Is facile better than nothing in Endgame: Syria?

Posted by on December 13, 2012 in Games

Two years ago, the Assad regime in Syria assumed they could just clamp down on this Arab Spring nonsense until it went away. It didn’t go away. Instead, a long civil war happened. The death toll has been staggering, thanks to the Assad regime’s unfettered use of the military power it has cultivated over the years in Lebanon and against Israel. One of the most common criticisms leveled at the international community (well, Barack Obama) is the failure to impose a no-fly zone over the county, as it did during the Libyan civil war. Sometimes it’s convenient to ignore the difference between Libya and Syria to score political points.

But as the opposition hangs on and pushes back, sometimes city block by city block, they get closer to winning. Well, “winning”. If Egypt can’t even be an Egypt, what are Syria’s chances? But with every defection, with every sanction, with every captured tank, with every demonstration, Syria’s various rebels get closer to taking control of their country. And we mostly just watch through a Google News page.

After the jump, now we can watch through a videogame

You can play Endgame: Syria in a browser here. It’s currently in the approval process for iOS and Android versions. This is the creation of Game The News, which boasts “the world, made playable”. This previously consisted of games to save endangered rhinos and fight for the Freedom of Information Act. Now it includes Endgame: Syria, designed by Tomas Rawlings, who is also one of the creators of Call of Cthulhu: The Wasted Land. Think of a WWI themed X-Com, but with Deep Ones instead of greys. So what is a guy like this doing making a game about the Syrian civil war before it’s even over?

From the press release:

Some may think that the choice of a game as a medium for this subject is questionable, but Tomas is adamant this is not the case, “As game developers, games are a natural way for us to express our thoughts on the world around us. Games don’t have to be frivolous or lightweight; they can and do take on serious issues and open them up to new audiences.”

I like this. But the problem isn’t the concept, which isn’t frivolous or lightweight. The problem is the execution, which is frivolous and lightweight. Endgame: Syria starts on the 91st week of the fighting, with a cool 39,000 casualties racked up and numbers representing support for the rebels and the Assad regime. The regime has a hearty lead in support points. I suppose that’s Russia for you.

The gameplay is based almost entirely on each side’s pool of support points. You play cards during the political phase to put points into the support pool. During the military phase, the regime and rebels line up cards against each other, paying for them out of their support pools. When you can’t block damage from another card, you lose points out of your support pool. Some cards cause civilian casualties, which are counted up from 39,000 to no effect, as near as I can tell. And as you’re playing, the game will suddenly and inexplicably end, sometimes giving you the choice to keep fighting or to accept a settlement. I don’t know why you wouldn’t accept a peace settlement. Maybe you just want to keep playing.

The cards have plenty of related flavor, but it almost never finds its way into the gameplay. You’re just flipping cards and picking them for the numbers. Satellites, communications gear, arm shipments, and Palestinian supporters appear with their accompanying combat values. The mujahideen can hold off a tank. Communications gear shuts down artillery nicely. Occasional AA units are a welcome response to — can you guess? — the regime’s air strikes. Hey, look, the Kurd event knocked a few points off the regime’s support score. How many? Who knows. Hello, Hezbollah. Turkey, France, the UK, and exiles all give you support points, in that order. Qatar kind of sucks. But there’s simply not much gameplay under this thin veneer of current events. That’s Endgame: Syria in a nutshell: a thin excuse for a game.

It reminds me of Victory Points’ solitaire game about the French Revolution, Levee en Masse, which is a matter of flipping up cards representing historical events that modify various die rolls. Then you just roll dice to keep armies from storming Paris. Simple, simplistic, and touched by historical trappings.

I can’t help but think of the asymmetry and uncertainty of Volko Ruhnke’s modeling of the War on Terror in Labyrinth, or Ananda Gupta’s Twilight Struggle as a canny reflection of political theory during the Cold War, or how those types of card-based historical games play with the certainty of known events and the chaos of a deck of cards used by two competing players. I think of Paradox’s revolutionary — literally! — population model in Victoria II. It’s probably too much to expect that level of game design for a quick project about Syria, built to be timely. But I also can’t help but think that the ongoing events in the Arab world, specifically in Syria and Egypt, are too important to have any meaningful resonance in the simple act of flipping cards to chip away at pools of points.

But I want to respect what Rawling and Game The News is attempting. Namely, “using rapid-game development methods to build games quickly in response to real-world events…The developers say that if this game brings the issues of the war to an audience who might otherwise not have engaged with it, then the risk of making something controversial rather than playing it safe will have been worthwhile.”

But isn’t there a better way to model one side desperately clinging to life while a dying regime unleashes its fury? Isn’t there a better way to model the terrible toll this takes on Syria’s people? I don’t know the answer, since I’m not a game designer. But I know how hollow Endgame: Syria feels when it all comes to this:

Maybe that’s the point.

  • Broooski

    Wouldn’t more involved game mechanics subvert the developers’ stated goal of trying to engage people who wouldn’t otherwise follow this conflict by using game conceits? Isn’t there a value in using game-like actions to present the relationship of various real-life elements in the conflict to people who will be more interested in something just because it is in game form? I wouldn’t describe it as an “excuse for a game” in this context – it’s more like the game is an excuse for someone to find out who the players are in Syria. And be reminded of the cost.

  • http://twitter.com/clwheeljack Charles Wheeler

    I’ve always been skeptical of “serious games”, (I was never sold on Bogost’s Water Coolor Games either) but I don’t know if I agree with that either. Is there really going to be anybody playing this game who isn’t already aware of the Syrian conflict? If so, how much actual information are they going to be absorbing?

    There were studies years back about how games like Number Muncher don’t really teach math: they teach kids to recognize shapes and act accordingly, but they aren’t forming the “math” mental model of numbers. They’re just reacting to shapes and colors on the screen. I wonder how different this is from that.

    At the end of the day, I don’t think games are very effective at conveying information via narrative because anybody really putting in the effort to “read” the game is going to see through them. They can be very effective at conveying information via mechanics, which usually means things like relationships, power imbalances, etc. But even though we’re only scratching the surface of how those can be expressed (or maybe because of that), there’s a very definite limit on the kinds of things that we can communicate using games.

  • Broooski

    Great post! I actually agree with most of it. But I understand that people might think that they can get some people to pay attention to a Syria game who wouldn’t pay attention to the Syria news. How many people that actually is, I have no idea.

    But if you take the position that games need to be judged as games and not teaching devices or information-conveyance vehicles, I think that they need to be criticized for being bad games without softening the tone due to the subject matter. How is a game about the American Civil War any less serious than a game about the civil war in Syria? The only difference is that one is current and therefore possibly more emotionally charged for some people, and the other is not. And if games are going to be “taken seriously” – whatever that means – they will have to succeed doing exactly that: being able to address emotionally charged topics in a complex way. I’m not sure they can do that with just game mechanics.

  • Twitchity

    I really don’t think that a card-flipping game is going to get *anyone* to think deeply about the Syrian rebellion and its various complexities. For example, one key factor in understanding Syria is how Assad pere successfully welded together minority groups into a relatively cohesive whole that served as the nucleus of the security, senior military, and civilian governmental state, and how a rebellion largely sustained by the anger of an Arab Sunni majority could affect regional politics.

    In this case, it seems like the rebellion is generally considered virtually unalloyed good guys (some minor numeric penalties from using radical Salafist Islamist militias notwithstanding), while the regime is unabashedly bad. In the real world, however, things are never quite so clear-cut: does a rebel success, even given US pressure to create a more inclusive government-in-waiting, mean potential genocide or “ethnic cleansing” of Shia, ‘Alawite, Christian and Jewish minorities? How will the Kurds be impacted — will they work to create an expanded de facto independent Kurdistan, and what does Turkey do in response? Would Iran lose all influence in a new Syrian state, and how will that affect Hizb Allah and the politico-military situation in Lebanon? From the Israeli point of view, will this stabilize or destabilize the region? What about the Golan Heights and the historically-contested Syrian-Israeli border? Nothing in the Middle East can move without affecting dozens of closely-linked systems.

    I suppose that what I’m saying is that a failure to think deeply about a situation is worse than not thinking at all. There’s a reason USG was so hesitant to strongly support the Syrian rebels, apart from concerns about their ability to succeed; in some ways the maniacal, brutal, near-genocidal devil you know is better than the ones you don’t, especially when they live in what has the potential to be a major regional flashpoint. I see nothing in “Endgame” that indicates the complexities involved. Perhaps the next time they’ll do better, but I’m a bit concerned that they won’t.

  • tomchick

    Thanks so much for posting that, Twitchity. If I thought I could get away with it, I’d just copy/paste it over what I wrote. :)

  • tomchick

    I would agree if I thought there was anything here to remind anyone of the cost. As it is, someone who knows nothing about Syria isn’t going to play this thing and wouldn’t learn anything if he did. Someone like me who knows a little about Syria is just going to be disappointed at how poorly this has anything specific to say beyond names of cards. And someone like Twitchity (see his comment) who appears to know the situation pretty well is just going to shake his head sadly at how facile it is as a learning tool.

  • Twitchity

    Thanks. :) But the article has to discuss the strictly ludic aspects of the design, and why they prove problematic; in this case the important point is why the game design doesn’t fulfill the designers’ aspirations, and I ain’t qualified to say why. Turns out there really is something to this games journamalism!

    I do recall that USC’s ICT some years ago created a “Full Spectrum Command” boardgame that cleverly simulated asymmetric “Three Block War”-type conflicts, by forcing the conventional military player to scramble for tactical bandwidth. Basically, the insurgent player could use inferior forces to cripple the military player’s OODA loop. Don’t know if that proved “fun” in the conventional sense (generally, as I understand it, game mechanics that prevent a player from taking an action aren’t good design), but I always thought it was a neat way to show why fighting in Iraq, or Afghanistan, or Syria isn’t the same as defending the Fulda Gap.

  • tomchick

    I want that on my iPad.

  • Afiemb R. Kewpovchin

    A bad game about an important topic is like any kind of bad art about an important topic. If it increases awareness, and drives somebody to learn more, then it’s good. If it doesn’t, well, add it to the pile of inane conversations that people have everyday about Syria.

    Maybe some game designer sees this and says, “I can make a relevant game about this, and at least I’m not the first.” Granted, we haven’t seen a relevant game about Columbine, or 9/11. But we have seen them for Mogadishu, Vietnam, the Arab-Israeli conflict, Korea, etc. So maybe it just takes time.

  • BLAM!

    Maybe a tad off topic, but since you mentioned Victoria 2, could I get a quick comparison between it and Pride of Nations? I played the latter and was wondering about similar itch scratchers.

  • tomchick

    I didn’t care for Pride of Nations. It felt messy and poorly tuned, but I confess I didn’t spend a lot of time with it. Victoria II, on the other hand, is unlike any other strategy game you’ve ever played. Even if you don’t like it, it’s worth checking out for Paradox’s unique model for political ideas and industry. However, keep in mind it’s a typical Paradox design in that you’re basically surfing a wave of data instead of the usual godhand you wield in most strategy games, including Pride of Nations.

  • Scott McNeill

    Hmm, I’m with you on your first point, but I have to disagree with the second. The Super Columbine Massacre RPG (www.columbinegame.com) is a thoughtful response to the event and the ensuing controversy; as for 9/11, you could try September 12th (or Madrid, a more-general response to terrorism) at http://www.newsgaming.com or even Molleindustria’s Oligarchy (www.molleindustria.org/en/oiligarchy). Only Paolo Pedercini’s stuff uses complex systems to further his argument, but the others are effective uses of the medium. I would concur that it often takes time to get the perspective necessary to create a solid game based on geopolitics.

  • Mercanis

    Wow, there’s a lot of well thought out comments on this thread. I feel a bit silly not being able to articulate something equally profound.

    Instead, here’s some typos!
    “The mujahideen can hold off [a] tank.”
    “That’s Endgame: Syria in a nutshell: a thin excuse for a game[.]”
    “But I want t [sic] respect”

  • spelk

    Aren’t most “historical” games more a doorway into the subject matter, rather than to be held up as a perfect model of the conflict? Whether it’s current or not, seems immaterial to me. In fact one of the draws to this game, was the fact that it was current.

    I hear about the Syrian conflict on the news, but sometimes, getting your fingers dirty and exploring the details – even if abstract – acts as a catalyst to your will to gain understanding of a situation. So this hastily developed topical almost throwaway game, can be a stepping stone to the pursuit of further information.

    For me, in a similar way that A Few Acres of Snow inspires interest in the era, this game could ignite a similar willingness to find out about the Syrian conflict. In fact Tom mentions Levee en Masse, and that simple solitaire game also had me digging around for more knowledge on the French Revolution.