Your playstations kill people

[jeregenest]

I once ran a very successful game called Pantellos. It is article like this that made that game so easy to run on several levels..

Oh, and the reason why this invasion was so profitable? Global demand for coltan was soaring throughout the war because of the massive popularity of coltan-filled Sony Play stations. As Oona King, one of the few British politicians to notice Congo, explains as we travel together for a few days, "Kids in Congo were being sent down mines to die so that kids in Europe and America could kill imaginary aliens in their living rooms."

I wish we had kept more of a website presence of that game.

I know that game was a political eye-awakener for me. Ever since I've been more keyed into issues in Africa amongst other things.

Games as political allegory is one of those things I really should write more about.

Comments

[heron61.livejournal.com]

Games as political allegory is one of those things I really should write more about.

Given that much good SF is at its heart social commentary, there is much room for social and political commentary in gaming. My group has done several such games with excellent results. I've never tried gaming with people with significantly different politics though, so I'm not certain how that would work in the equation.

One of the more glaring limitations I've seen on most gaming theory, including "The Big Model" is the dismissal of the elements of social and political commentary in gaming. Then again, I've very much of a believer in the idea that "the personal is the political".

[jeregenest.livejournal.com]

I think that social/political commentary can be one of the agendas of a good game.

I wasn't eally aware that there was a degree of resistance to the concept, I'll have to go looking.

[balthial.livejournal.com]

I generally do not like political commentary in my fiction. The temptation for the author to set up the situation in an oversimplified way which doesn't leave room for disagreement is very high.

However, I'm a great fan of political commentary and dealing with real world issues generally. I agree that the personal is political.

[balthial.livejournal.com]

I remember that story. International marketplace is a strange place.

What was this game you ran?

[locke61dv.livejournal.com]

I'm a big fan of political/ideological content in a game!

Now that I think of it, a lot of the Big Moral Issues I introduced into my Dogs group were actually half-way into being poltical issues. I probably swung that way subconsciously because that's whats most interesting to me.

[princeofcairo.livejournal.com]

I'd be interested in Actual Play reports of explicitly politically-centered games with players of differing political perspectives. (I separate such games from, say, conventional games of special-forces adventure, which assume that special-forces adventures are justified but don't go out of their way to defend or even analyze that assumption in-game.) I've run one such, a dystopic time-travel game which had the (secret) goal of teaching the characters that power corrupts -- the endgame "victory condition" was for the Time Agents to go back in time and alter their history so that their patron corporate-state, and thus time-travel itself, never existed. Since a majority of my players are roughly libertarian, the Time Agents killed Earl Warren and made sure Ike appointed a libertarian Chief Justice. I suppose if a majority of my players had been socialists, we would have seen something with the Great Rail Strike or Huey Long or something.

I run a good enough time-travel game that I think even my non-libertarian players enjoyed themselves, or were capable of playing converts to the libertarian cause espoused by the ringleader players, but I'm not sure it succeeded as politics per se.

And since we're taking surveys, I believe "the personal is political" is totalizing cant, and that the proper function of political action is to keep the political and personal spheres as fully separate as possible.

[heron61.livejournal.com]

I generally do not like political commentary in my fiction. The temptation for the author to set up the situation in an oversimplified way which doesn't leave room for disagreement is very high.

My reading of this is that you dislike heavy-handed and badly done political commentary in your fiction. There is vast difference between doing this well and doing it badly.

[wiredhound.livejournal.com]

That's an amazing article. I've read before about dirty coltan mining for use in cell phones, but it didn't draw the Congo situation in such devastating terms.

[balthial.livejournal.com]

Yes, but I can think of very few examples of it done well. The only two examples I can think of are the Grapes of Wrath and the Jungle, both of which are (I think) largely journalistic. And really I might be wrong there, since I don't know that much about those two periods. What would you consider a good example of the type?

[heron61.livejournal.com]

A film with an strong anti-corporate message that was also a nifty action film was Paul Verhoven's Robocop. There is also a fair amount of social commentary in the new (and mostly excellent) Battlestar Galactica. The key is to make a good story first and not let any message get in the way of this task.

[locke61dv.livejournal.com]

I'm a pseudolibertarian myself, and do find that influencing my gameplay, although not in a political sense so much as a moral one, by which I mean the ethical values behind libertarianism. (So, making kind of political ethic a personal one.)

In my "Dogs in the Vineyard" game, I realized that in every town, there was always a sympathetic figure who libertarian, independent-minded, and of a culture different than those of the Faithful (ex: Mountain Folk, immigrants, etc.) I took me a while to realize I was basically avataring.