that we see, also. You’d never have had the Spanish-American War, or the 1990s interventions in the Balkans or Somalia without the media’s role in shaping public opinion of the conflicts.
one of the big takeaways from my dissertation research was that when you introduce some form of interactive digital tool (usually a game, but not always), that the user interface is a major issue. If your audience spends too much time ‘fighting the interface’ or trying to learn it on the fly, then they spend valuable lesson time learning and interface instead of the learning the material. For students who are already familiar with the interface (or one that’s substantially similar) then the buttonology takes up fewer cognitive resources that can instead be focused on the actual material to be learned
More broadly, I think Gus’ article points to a number of things that IR simulations often don’t do very well:
1) They embody or encourage a sort of hyperrealism, with an associated excessive use of armed force, trade embargoes, etc.
2) They don’t much address domestic political constraints, or bureaucratic politics and process. Some (like Tessman’s International Relations in Action) do require multiple team players to sign off on a decision, although that’s not quite the same thing.
3) They have rather poor modelling of economic interaction, markets, the private sector, and the international politics of trade, frequently rendering these in a highly statist, mercantilist way.
This has long been a problem, and indeed has been since the very earliest academic IR simulations (such as the early 1960 Guetzkow INS simulation, which I first played as an undergraduate in the early 1980s).
You can mitigate a lot of these weaknesses, however, if you encourage the students to undertake a critical analysis of the simulation experience, and then reflect on these strengths and weaknesses in your own debrief of the class.
I went to a talk at ISA in San Francisco put on by a couple of the developers/managers of Statecraft. After about 45 minutes, I was quite underwhelmed. This post and the referenced article are really helpful in thinking more about some of the reservations I had after their talk.