GamesBeat: By 2040, do you imagine Donald Trump would have his own private army?
Castronova: Well, if that’s going to happen, it would happen long before 2040. But in terms of the game, he has the national army and he’d be the one deploying it.
GamesBeat: Does the government army remain its own faction, or does it split up?
Castronova: Yeah, it splits up. You have the loyal government forces, and then there are the radicals, both the radical right wing and the radical left wing. What if Hillary won in 2016, say? Then you could have Democrats in the government role.
GamesBeat: Could this ever be a computer game, a strategy video game?
Castronova: I don’t think it really works as a video game. It needs four players around a table. Four player video games are harder to make work, especially if they’re strategy games. It’s also hard to run an AI.
GamesBeat: What would you say is the most valuable point to capture in terms of territory on the map?
Castronova: That depends on who’s rebelling. If it’s a right-wing government and the left is rebelling, the left’s power base is in the cities. It’s in big cities all over the place. It’s hard to rebel in the city. The army can more easily control them. The challenge for the left is to establish bases outside the cities somewhere if they’re really serious about rebelling.
The right has a much easier time of it, because the right is already out in the country, up in the mountains. I have family who are afraid the government is going to come and get their guns. A right versus left rebellion could go on a long time, I think. The left would be easier to stamp out. If you look at the example of Afghanistan, Kabul has never been under threat from the Taliban. It’s easier to control and defend.
GamesBeat: It’s a very bloody scenario. Did anybody tell you that this might hit too close to home?
Castronova: I’ve explained it to some people who say, “That’s terrible. I don’t want to go anywhere near a game like that.” I understand that point of view. But the purpose of the game is to make people think about the subject. That’s kind of why I made it. If somebody said, “This shouldn’t be so bloody,” well, that’s the whole point. I didn’t want to sanitize something that shouldn’t be sanitized.
GamesBeat: What happens with civilians? I assume they’re by far the majority. They’re not all taking sides.
Castronova: Civilians are important to the government because they’re trying to create support for the government. Similarly, the rebels are trying to win the support of the population. You have a fight between those two factions over popular support. The problem is that the other two factions don’t care about popular support. The vigilantes just want to kill the rebels, and the criminals just want to make money. Between the two of them they can keep the situation so destabilized that no side can ever get ahead.
GamesBeat: What about nuclear weapons?
Castronova: It’s not in there right now, but I thought–if we’re talking about 2040, there should be some more cards in there along the lines of, what if somebody creates a plague in a laboratory and releases it? Then you’d have this plague going around killing people. Or, as you say, what if someone gets their hands on a nuke and sets it off in New York? Those could all be interesting game mechanics.
GamesBeat: I suppose you could build a virtual economy into the game as well.
Castronova: There is that to some extent. Every faction has resources. In order to get resources — the government can levy taxes, of course. The others can resort to extortion. The crime faction has lots of money. They always have money coming in. But the rebels and the vigilantes have to turn to extortion, bribes, sabotage, and things like that to get their resources.
GamesBeat: Are you going to continue to refine the game and add more details over time?
Castronova: The only thing I might do is come up with a new deck of cards. The system itself is ready to play. It’s done. But it might be interesting to do more cards about what might happen specifically in the United States. Right now the cards are these generic mechanics: with an air raid card, say, you can take out three bases in one forested area. But I could come up with specific things like, say, police brutality in Chicago. That could have some new effect.
GamesBeat: Does the scenario involve what actually sparks the conflict?
Castronova: I don’t want to go anywhere near that. [laughs] I just want people to realize that it wouldn’t be any fun. There’s dynamite and gasoline and sparks all over the place right now. It’s not too hard to think of a story where people just open fire. We’ve come close enough to that already.
Before the first Civil War, one of the key moments was when someone in the Senate beat the shit out of another Senator with a cane. When people at that level of the government are so mad that they’re beating each other up, that’s a sign that the country is close to going crazy.
GamesBeat: Is the artwork for it already set up?
Castronova: The artwork isn’t really the most important thing. The most important thing is creating the map of the United States that can work with the game’s system relative to the scale of Colombia. That’s what I put all my time into, making sure I had a good map. It’s on my website. You can download everything. I’m very proud of the map. I’m an economist, but boy, I made a map. [Laughs]
GamesBeat: I suppose you can have some fun in the process of making it, even if the topic is abhorrent.
Castronova: I feel like the broad statements about — you remember movies like Red Dawn, about America being invaded. We’ve spent all our time agonizing about what’s going on Afghanistan and all these other places — Vietnam, Korea. It’s actually weird to think about, well, what if that happened here? What if someone set off a bomb on I-95 in New Jersey? What would that do to the United States? It kind of takes your breath away. When it’s in a game it’s not that bad. We just don’t want it to be real.
GamesBeat: It’s a timely thing to bring up right before the elections. Do you have any thoughts about that relative to your work?
Castronova: Here’s one thing I would say. These kinds of conflicts come about because people stop following the normal rules. I’m really into games, and I can’t tell you how triggered I get when people don’t play by the rules. There’s been a lot of not playing by the rules lately. I think it’s really a bad sign. And I don’t just mean written rules. The Constitution has written rules, and there’s a written process for creating new rights, passing laws, things like that. Those are the rules. And on top of that, we’ve had these norms that have been around for more than 100 years — how the Senate is supposed to operate, what the Supreme Court is really supposed to be doing.
In the last 40 or 50 years I feel like we’ve started saying, “Let’s do it this way,” on both sides. You have things signing statements, where the President gets a law and says, “I’m going to sign this law” — which is what he’s supposed to do, sign or veto it — but then he adds a memo when he signs it saying, “And here’s how I’m going to enforce it.” Which can change what the law actually does. That’s breaking the rules.
Don’t get me started on what’s happened with the filibuster and that sort of stuff. If we don’t want to go to war, we have to start following the rules. People only start fighting at the game table when someone starts ignoring the rules.
GamesBeat: What other kinds of games do you teach in your class?
Castronova: Right now I’m teaching five games in my class. We spend a couple of weeks on each of them: Dungeons & Dragons, Netrunner, Power Grid, a race car game called Formula D, and then a really old war game, Battle for Germany. What I’m trying to do there is give the students exposure to a very wide variety of board game simulations — everything from sports to warfare to computer hacking.
It’s easier to teach principles of game design with a board game, because the players are the computer. The players have to understand the system. It’s a really good way of getting students to understand how games work.