Game Review: A Force More Powerful
Submitted on Tue, 04/11/2006 - 3:10pm
A Force More Powerful is a new game produced by the International Center on Nonviolent Conflict and York Zimmerman as a followup to their collaboration on the PBS documentary of the same name. It is billed as "The Game of Nonviolent Tactics" and is intended as a fun, educational game for people involved in mass struggle worldwide.
Above: An anti-goverment rally in the city of Grbac
In AFMP, the player controls one movement, the Opposition, which is attempting to defeat the other movement, the Regime, using nonviolent tactics. There are ten scenarios included with the game, though with various difficulty levels and choices of victory conditions for each scenario it seems likely that there will be a lot of gameplay possibilities even before you download the scenario editor and have a go at designing your own. An interactive online forum provides a space for discussion of these scenarios and for you to upload any new scenarios you create for sharing with other gamers.
In the three "easy" scenarios that I have played so far, there has been a richly varied gameplay. For the first scenario "Corruption is Stealing" you play the role of Freedom from Corruption, a coalition of student groups and activists that is trying to bring down the corrupt political leadership of the City Government of the fictional eastern European city of Grbac. By training your members in nonviolent action, political action, and support you are able to coordinate recruitment of nonalingned characters, infiltration of regime-aligned groups, and direct action to achieve the various goals for the scenario. You have to go through such steps as fundraising, letter writing campaigns, newspaper publishing, fraternization with the enemy, clandestine meetings with sympathetic members of the regime, wearing the colors in public, graffiti campaigns, and so forth in order to rally support for your cause. In another scenario, "We're done with the War" you coordinate the action of groups in three cities to end the aggressive war efforts of a small nation. In "Justice on the Waterfront" you play as the Dockworkers and Dockworkers Wives trying to build a labor coalition and achieve the Right to Strike as a victory condition.
Is the game fun? Definitely. Though it is a tactics and planning game, and lacks the violent action that you are probably used to if you play games like Civilization, it keeps the tension up by uncertainty of outcomes of tactics, by occasional special events (such as a character gaining a new competency such as Writing or Public Speaking that make him or her more useful to the movement), and by interspersed pseudo-3D cutscenes of rallies, marches, and the like.
Will the game teach you nonviolent tactics? Maybe. It's more about coordinating tactics than the actual performance of the tactics, which is handled automatically. I've only played a few scenarios, and I had my best results on the "easy" gameplay settings. Pushing the difficulty up to "medium" or "normal" made the same scenario much harder and it took much more planning and thinking on my part to achieve even one of the three or four victory condition goals. You have to coordinate money, the number of people and time required to carry out tactics, and you have to pay attention to the public image of your movement and the motivation of your characters. I expect as I continue to play and move up into harder and longer scenarios that I will have to spend more and more time digging into the manual and the "Resistopedia" to understand the strengths and weaknesses of the tactics and which characters are best equipped to carry them out.
Above: The Organization Screen, where you evaulate your support among various groups in the oppostion and the regime.
What would I change about the game? I would add in a graphical cutscene to show the outcome of more of the direct action tactics such as occupying buildings and street theater. There is only graphic scenes for vigils, marches, and rallies which is too bad because they do add some excitement to the gameplay. I would have some graphics options so you didn't have to play in 800x600 resolution. I would also love to know why there is a music volume adjustment in the options but there doesn't seem to be any in-game music. And I would love to have some in-game tutorial for at least the first scenario. There is some tutorial in the manual, but I suppose having to learn by doing and by reading the book is another good lesson for all of us...life doesn't have a tutorial and neither do the struggles we engage in.
My Evaluation:
Gameplay: 9/10
Graphics: 6/10 (though I do appreciate that they made the game playable on lower-spec machines, thus making it more accessible to people actually involved in the movement who don't have the latest and fastest machines)
Sound: 5/10 (where is the music?!)
Game Mechanics: 10/10 (this thing has layers of complexity that I haven't even begun to dig into yet)
Overall Rating: 8/10
Not a winner for the "best game I've ever played" rating, but in the "nonviolent games I have played" category it is definitely the top of the list. This is no "Myst" or other such games that rely on puzzles to form the basis of nonviolent gameplay. This is direct action and struggle and organizing, and it is definitely worth the $19.95 plus shipping.
Website: http://www.afmpgame.com
Minimum Specs:
o Pentium® III CPU, 600 MHz (1.2 GHz recommended)
o Windows® 98/2000/ME/XP
o 128 MB RAM (256 MB recommended)
o Video card with 32 MB of RAM and Hardware TnL (GeForce® 2 or equivalent)
o PC-compatible Mouse
o 800 MB of free disk space
o DirectX® 9.0c or newer