Thomas P.M. Barnett :: Weblog

Got an email from the COO of the company (Impact Games) that developed the game, asking for my opinion (he's read me going back to my Pop!Tech appearance of two years ago).

My reply was simply to paste in the text from BFA's "blogging the future" afterward, where I penned the following:

“Online Game Triggers Dictator’s Departure; Stunning Victory of ‘People’s Diplomacy’”

The complexity of planning postconflict stabilization operations in advance is daunting, simply because of the huge number of variables involved. It’s not a matter of simply crunching numbers, but rather anticipating the free play of so many actors—your own military, allied civilians, enemy soldiers and insurgents, the local population, and so on. In many ways, this kind of complex simulation is well given over to massive multiplayer online games (MMOG), something I see both the military and the U.S. Government turning toward as a tool for predictive planning. Imagine if, months prior to the invasion, the Pentagon had started a MMOG that modeled Iraq immediately following the regime’s collapse, allowing hundreds or even thousands of chosen experts (or even just enthusiastic gamers!) from the world over to fill out the multitude of possible characters involved on both sides. Imagine what insights could have been learned beforehand. Now jump ahead fifteen years and think about how sophisticated such MMOGs might be, and how they could be used to preplay—for obvious consumption by both the global community and the targeted state in question—a rogue-regime takedown and subsequent occupation, perhaps even to the effect of convincing the regime to abandon its untenable situation in advance of actual war being waged. Far-fetched? Not in a world where uncredentialed Internet bloggers can force Senate majority leaders and major network news anchors to resign in disgrace at lightning speed.

I've actually been approached by MMOG researchers and developers over the years on this general cluster of ideas (modeling postwar). In fact, my interaction with such researchers at the Institute for Defense Analyses back in 2004 led me to pen the "headline from the future" above.

Check out the Peacemaker site. It's pretty good and gives you a good sense of the game's potential for mass education, something I obviously believe in, given my efforts here, in articles, in speeches and books and media appearances.

As I wrote about in BFA regarding son Kevin and the Echo Boomers in general:

The Echo Boomers, or the huge 80-million-plus generation of Americans born between 1980 and 1995 (the largest generation this country has ever known), are the real target audience for this vision, because come the year 2025, they’ll be the cohort (age thirty to forty-five) that’s doing the most moving and shaking in our economy and political scene. In the same way that I spend the vast majority of my time now working the youngest officers of the U.S. military on the security implications of this grand strategy, over time I’m most interested in winning the hearts and minds of the Echo Boomers regarding the economic, political, and moral implications of this vision. Why? The Echo Boomers will constitute the generational follow-through. If they can’t stay the course, then there will be no course. It’ll be their system to administer, so they will need to be able to wrap their minds around it and claim this responsibility as their own, just astheir contemporaries all across the Core will be required to do eventually.

And the Echo Boomers couldn’t be a better fit, in many ways.

The children of the Boomers are probably the most overly programmed and overly protected generation that America has ever produced. As 60 Minutes correspondent Steve Kroft put it in his profile of the cohort, “Echo boomers are the most watched-over generation in history. Most have never ridden a bike without a helmet, ridden in a car without a seat belt, or eaten in a cafeteria that serves peanut butter.” As a result, they are naturally team-oriented overachievers who, unlike previous recent generations, trust the government, hold traditional values, and emulate their parents instinctively.

The Echo Boomers are also natural networkers. They build their own Web sites, burn their own CDs, and edit their own DVDs. They distrust slick packaging and mainstream media, preferring to share information among themselves to a degree never witnessed before. They are the ultimate word-of-mouth generation.

Natural multitaskers because they grew up in conditions of universal connectivity (the oldest came of age right as the Internet blossomed into a global phenomenon), the Echo Boomers are, in the words of one demographic study, “totally plugged-in citizens of a worldwide community.” As such, they know multiculturalism not as something to be accepted, but as simply a fact of life, since over a third of this generation is nonwhite. Probably the least “churched” generation in U.S. history, they are nonetheless deeply interested in making the world a better place. As historian Neil Howe describes Echo Boomers, they are far closer in outlook to the “greatest generation” from World War II than their egocentric Baby Boomer parents. In short, they’re “more interested in building things up than tearing them down.”

This generation is far enough removed from the sensibilities of their parents that “the bomb” is their slang for cool, and “gay” has mutated into an all-purpose put-down for nerds and geeks. But like Pearl Harbor served as a wake-up call for their grandparents’ generation, 9/11 is their historical touchstone. And like their parents’ fixation on the Vietnam War, their sense of the world is being dramatically shaped by the global war on terrorism.

Put this package all together and you basically have my ten-year-old son Kevin, who’s completely at home playing Nintendo in the back of the car, listening to his favorite band over the stereo, and talking with a friend over a cell phone while Dad, the only coach he’s ever known over five years of playing three sports, drives him to his weekly piano lesson. Kevin knows more about World War II–era weaponry and tactics than I know about current U.S. military operations, thanks to his having replayed virtually every major battle of that war in a variety of first-person-shooter video games of stunning complexity—at least to his dad, whose own “war” game as a kid consisted of picking up a stick and running around the yard shooting imaginary German soldiers. Kevin also likes to remind me that we should go to church more often, that smoking cigarettes is just this side of suicide, that we need to donate money to environmental groups the world over, and that someday he wants to grow up to be just like me so he too can earn a living writing stuff and sending it over the Internet.

Oh, and for Christmas Kevin wants a Mac Powerbook laptop so he can self-publish his book about a superhero named Ray Trinity who routinely saves the world from fanatical terrorists hell-bent on destroying it.

Kevin is keen on heroes, especially ones who fight the good fight, like Luke Skywalker, King Aragorn, and Spiderman. He’s less concerned with success than with playing by the rules, and he’s pretty sure he’ll spend his adult life “doing things that’ll help other people,” even if he’s unclear right now about what that might entail. He knows there are some things worth fighting for, but that—in the end—we all have to get along because it’s a small planet and we all need to share, especially when somebody gets into trouble. So Kevin thinks nothing of saving up his money from chores only to turn it all in at school for some relief fund targeting disaster victims on the other side of the world. “Dad,” he says when I ask if he’d rather not save his money for that laptop he keeps talking about, “those people over there are just like Vonne Mei, and if she got in trouble, you’d want me to help her out too, wouldn’t you?”

Would I like to see a game based on PNM? Sure. Hell, the New Map Game we did with Jeff Cares and Alidade proved it can be done in that format. I focus on the next generation, not just because that's such a neat truism to repeat but because I've seen time and time again (on smoking, designated driver, recycling) how teaching your children well pays off much faster in generational change than is commonly recognized.

In terms of specific feedback on the Peacemaker game, I'd like to see it genericized for a variety of baseline scenarios (disaster, civil war, civil strife after economic collapse, genocidal strife, etc.) so it's not just stuck on that one scenario, which I honestly believe is kept brewing largely for reasons external to the game play (i.e., as I often say here, "fixing" this conflict requires a regional approach, not some perfect interior peace plan, because so long as everyone in the region can use this conflict to screw one another for various purposes, they will).