Free Change

Alex with his youngest brother Theodore

Originally uploaded by gregoniemeyer

The pageant-contest quality of the phrase notwithstanding, many serious game development efforts these days seek to make a game for world peace. Examples are Peacemaker or Virtual Peace. Armagetron, on the other hand, is an old-school, rather violent racing game. It is a free clone of the classic Tron racing game. Players seek to cut each others’ paths off in high-speed motorcycle races.
Last night, I played Armagetron in a LAN mode with AI and my hormonally wild, rather challenging, and beloved teenage son, Alex. After a few rounds of last-man-standing, Alex and I decided to bond against the two artificial intelligence (AI) racers in the game. We developed common strategies, reveled in victories, supported each other, and bonded about losses and mistakes. This does not happen every day between the two of us, partially because of the teenage phase, and partially because I am not that easy, either.
While Armagetron does not look or sound like a peace game, it nevertheless had a peace-giving effect on the real lives of the players. The game opened a pathway between two generations in the face of a “major threat”. This is because it elicits a profound pattern of collaboration, which requires that players validate each others strengths and forgive each others weaknesses. We could call this pattern “Ganging Up”, and that may sound like a bad thing, but it depends what we gang up on. We can gang up against bigotry, pollution or the dirty dishes in the sink.

Armagetron is also very fast. A round can last as short as a minute, and the race starts again. So players learn fast, too. For Alex and me to beat the AI, we first had to agree not to chase each other, then we had to come up with coherent and effective strategies, stick to agreements, and execute skillfully. Together, we defeated the simplest AI and it felt great.

Peace is the process of real people interacting productively in real time to overcome common challenges. The beauty of games is that we can abstract such complex patterns of social interaction from their real contexts, simplify them, speed them up, integrate them into playable core loops, and let the gameplay transform us into better people. For this to work, we don’t need a map of Israel and Palestine, or canned news. We also don’t need to go into a VR conference room and solve fake crises from the comfort Aeron chair simulations. It is not about the game assets. Rather, it is about how fully a player can engage with a rapidly changing gamestate, how a player can act as a game persona and lend that person her full range of emotions. And from there, what behaviors can a game not elicit among its players? Behaviors, which players would not engage in otherwise. Behaviors which, once experienced, players can abstract from the game and try out in real life.

So my son and I now do not go on wild motorcycle chases in the mean streets of Berkeley, CA. Instead, we try to do the dishes together in less than 10 minutes, and we laugh about it, and we talk about man stuff like confidence and over-confidence. All because of Tron.