What I Learned from Computer Games About Foreign Policy and War

In 1983 and 1985, two computer games emerged that created a buzz in what would be a continuous projection of foreign policy and war, in which computer games might simulate actual real world situations, eliminating the need to actually go to war to experience the effects of war. Before this, from the 1950s, with A.S. Douglas’s simulation of tic tac toe in 1952 and William Higginbotham’s infamous “Tennis for Two” in 1958, numerous games emerged that helped evolve the genre from mainframe systems to personal gaming systems in the 1970s and 1980s. However, it was Bruce Ketchledge’s 1983 game Geopolitique 1990 and Chris Crawford’s 1985 Balance of Power that really changed the industry in the eyes of potential foreign policy usage.

The two games were similar. You spent the majority of your time in negotiations between international powers, and in the end you ended up with a high score or thermonuclear war. The real difference between the two games was that Ketchledge’s game played out the nuclear war in all its 1983 pre-CGI glory while Crawford’s game ended with the prescient words of "You have ignited a nuclear war. And no, there is no animated display of a mushroom cloud with parts of bodies flying through the air. We do not reward failure." As a player of that game when it first released, I can tell you that when you received that message, it had a much stronger impact than any computer graphic series of explosions ever could have.

What was unique about these series of games was that they used a series of negotiations with foreign entities that can now best be described as a tit for tat strategy, where you continue to reward your opponent until you achieve your goals. The difference was that the computer saw each negotiation as separate and distinctive, meaning that previous successful negotiations did not necessarily create a much more conducive environment for future negotiations. You had to treat each series of negotiations as unique and untied to anything else. The only exception is that negative steps in the negotiation process managed to lead to a much more hostile set of relations between your country and the one that might eventually be your nuclear opponent. It is a lot like negotiations with North Korea, to be honest. One mistake, and one set back, sets you back years, and the new series of negotiations pretty much start you up as if you’ve never been on a positive path before.

Since those series of games, there has been a belief in computer gaming circles that simulations can be designed in such a way that they might emulate the actions of real nations in the world. A number of games have been released that attempt to do just that. One well known entity has attempted to take a more historical approach, and it has been very successful, both in implementation and in sales as well. Sid Meier’s Civilization series takes a leader from the creation of a city to the development of an entire empire that can span the globe. The terrain used can be pretty much anything from barren wastelands to an actual excellent representation of the planet Earth. The game has gone through several sequels to itself, including the colonization of both the New World, and a planet of the star system Alpha Centauri. But what makes Civilization so unique is that even though it includes famous, and infamous, leaders of Earth history, any number of chances can change the entire course of one’s civilization.

Civilization IV is the latest in the series of this game, and there is something those who study foreign policy and war can recognize as an unexpected benefit. To explain this benefit, let me just tell a small story of a particular game I was playing.

In this game, I was the most powerful nation on the planet. There were ten or eleven strong opponents against me, representing all sorts of different civilizations, like Catherine of Russia and Lincoln of America, for example. In this scenario, I had gone to war against Catherine of Russia because of reasons that are not really important for this discussion, but at the end of the war, I managed to wipe out Russia’s civilization. This left me in a position of peace with the rest of the world, because Russia was my only real adversary for many game years of playing. However, something started to nag at me as I conducted peace with the rest of the world. I had developed this humongous army to finally wipe out the Russian empire, and now I was sitting on it, and it was doing nothing. I started to focus my economy on peacetime needs, and as I continued the years moving forward, that huge army that was now sitting there doing nothing just seemed like it was waiting for me to do something. Anything.

And isn’t this very much how the world is as well? After World War II, the United States was this behemoth of massive military proportions, and that military industrial complex ended up dictating a lot of our foreign policy from that point forward. It would not be a hard argument to make that we had this huge army that was just looking for some place to put it. Even today, with two wars having just been fought in Afghanistan and Iraq, the idea that this army needs to be used for something never escapes the thought process of those in power. An idle army is a scary entity for a lot of countries. Sometimes, an idle army is the reason a country collapses, or falls into civil war. There are so many scenarios that can go bad, yet in the United States, we ignore what has happened to so many other countries and throughout so much of history, often by stating, “well, that can’t happen here.”

A final lesson, at least for this essay, is that of the human factor. We often look at statistical projections and number projections and make determinations of economic circumstances, but quite often it’s frowned upon to do that with political behavior. Political science used to be a science where the belief was that projections are not part of the science, because anything can happen. However, more and more political scientists are becoming tied to statistical research so that it is not surprising that a lot of foreign policy projections coming from political scientists, or political economists, also now start projecting future international behavior. Very dangerous, and quite often very wrong.

An example comes from a very interesting world domination game called SuperPower. It uses very real world information to make up the countries that come against you, but at some point in the game Belgium goes nuts and tries to take over the world. This example is why political scientists are wise in avoiding projections in international affairs that rely on statistical argumentation. The thing that is missing in the game is rationalization. The reason Belgium has not taken over the world is that people are involved, not numbers on a computer. Yet, when you crunch numbers with no concern for the thought processes of the people involved, you come up with all sorts of funky answers.

These are just some of the interesting connections that can be made between computer games and international relations. Unfortunately, scholars are very apprehensive about connecting themselves to a medium often considered the canvas of children. Therefore, it is very possible that many great insights can be achieved by computer games and the study of those games, but like in so many similar situations where history is doomed to repeat itself because no one remembered what happened before, we might be too proud to ever realize the answers were found in a place no one of importance will ever see.

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