By now, you’re familiar with the gameplay and the International Relations background of World Order. But what about its educational value?
First is the game’s immersive experience. Like Hegemony, World Order has been created by a team of professional game designers working closely with a team of professional academics to create an immersive (and fun!) learning experience about international relations theories, international political economy, diplomacy, strategic planning, and power politics. Politics is as old as humanity itself – wherever there are two or more humans, there will be politics. We engage in politics every day, whenever a decision has to be made. But for many people around the world – including the creators and advisors on this game – politics can feel like something distant, something that shapes our lives, but which we have little to no ability to shape in turn. This is especially true in the realm of international politics. We are used to witnessing international politics, reading about it or watching it on the news, but so often we feel that it is something “out there”, a realm that belongs exclusively to presidents and prime ministers, admirals and ambassadors. To an extent this is true, as even in free democracies the voting citizens are very, very rarely consulted on foreign policy decisions. Partly this is pragmatic (governments rarely have the time or inclination to consult their populations on urgent issues) and partly it is political (the voting electorate generally knows far less about a foreign policy issue than experts such as foreign ministers, trade envoys, or military officers). However, this encourages the belief that international politics is something we have no control over.
Like Hegemony, World Order simulates political events based on academic theories and real-world events. But while Hegemony is played at the level of domestic politics, World Order is played at the international level. Playing the game is an immersive experience, where you are put in the shoes of a head of state, head of government, foreign secretary, minister of trade, and chief of the general staff – all at once! The first value of this, besides entertainment, is gaining first-hand experience of just how difficult it is to navigate a country through the turbulent realm of international politics. Politicians are just people like us, they are not omniscient and they cannot always predict what other countries’ leaders will do, or what events are coming in the future. As in the real world, the game requires a careful balance of diplomacy, building and maintaining relationships with other countries, strengthening alliances, trade, increasing exports while reducing imports, making wise foreign direct investments, establishing military bases, encouraging allies while discouraging rivals, military manoeuvres – all while taking care of the day-to-day internal affairs of economics, industrial and agricultural production, research, and internal stability. Playing the game gives you an appreciation of the enormous difficulties of international politics, in which leaders try to pursue their own objectives while simultaneously trying to anticipate what their allies and rivals will do (and why), and respond to unforeseen events. It’s far from an easy job.
The second value is that playing the game helps bridge the gap between academic politics and ‘real life’ politics. In colleges and universities you are taught, by people like us, that international politics operates according to schools of thought and “-isms”. Realism, liberal internationalism, constructivism, and so forth. To an extent this is true, as all people have ideas about what the world should look like and how it works. Politicians are just people, after all, and not only do they have ideas of what the world should look like, they have powers to try and make those visions a reality. But politicians and governments are not abstract, soulless, inhuman calculating machines. They have emotions and moral codes, anxieties and ambitions. They might balk at military action when a short war might be the lesser of two evils, or they might desire power and pursue their vision at any price, regardless of how other people suffer. Academic theories of politics mean nothing without practical politics, and practical politics are incomprehensible without theories to explain them and guide politicians.
The third value is perhaps the most important. We are used to thinking of international politics as something ‘out there’, which we cannot influence. This is what the nineteenth-century German historian JG Herder termed “aussenpolitik”, literally “outside-politics” or foreign affairs. This is the realm of embassies and armies, international summits and trade treaties, part of grand strategies which are made up in between election cycles. But there is another realm of politics. In the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries the French Annales school of politics, pioneered by thinkers such as Fernand Braudel and Reinhard Kosselleck, emphasised how politics exists in the everyday. If the world of ‘high politics’ is aussenpolitik, then the realm of ‘low politics’ is what they called “alltagsgeschichte”, literally ‘everyday stories’. Politics is not just something we encounter every few years in an election, it is something we encounter, and navigate, every day; something which shapes us, and something which we shape. If aussenpolitik is the world of political discussions at the international conference table, then alltagesgeschichte is the world of political discussions at the kitchen table.
It might seem strange to think of foreign affairs existing in this realm, but it does. In democratic countries, foreign affairs can have a huge influence on peoples’ everyday lives. The price of groceries, rent, petrol, energy; immigration and identity; the memory of wars; the scenes we see and the words we read on our screens – all of these shape citizens’ attitudes and political opinions, and on voting day, these emotions play out at the ballot box. In authoritarian countries, the exact same influences exist on ordinary people. And while they cannot vote their governments out, governments are very aware of the need to keep their populations quiet through low prices and national pride – which are intimately connected with international politics. International politics is not some distant phenomenon we only encounter when doomscrolling on our smartphones. International politics is part of our everyday lives, and everyone reading this has some small influence on the ‘big’ world of foreign affairs.
Like Hegemony, the game World Order is accompanied by a richly detailed booklet created by a team of internationally distinguished academics, from prestigious universities around the world. This gives you background context for World Order, and helps reinforce the link between academic theory and ‘real-world’ applications. Reading the booklet and playing the game puts you in the position of an elite, a policymaker, a person with a vision and the power to try and make it a reality. But it is not just presidents and prime ministers who make international politics. Playing World Order reminds you that, like a single cell in a bigger body, each of us is one small part of that world.
We’re only human, after all.
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