International politics is not new, and it is not neutral. We do not take sides with any faction or ideology in the game, but simply depict the world as it is – and as it has always been.

Politics has never been neutral, but there has always been an effort to treat international relations objectively, as something to be analysed rationally rather than condemned and judged. Recorded human history stretches back over five thousand years, to the earliest organised societies formed by humans in the Bronze Age. And among those earliest records – religious texts, civil law codes, even commercial contracts and receipts and personal letters which have survived for thousands of years – among those ancient documents are texts about international politics. The Armana Letters, discovered in Egypt in the 1970s, are surviving accounts of political negotiations, strategic plans, and diplomatic relations between different societies and ‘countries’ some 3,200 years ago, in what is now the Middle East. Translated into our languages, they are not that different to the documents which politicians and ambassadors produce now, at the United Nations and the G20 and embassies across the globe – policymakers trying to approach international politics rationally and objectively, not emotionally and judgementally. And thousands of years from now, when future archaeologists discover the political documents of our ancient Digital Age, they will almost certainly have the same response we have to the Armana Letters – a wry, perhaps sad, smile at how familiar they seem. Plus ca change – little has changed between the Bronze Age and the Digital Age, and future humans will have the same reaction upon discovering how familiar our squabbles and arguments are to their own, and how we, like they, try to be neutral.

Throughout the thousands of years of recorded international politics, one common theme is visible in every age, in every society, from presidents and popes and pharaohs. This is normativity.

International politics is full of questions. We are generally competent at answering most of these questions – the ones that start with Who? When? Where? What? How? But the hardest questions are the shortest – the ones that start with Why?

Normativity is at the heart of international politics. Anyone can say what the world is – the who, what, when, where, how questions. And equally, everyone has an opinion in what the world should be. There are wrong opinions, which we can judge with the benefit of hindsight or even contemporary morals. Atrocities have been committed in every era by every society, and we can look back at history and be appalled by what people did. But did those people believe what they were doing was wrong? Many certainly did, and at the same time many people who enacted terrible political decisions genuinely believed that they were doing the right thing. Future societies will judge us in the same way. We are not arguing for moral relativism, the argument that ‘evil is in the eye of the beholder’ or that history is written by the winners. But equally we are not arguing that there is a single ‘right’ vision of politics. There are evil visions, there are incompetent visions, there are comically ridiculous visions. But there is no single ‘right’ vision.

Consider the four factions of the game – the USA, Russia, the European Union, and China. We do not label them as good or evil, nor do we attribute their foreign policies to benevolent or malevolent goals. To an American in 2004, the Global War on Terror might have seemed a genuine attempt to stamp out evil. To a Chinese citizen of the 1950s, the Europeans might truly be remembered as a plundering horde of marauders pillaging their homes. A Russian in the 2020s might honestly believe that the West is a degenerate threat to society. And a European in the 1990s might have believed in their hearts that a continental union was a road paved with good intentions – and we all know where that leads. The factions in the game are presented as the world is, based on theories of international relations and other social sciences which can be read about in the main booklet.

An additional reason for not portraying the factions as good or bad, is that the game is based on collaboration with distinguished academics. Academics have to try and set aside their prejudices and biases, to present a neutral world than can be analysed, not judged or condemned. But academics are just people too. Every human who has ever been born, and presumably every human who will ever be born (until our species goes extinct or we figure out how to upload ourselves into immortal software), is subject to what social scientists term positionality. Everyone who reads this booklet has positionality. So does everyone who wrote this booklet. So does everyone you have seen since waking up this morning. You have a set of morals. You have a personal history from which you gain life experience. You have a gender, a race, an age, perhaps a religion, a political identity; like all humans your positionality is partly shaped by your own choices and beliefs, partly shaped by parents and teachers and the people who made decisions for you as a child (and people who still make decisions for you today), and partly shaped by the society you grew up in. This has shaped you, and it will continue to shape you throughout your life. You see the world through your positionality.

And so does everyone else.

This is why we take a neutral position, because everyone’s positionality is different. As an example, take the most powerful society in the world today – arguably, the most powerful society in human history so far – the United States of America. One human might consider the United States of America the manifestation of all that is good, a beacon of liberty, equality, and the pursuit of happiness. 99.9% of the humans who have ever lived could only dream of being born into such a glittering utopia. But at the same time another human, maybe even one living in the same society, might consider the United States of America the manifestation of all that is evil; a den of iniquity and injustice, a nightmarish dystopia that would make George Orwell and Aldous Huxley blanch. It is very easy for each person to judge the other as wrong – or create a boardgame which depicts the USA as heaven or hell – because it is their positionality. And it is the same for every society which has ever existed, every country which exists today, and every civilisation which ever will exist.

Playing this game might put you in an uncomfortable position because your player country conflicts with your morals or positionality, or because of what historians term presentism­ or historical privilege – we know what ultimately happened, so we are able to judge that politician, that policy, that action, as good or bad depending on the outcome or upon our own positionality. We are not arguing that morality is relative. We are not arguing that a minister in the Third Reich, or a commissar in the Soviet Union, or a pith-helmeted colonialist in a Victorian empire, should be forgiven ‘because they didn’t think they were wrong’. Atrocities still exist today, and sadly atrocities will almost certainly still exist when those future archaeologists, thousands of years from now, excitedly brush away the dust to find our peace treaties and our declarations of war on a half-fossilised USB stick. We are not handwaving away the evils of international politics which existed, exist, and will exist. We are arguing that in order to better understand international politics, we have to consider the all-too-human element of positionality, your own and other peoples’. Playing this game forces you into the position of people who, for all their power and pompous grandiosity, are still just humans like us, and are subject to their own positionality. Playing this game can give you a new way to approach that easiest, but hardest, question of international politics:

‘Why?’

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