What can the UN learn from a game about aliens?

Confession: I am a game addict who is fascinated by international relations, and I have a tendency to conflate the two.

Back in my FT days, while covering the run-up to the Iraq conflict, I spent my evenings in a game called ‘Medieval Total War‘ – which involved lobbying the pope to grant divine legitimacy to princely conquests. I began to see the UN Security Council’s deliberations as the same thing. In war-torn Baghdad, I would wind down by playing ‘Civilization‘, battling oil powers and insurgents for silicon supremacy.

I’m convinced that games can bring insight to real world politics. This is because to be effective in international affairs, you need to understand not only what you want, but what the other guy wants, and games are one of the most powerful tools I know to achieve that insight.

So when I heard about Watch the Skies 2, the Megagame of Alien Terror, I was ridiculously excited. It was everything I enjoy rolled into one.

Here’s the premise: the year is 2020, and unknown aliens are visiting earth to abduct, investigate, and subvert. Participants roleplay the planet’s response. So far so normal, except this is a megagame, and it does so with breathtaking scope.

300 players, representing 30 countries, half a dozen corporations, media groups, religions, the United Nations, aid agencies, and, of course, the aliens, who are riven by factions and competing philosophies.

The nations of the earth are a seething mess of bickering politicians, diplomats, scientists, and generals – all with their own regional ambitions and personal hunger for recognition. I was the science minister of Iran, driven by service to my nation and religion, but also to get my discoveries in the papers. This was not always in tune with national policy…

The event quickly descended into glorious semi-controlled chaos. (Try organising a kid’s birthday party of 12. Now imagine a room of 300 buzzed up role-playing gamers.)

And yet, it was magnificent. Europe became a frenzy of ancient rivalries, even as the alien presence drew closer. A mysterious super-plague broke out, and insurgencies threatened the stability of Africa. A paralysed UN Security Council was abducted and shown the error of its ways upon the moon, while the aliens brokered a peace agreement between Japan and an embassy of whales.

Faced with mutual annihilation, the Middle East overcame centuries of hatred to give the Palestinians an independent homeland, and brokered an Israeli-Iranian deal to jointly advance the cause of science. Hooray!

So what’s all this got to do with teaching people how to be real-world United Nations officials, you might ask? A lot.

This is the Model UN on steroids. I know no other one-day event which better approximates the realpolitik of a time-pressured, chaotic and uncertain international crisis – and which offers so much distilled insight into the world inhabited by the UN and its agencies.

The UNHCR (Refugees) and the World Food Programme spent the entire day desperately trying to raise funds to deploy their crisis-reducing tokens: a delightfully cynical take in which they were reduced to pawns begging for attention in a much bigger game. Sound familiar?

I particularly enjoyed the write-up from this participant, who played the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, and who appears to have stumbled across some deep truths about humanitarian aid:

The WFP guy never showed up so I ended up doing both roles as a sort of generic ‘humanitarian aid’ thing as they overlapped considerably. Given the overlap one suggestion for future games would be to make a generic ‘aid’ token from the UN, as it was unclear what the difference between the WFP and UNHCR tokens were in game terms (indeed it was unclear if they were even doing anything).

As the ‘humanitarian’ guy, I went around the room fund raising. I think I hit up everyone for money all day long. Things I learned;

1. Walking up to huddles of people and yelling their country’s name is a totally ok thing to do.

2. People liked giving funds affecting crises in their region, but were generally pretty generous.

3. Corporations are stingy. 

Basically, the UN had very little real political power, so we just continued to focus on aid and making ourselves look good/relevant.“

Couldn’t have put it better myself. The corporation players were charmingly surprised to discover they had way more cash than any of the hard-pressed nations they were dealing with, and quickly gravitated to the most lucrative pots. 

One recalled in his blog:

Two things had become apparent. We were more minted than anybody else and the countries were poor, poor, poor. The best move we had made in the game was pivot dramatically to establish the USA as a Most Favored Customer and then relocate our HQ there. Their generals and spy agencies were a great source of business.

But as a communicator, my favorite part of the game was the crash course it offered in media relations.

At first the journalists seemed remote, quietly tapping away on their screens at the other end of the room. Most players were too busy pursuing their narrow objectives – research the tech, deploy the tanks etc – to pay them much heed.

As the game advanced, however, it became apparent that there was a huge amount going on which you didn’t have the slightest clue about, and yet which could have a profound impact on your success.

300 players with divergent desires created a volcano of world-changing shenanigans, and as an individual it was impossible to track them.

The news-sheets and twitter feeds I originally ignored became a lifeline, an anchor to understanding the universe I had entered.

Why the heck was the Australian scientific establishment being so friendly to me? It made no sense. And then I learned that there was a giant asteroid hurtling towards Antarctica, and they wanted our nuke. Ah… I should have read the papers!

(A side point here: you soon discover that if you want any influence in this labyrinth of agendas, you’d better bring something real to the table. People have no time for flim-flam.

Iran began life as a convenient whipping boy, a unifying force for the US and Saudi and Turkey. But then we got our nuke, and we were everyone’s best friend, doing deals all over. That, and our pioneering desert agriculture, which I hawked around the world for PR credits.)

Back to the media… 

As its importance grew amid the hubbub, people learned its ways. Individual reporters were too harassed to focus on anything more than the most simple statements; nuance and technicality got lost in the rush to write and tweet headlines.

So the first team to say something simple and newsworthy won the narrative. There was no time in game for the reporter to seek the other side.

One of the press players bemoaned: There wasn’t really a single moment that I got time to myself to actually write down the news I had (that’s to blame for all the typos, as I was half-typing, half-listening). I had to be very cut-throat about who I even let speak to me, which did feel rude, and I’m sure I missed out on a lot of the flavour by only being able to listen to the salient points.

To which I say, yup, sounds pretty much like being a hack to me.

The best operators figured out how to announce fast and early, and their version of the truth became history.

We were shocked to discover my Supreme Leader’s hard fought and visionary deal over Palestine was reported as an Israeli initiative.

They’d got to the media first. ‘Can’t they print a correction?’ a member of the Iranian cabinet asked. Yeah right. The next turn Tokyo was nuked from orbit. Try beating that for the front page.

Am I serious in thinking that a game like this can provide genuine insight for would-be UN officials? Mhm. I am.

Most of our lives we beaver away in tiny silos, with little sense of the vast complexity we form such a small part of. And then we wonder why our magnificent achievements gather so little attention.

Why are media people so insistent on reducing subtleties to blunt catchlines, and so aggressive in demanding the information right now? Why are pet projects put on ice, while meaningless side-initiatives leap to the top of the agenda?

If you’ve ever asked these questions, wondered at the apparent insanity of decision-making, or sworn at the evening news, try playing a megagame. In a single day, it can offer more insight into the realities of international relations than a year of academic study or hectoring by your PR department.

Even better, it’s hilarious fun. Join in!

How horrifying does the footage have to get before we wake up to the mass grave in the Mediterranean?

I have a mixed relationship with Vice. I still associate it with a lackadaisically sensationalist hipster style of reportage – an over-easy ‘whoa, cool’ attitude to the darkest dramas unfolding across our planet.

But it’s also giving us some of the most compelling foreign news coverage on the net, and for all my prejudices I find myself turning to it increasingly often.

I watched its trailer for Europe or Die – Libya’s Migrant Jails through the gaps between my fingers.

Some of the imagery is so casually awful, I hesitate to share it. The clip is suffused with the visual tropes of a horror movie; the below sea view of the boat, the lingering shots of drowned bodies, set to an atonal dread-filled soundtrack.

Is this really the way?

And yet, and yet. Europeans surely need something to wake us up from our casual ignorance of the mass grave lapping against our shores.

More than 3000 migrants died in the Mediterranean Sea last year, many of them fleeing the war in Syria, and growing insecurity in Libya. The stories of those who survived is the stuff of nightmares. Pope Francis last year issued a global appeal for solidarity to stop the vast cemetery on our doorstep. Aid agencies are deploying cutting edge story-telling tools to sound the alarm. Horrifying incidents are reported by newspapers with numbing regularity.

But to no avail.

The major European programme to rescue migrants at sea – Mare Nostrum – has been discontinued, replaced with Operation Triton, which is more interested in keeping people out than saving them. There are already indications that this year will see more drownings than the last.

I remember learning as a child of the Vietnamese ‘boat people’. Their plight became one of the iconic images of that era, a reference point shared across the world, and I still have memories of those reports.

By contrast, it feels like the crisis of the Mediterranean boat people, if the term is appropriate, is causing barely a ripple, tutted over briefly and then forgotten.

For all its Hollywood thriller sensibilities, maybe Vice has the right approach. At the very least, it’s trying.

How else to give this horror the attention it deserves?

Interest in Syria peaked in September 2013, and dropped massively soon after. It never came back.

What interests the world more: Syria, Israel, or A Game of Thrones?

We who work in the international aid sector often have a strikingly distorted view of what most people care about.

Because we’re surrounded by the consequences of crisis, and because those consequences are so very dramatic, we significantly over-assume the interest of others.

Every returning aid worker has their story of the day they realised how little the wider world was engaged. For me, it was coming back from the Haiti earthquake in 2010 – quite the most overwhelming experience of my life – and bumping into a couple of vague acquaintances in Prospect Park.

I played it cool, casually mentioning I’d just returned from Port-au-Prince, and waited patiently for the applause. It never came. My announcement was instead met by a blank, a moment of discomfort (“huh?”), followed by a flicker of vague recollection. “Oh, yes! Wasn’t there a tidal wave there or something?’

I was reminded of this mismatch by Al Jazeera’s unsettling blog: “You probably wont’t read this piece about Syria“. It was posted shortly after the greatest humanitarian crisis of our era entered its fifth year.

On the anniversary, we published a lot of content. There were stirring documentaries, powerful polemics, Syrian paintings, infographics, analysis, interviews, features and news. There was streaming TV. We tried to take our audience into the lives of those caught up in this.

And all of it was fronted with the bloodied woman, that gaze taking up most of the screen.

But the number of people who came to our site that day was far lower than expected. As we watched the analytics, tracked our traffic, that stinging accusation of apathy seemed justified.

Injured women arrive at a field hospital after an air strike hit their homes in the town of Azaz on the outskirts of Aleppo, Syria. [AP Photo/ Khalil Hamra, File, Aug. 15, 2012]

Barry Malone, the author, mused over the potential reasons for this dip in activity, not least the aid industry’s most dreaded bugbear ‘fatigue’.

We have seen a stagnation in traffic to our Syria conflict stories since 2012 with intermittent peaks when it makes headlines – Assad says something unusual, the possibility of Western missiles.

Recently, though there have been occasional spikes, they appear mostly related to ISIL. The taking of Fallujah, the fall of Mosul, the detestable beheadings, and the sledgehammering of history.

The twisted steal the attention. And the people we should pay attention to fade into the background, bit players in a narrative wrongly and unfairly dominated by the grotesque.

We find that stories about the suffocating grind and everyday hardship of war don’t do as well. Stories about the almost four million Syrians who have been forced to flee their country, the same.

When we tweeted the accusation that the world didn’t care, many people retweeted it. But most didn’t click the link to read our stories. Perhaps they wanted to be seen to care. Perhaps they believed that people should care. But they didn’t care enough to read what we had written.

One powerful tool to ground us in what people are really interested in, and whose under-use always surprises me, is Google Trends, which tells you how intensely people are searching for certain terms over time. It’s blunt, but it’s super-easy to use, and is great for a quick reality check.

I turn to it often both for my own interest, and to show others where they lie in the spectrum of world interest. After the AJ piece, I had a look at the trend for Syria.

Interest in Syria over time – Google Trends

Turns out there was a peak in mid 2013, which matched the big  debate about whether the US and UK were going to bomb Assad or not. Since then, despite all the horror, all the campaigns and passionate appeals, the interest has dropped precipitously, and we are really not much higher than the pre-war average.

Another nifty feature of Google Trends is that it lets you compare search terms. Let’s have a look at Syria vs Israel.

Interest in Syria and Israel over time – Google Trends

Israel is consistently scoring much higher on the global trendometer, with peaks occurring considerably more often. This is something we suspected, but may not have been able to measure nearly so easily.

Now let’s inject some perspective.

How do these big themes compare to the other major influence on my life: A Game of Thrones?

Interest in Syria, Israel and Game of Thrones over time – Google Trends

So there you have it. Even the peak of interest in Israel, during last summer’s conflict, doesn’t hold a candle to what’s going on in the latest episodes of a fantasy show on HBO. Even when A Game of Thrones is in between seasons, it’s generating around the same baseline search trend as Israel, and far more than Syria.

People are more interested, it would seem, in the fictional depredations of warlords and autocrats, than in those very same acts taking place in the real world.

How can we deploy the power of story to win back their attention?

Is this really the best way to choose between aid agencies?

Scrolling through Facebook this morning, I came across a sponsored post from Oxfam, asking for money for Vanuatu.

It was timely, eye-catching and well-directed: a victory for the algorithm which correctly targeted me, married to the sense of moment generated by a major news event.

I clicked.

I have no quarrel with Oxfam for this. Far from it: I applaud their smart use of social media to find the right eyeballs at the right time.

But as a customer experience, something was lacking.

How did I know if Oxfam was really the best agency to donate to? It obviously had a great marketing department, but did it offer the best service to the people I wanted to help? How could I find out?

There are surprisingly few sources of information on this.

One of those sources is Oxfam itself, which tells stories about what it does. Aid organisations are becoming increasingly adept at creating narratives around their work, which on the whole is a good thing, but clearly isn’t the whole story.

Another source is the media: the TV segment featuring charities on the ground, or the well-placed quote in a newspaper. These can have an outsize influence on our choice, and reward agencies which work well with journalists. But they tend to be ad hoc and don’t stay around for long.

We might turn to an expert organisation, like the UK’s Disasters Emergency Committee, which we trust to do the homework for us – and channel the funds to the right people. Or we could meet a fundraiser at an event, who convinces us in person to give there and then.

Underlying all these interactions is a primary relationship: that between the donor, and the aid agency.

In other words, the main axis when the aid industry raises funds is between the service provider, and the person who pays. (Let us set aside for the moment that the ‘service provider’ might actually be subcontracting the work).

You may have noticed, however, that there is a rather important third party being left out of this equation: the person who is actually receiving the service, the crisis survivor.

As a donor (who is paying) I have very little sense of what survivors think of the service I am paying for. I may see a vox pop in the press, or a featured story by the aid agency, but it’s a limited relationship at best.

So here’s a question: how can I, as a potential donor, get a better sense from the people I want to help which is the best organisation to give to?

Can we imagine something like this for aid agencies?

Let’s look to the internet for answers. When I want to see a movie, I go to a movie aggregator – like rotten tomatoes, or metacritic – and check out what audiences are saying about it. I also look at the aggregated score.

When I want to find a hotel, I go to tripadvisor, and scroll down the comments of previous guests. When I’m looking for a restaurant… okay, you get the idea.

This is how we make choices in the networked age. Why can’t we do the same for aid?

Now obviously in the immediate aftermath of a fast-onset crisis, the priority is to get stuff out there as soon as possible, and generating recipient reviews would be tricky. Internet and phone systems may be down, and people have other priorities.

But these crises do not happen in a vacuum. Chances are the agency was already there beforehand, and chances are they will stay there for a good while longer. And for protracted emergencies, there’s plenty of opportunity to gather information about what the recipients think of the agencies that stick around.

I’ve been dreaming a way to capture this  information for some time, and toyed with the concept of an AidAdvisor, which would gather information through mobile phones (increasingly accessible to everyone, even in disaster zones) to generate scores, which could influence donors.

The basic idea is that recipients of aid comment on and rate the services provided by the nearby aid organisations. These ratings are filtered and aggregated, and appear on a central website. Then, when a potential donor wants to choose which organisation to support, she can simply click on the relevant page, read the comments, and check out the metascore.

This is easier said than done, of course. Ratings sites are famously difficult to manage, there are numerous technical challenges (including language). It’s not entirely clear who would pay for it.

But the fundamental impetus remains. Surely there is a way to generate systematic information on the quality of aid, from the perspective of the people we’re trying to help, and which can influence donor decisions accordingly.

I am convinced that if we crack this, it will usher in a remarkable change.

Aid agencies would suddenly have a pressing interest in generating a good score from their recipients. They would court them to increase that score. And in so doing, their primary relationship would shift, from the donor-agency axis, to the agency-recipient axis.

This would cut the Gordian knot of accountability and effectiveness. No longer would donors have to rely solely on the opinions of experts they pay for (with a vested interest in saying good things). They could go straight to the target communities.

Perhaps I’m being naive. But I’m confident something like this will happen sooner or later. And when it does, it will be every bit as revolutionary as switching from command economics to the market. In other words, from technocracy to democracy.