Lab Report #25: Peace Games
Findings from playing The Transition Year
Dear Ludic Liberators,
At the last Ludic Liberation Lab, we played The Transition Year, a map-making game of post-capitalist community building, produced by the queer anarchist game design collective Affinity Games. The Transition Year is an adaption of Avery Alder’s The Quiet Year and shares several key mechanics with the original. Both games make use of the following rules:
Players don’t play as specific, assigned characters but mutably hold the perspectives of different community groups throughout the game;
Each turn represents a week in the year, played by drawing a card from a standard playing deck in which the four suits symbolize the seasons— Spring, Summer, Fall, Winter;
At each turn, some kind of change occurs, prompted by a scenario on the randomly chosen card (e.g., someone in the community rebels, a new food source is discovered, etc.)
The game is played by elaborating the details of the change and imagining how the community reacts to or adapts to this change in light of the initial conditions specified by the players: which resources in the world are limited or abundant, what collective desires were expressed at the start of the game, etc.;
There’s no “winning” the game really — at some point in the game’s 4th act, Winter, a specific card announces the arrival of a powerful enemy and with it the end of peace, although the game is meant to be played without this awareness;
Or maybe this awareness actually is at the very core of the game. A key shared understanding is that as we build our little community, we are not necessarily building for a legacy civilization, but we’re also not investing our energy into a military operation to fight some future inevitable war. Instead, play is for experimenting with and experiencing the tensions and possibilities of complex and conflicted community-making during peacetime.
I’d like to suggest that The Transition Year and other variations of The Quiet Year can be thought of as Peace Games—simulations of peace times — a contrast to Wargames designed to simulate military strategy and combat. Peace Games are certainly not without occasional violence (our imagined community had a bomb threat and bear attacks), but what distinguishes them from wargames is (according to Utsumi Takeshi who takes credit for inventing the term Peace gaming) is their non-zero-sum nature. The term zero-sum refers to a mathematical model of a game that involves two sides, in which one side wins and the other loses (+1 and -1 adds up to a 0 = zero-sum). In a non-zero-sum game, everyone wins and loses some, unevenly, so the zero is never achieved.
If we accept this notion, what’s unique about the experience of playing a peace game rather than a wargame or another kind of game that involves competitive strategy? I offer four distinguishing features:
Rather than being games without any conflict, peace games are games in which the players must hold and dance with the inherent conflict of being in community. In The Transition Year, conflict emerged from the different interests and needs of the affinity groups we generated (such foragers who wanted to forage for plant food and use compost toilets, librarians who wanted to preserve books, the unvanquished who wanted to revive old capitalist ways, and dionysiacs who just wanted to party), as well as from external weather conditions and relics of past extractive industries. In a wargame, the primary conflict is one of competition between players themselves, and there is presumption is that this conflict can be ended by one player or one team winning the power competition. But in a peace game, the conflict can never be done away with, but only be acknowledged, adapted to, and harmonized.
A primary mechanic for harmonizing conflict in The Transition Year was that of holding “a gathering” when a problem or question emerged in the community. A gathering follows very specific rules: everyone voices a perspective (not their own, but of one of the affinity groups in the community), each player only goes once, and nothing is decided, voted on, or resolved. Rather, the gathering is a game mechanic for making difference and its inherent conflict visible. As conflict between groups becomes visible, it becomes collectively held, and even as the differences remain in tension with one another, the tension produces a polyphony of voices, and thus a kind of harmony.
Another thing we discovered about community building is that we’re more likely to create the collective experience we want in the world by holding closely to our desires. The Transition Year’s mechanic of creating a “taste menu” at the beginning of gameplay primed us for the experiences we wanted (and didn’t want) to play with. Although the game evolved in unpredictable ways based on the cards we pulled and scenarios we had to adapt to, we were able to continually return to some of our desires and weave them into our shared worldmaking. Other times, we got distracted by the conflict at hand, and missed opportunities to incorporate our desires into our community experiments. This realization made me want to keep thinking about ways we consciously and unconsciously pattern or forget to pattern our espoused values and desires into our daily lives. Then I remembered that my existential game The Feeling Collector is a very simple and persistent way to do this 🎈 But there’s still more thinking and gamemaking to do.
Of course, at Ludic Liberation Lab, we’re always asking how different forms of play help us practice liberation. For me, the most liberating aspect of this game was the embedded dynamic of non-identification. At each turn, we could change which affinity group we spoke or acted as, make a new group, or simultaneously hold multiple conflicting positions. This allowed us to more imaginatively play with fortune and misfortune through our shared storytelling. Rather than trying to make a specific character or group end up with the most beneficial outcome, we could be genuinely curious about what we would do—together, as a collective—when unfortunate things happened, like when someone was revealed as an abuser or a natural disaster occured. In fact, since we ran out of time and didn’t get to play all the cards in the deck, our group lamented that we didn’t get more “dramatic” and “negative” (and thus more “interesting”) scenarios. I think this practice of non-identification (and dis-identification and re-identification) might be a core component of peace gaming and peace making more generally, as holding peace necessarily involves awareness of diverging needs and concerns.
Obviously, I’m writing this Lab Report during an escalation of the Russo-Ukranian war that has become a massive global spectacle. War and wargames are everywhere, but we’re much less practiced at playing peace games together!
So next month we’re going to play Arcology World — another postcapitalist peace game of mutual aid and collective mutation. It’s important not to assume that just because these games have a similiar theme that they are going to use the same dynamics or lead to the same insights. I’m excited to explore different mechanisms different post-capitalist and solarpunk games are built on, because it will help us make theory into practice through play (and play into theory again)! You can register for April’s lab now — don’t worry you’ll get a reminder again :)
I would like to thank to The Transition Year players leaf, bopblopbeddebop, out-lander, TraderJain, Baelfyre, kidseverywhere, and nowork for your wild imaginations and contributions to our shared community and a deep meta afterparty. It was an honor making a world with you 🌍 — would 💯 do it again.
Peace ☮️,
Natalia
Existential Game Maker/Destroyer