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In our culture games we make players make emotions explicit. See below.
We believe that emotions are the key to the understanding of conflict; yet, in the study of conflict these are also critically understudied. Indeed, a real understanding of what it means to be in conflict pertains recognition of the underlying emotions of the engaged parties. Emotions are forceful drivers of conflict; Studies on radicalisation (e.g. Veldhuis & Staun, 2009; Segman 2016) found that the perception of relative deprivation, the subjective perception of being unfairly disadvantaged, is found to be a major cause of disengagement and radicalisation. In ‘Why men rebel’, Gurrs (1970) states that the ‘inability to obtain what is felt to be justified triggers feelings of frustration that ultimately facilitates the emergence of collective violence’. Endeavours to chart a psychological profile of men and women involved in acts of terrorism found that strongly perceived oppression and feeling of being humiliated are amongst the strongest drivers for people to revert to violence (Victoroff, 2005).
Emotions are causes as well as escalators and de-escalators of conflict. Culture has a profound impact on the way in which people experience and express emotions, and also how they perceive emotions of others. Scholars have recently found that culture played a key role in the emotion regulation, in the reappraisal and suppression of emotions (Tasi and Lu, 2018; Matsumoto, Nakagawa and Yoo ,2008) and in the emotional response to world-experience such as ostracism (Kimel, Mischkowski, Dominik, Shinobu, Uchida 2017).
One of the domains we are applying gaming to is the Comfort women case, aiming at understanding the residual tensions between South Korea and Japan due to Japans WWII system of forced prostitution of amongst others South Korean women. The fact that it took the former comfort women more than half a century to publicly reveal their dreadful experiences may only be understood if one actually feels the shame that these women must have felt. The denial by the Japanese of the existence of forced prostitution may have triggered many repressed emotions and made the first South Korean women to make a public testimonial.
Finally, emotions may make people act against their strategic interests. From the psychological literature on emotions (e.g. Ekman) we understand that in states of strong emotions people are urged to respond in an emotional manner. E.g. a state of rage urges people to ‘lash out’ which may be totally against their own or (geo)political interests. Hence, as claimed, to actually understand the dynamics of conflicts and possible forecast, we have to get more rational about emotions.
Al in all, emotions are strong drivers in conflict and culture affects those profoundly. In our culture games, we explicitly address emotions as driver in conflict. During the identity building phase, players have to express their identity in terms of emotions as well as beliefs and personality traits. During play, their emotions will change and sometime their beliefs and they have to be explicit about this. When our players play certain actions during conflict, their underlying motives have to be explained in terms of the underlying emotions and beliefs.
As an example, characters in the Israel Palestine version of our culture game may initially live in relative peace with their Palestine neighbors, but after a number of increasingly violent encounters between groups, we see anger risings to rage, beliefs are seen to change, we see Jews turn to Zionism and we see Palestine fight for a Pan Arabic state. We see actors segregate and blame and shame the other party.
We are currently experimenting with this format, and trying to validate what players do in our games against psychological theory. Will report later on the outcomes.
Three major methods were discussed, as I remember. The least effective was to describe the psychology of the player in the briefing, and expect the player to then represent it in the game—which can result in some very artificial performances. Second, you can socially engineer roles, so that you match players to roles based on personality, game play style, etc. This can work well, but of course you don’t always know the participants well enough to do this. We also discussed designing the briefing materials in such a way as to generate a sense of grievance, etc. in the player (for example, by modifying or spinning each presentation). I also noted that occupational subcultures can be powerful things: diplomats (regardless of national origin) often game in convergent ways, as do military officers, etc.
Rex, in Anja’s portion of your write up, you mentioned there was considerable discussion on how to best encourage players to internalize game narratives and respond in ways that resemble either the psychology of particular actors, or their value systems, fears, and concerns. Do you have any suggestions or recommendations brought up by the group addressing this topic that you could share? Thank you.