Zyniker's Weblog

{Introductory comments here!}

PeaceMaker

To describe PeaceMaker in a word: frustrating.  However, the game does convey an important lesson.  That lesson is that patience is the key to success in [the Middle East].  Of course, patience is often key to success in most diplomatic endeavours.  Nevertheless, it seems that either I lack the true patience necessary to beat this game, or the game has developed a consciousness all its own and does things to spite me.  I may have to lean toward the latter as I am fairly certain the little crises markers created a smirk at one point.

After playing both sides of the game numerous times, I discovered something: I am much better at losing as the Israeli Prime Minister.  A few spectacular rounds of losses into my gameplay marathon (as I discovered, Calm, Tense, and Violent have no real bearing on how quickly people want to kill me), I decided to take true advantage of the game experience.  I started to lose intentionally.  Naturally, this absolved me of any need to exercise patience for the time being, but it also served the purpose of allowing me to explore more fully the game’s options.  As the Israeli Prime Minister, I quickly discovered that missile strikes against infrastructure and police and building new settlements was the surest and quickest route to my downfall; bulldozing roads for security was a close third (oddly, bulldozing roads in retaliation actually gained me popularity with the Palestinians on occasion, so security was a much safer path to failure).  Having lost as the Israeli Prime Minister some number of times I am not sure I can recall (at least twice with a score of -85, defying my previous belief that I would lose at -50), I turned to the Palestinian side.

As the Palestinian President, my term of office was always considerably longer, even when intentionally trying to ‘lose’ the game.  Of course, some of this had to do with the small fact that, as the Palestinian President, I seemed to have the budget of a small California town, or, perhaps, a community college in the middle of nowhere.  It seemed my only option for actually constructing anything was to prod the European Union, constantly.  However, I was not able to get funds for just anything, I had to pitch my intentions as investments on the part of my European friends.  Holland seemed to like me a lot, especially Dutch banks.  Nevertheless, funding always ran dry as soon as some fantastic individual decided to strap himself to a few hundred pounds of explosives and detonate somewhere.  This led to a necessary crackdown with security measures (I usually played the Palestinian President with a nice buffer with my own people), then futzing about for a few turns while I waited for the Dutch to forget I was leader of an unstable country where their money could go to disappear.  A lack of any real aggressive tactics made losing a much more involved undertaking as the Palestinian President.

It was while playing the Palestinian President that I believe I actually attempted my first real game (I guess my first two to three games were real attempts, just horribly, horribly sad ones).  I was doing quite well, had garnered considerable investment in my country (I actually seemed to have acquired a small budget of my own at some point, which enabled me to build infrastructure without the usually requisite round or ten of begging), then for whatever reason Hamas and Fatah decided to instigate some wonderful violence against me and I quickly lost world opinion and was deposed, I guess.  Unfortunately, this attempt was probably the closest I came to successfully playing and ‘beating’ the game.  If nothing else, I found no difficulty in changing my perspective from one side to the other (despite the fact that I openly admit bias in favour of one side).  Israeli Prime Minister or Palestinian President, my losses were spectacular no matter my title.  They just came much more quickly on the Israeli side.

…  The domestic and international realities of the two sides seemed to resonate with my existing knowledge and beliefs.  As Israel my domestic joy was to placate the settler movement, manage security to a satisfactory degree, and attempt to avoid Intifada (I say attempt because this never seemed to go so well); on the international scene, my priorities were a bit different, these included maintaining my relationship with the US, attempting to convince the EU and UN I wanted peace (often pretending to ignore security concerns to do so), and attempting to strengthen peaceful relations with neighbouring Arab states.  Palestine offered me a different set of domestic priorities: damage control when random violence reared its ugly head, attempting to keep Hamas and Fatah entertained doing useful things (security and law and order seemed to work, sometimes), building infrastructure (then watching it explode and building it again), and attempting to solidify government power were my primary objectives; internationally, I found myself with a much more limited set of objectives, basically begging for money and maintaining a pro-peace and pro-stability image (investment dollars do not flow when Palestine is unstable).  I preferred Israel for budgetary reasons and Palestine for a more predictable congratulations-you-have-lost event cycle (suicide bombings and other random violence against Israel, basically).

…

{Rambling here.}