Quick note on New Map Game
Thursday, June 2, 2005 at 2:46AM Dateline: above the sold garage in Portsmouth RI, 2 June 2005
Game going well, but it's an interesting challenge. Exciting to have so many smart people all working the same concepts, using your language, debating your ideas. Likewise cool to have Alphachimp doing all these boards of drawings every time you open your mouth.
Through three moves, the Chinese team is clearly doing best, feeling the long-term advantages of its growth accruing. Iran and Brazil doing okay, but each having its tough moments trying to "play up" when China is single-minded in protecting its growth strategy and US seems somewhat passive given the complexity of the four-sided play.
Two interesting notes for me: 1) the Chinese see the SysAdmin role as a potential market-conquering function for themselves: U.S. sets the table with Leviathan and Chinese SysAdmin effort eats the meal; and 2) when you confront players with the need to think across the four flows, it does get decidedly harder for them to go mindlessly aggressive. If anything, we're having a hard time trying to get anyone to do something rash or aggressive. Upside: the PNM maps well to a game. Downside: it's a more calm game than most of us are used to, so Control itself fights the urge to jack things up artificially.
And yet, can't have too quiet a game, even this first time. So we had disaster in North Korea in Turn 2, its summary collapse in Turn 3, along with Iran's nuclear "outing" by reformist elements there. Worse stuff imagined today.
Overall I am greatly impressed by the play, and the discussions have been great. I've been the Control rep in China, so I've seen mostly just those, but in terms of personal learning by the players, the game seems much richer than I had hoped.
The second iteration, planned for DC in the fall, should be really great, if we learn the right things from this first try.
Two more moves today, then press conference (already given 3 interviews), then we wrap it up. Alphachimp has impressed me throughout (didn't really notice their work as much in other settings where we crossed paths), and Alidade has demonstrated why their rep is so high.
