Chris Crawford on Game Design

Higher Levels of Play

The great majority of players were happy to play the game with my own value system; I encouraged them to try higher levels of participation and some took me up on that offer. The next higher level of play involved the concept of political bias. I offered the player several other sets of values representing certain common points of view, such as Environmentalist, Oil Company, Pro-Nuclear, and so forth. Players who tried out these value sets quickly discovered that the only way to win was to follow the kind of policies embraced by proponents of each bias. For example, in the Pro-Nuclear bias, nuclear power plants are safe, clean, and cheap; building lots of nuclear power plants generates lots of cheap energy that propels the ...