erratio

aka Why my brother should have been a politician.

Back in the day I used to be an avid gamer, of both card games and board games. Name a CCG(collectible card game) and I either played it, had tried it and didn't like it, or had heard of it and knew about some of its main features. Board games I didn't get into nearly as much, but I still have my memories of playing Settlers of Catan with my brother and cousin.

At our gaming store there was a core group of us that played, and we played a wide variety of games ranging from the corny DragonballZ to the much more interesting Magi-Nation. But the real strategy was in Magic The Gathering, and we had a specific group for that. Me, my brother Jonothan, the twins whose names are now lost to memory, Nick and his older brother whose name I also can't recall. For those not familiar with it, Magic is an insanely complicated game. There are 5 different colours available to play, each one with its own associated resource cards. A typical deck would feature 2-3 of those colours. Then there are the 7 or so different card types, not counting resources. Magic is the only game I know of whose rulebook used to contain a detailed description of the stack data structure as seen in computer science. Deck building consists of finding a delicate balance between resource cards, supposedly game-winning combinations, and the basic muscle and flexibility to put up with whatever the enemy might throw at you. Ideally you would want each card in your deck to be able to fulfil multiple functions, so that no matter when you drew it you would be able to make effective use of it. But I digress from the main point of this post.

Whenever I played any multiplayer game, not just of Magic, my brother won more often than not. After a while I saw why but my own deck-building and diplomacy skills weren't up to the same task. These were his secrets:

1)Don't provoke anyone needlessly. At the beginning of the game he would either not attack at all, or attack everyone equally so that no one could feel singled out by him.
2)If someone becomes too obviously strong, attack them, but explain WHY to everyone so that it doesn't seem like a petty grudge. A typical attack from him would be followed by “I'm sorry but your Imperial Guard was just too dangerous for me to leave alone”.
3)Never be the one to finish someone off. He would attack until his enemy would be left easy prey for anyone else who wanted to pick on them, and then make a show of his generosity in leaving them alive.
4)Get into a position of strength early on in such a way that no one wants to be the first to attack you. In Magic there were many ways to do this. His favourite would be to either have creatures or enchantments on the board whose abilities he was generously not using to oppress anyone with the clear warning that anyone who attacked him would be the next target for those abilities, or to do the same by revealing spells or enchantments from his hand that he was also generously withholding.
5)Don't take any actions that impact particularly badly on everyone. Once I made what I thought was this awesome deck, and in single player it was a reasonably good deck. But in multiplayer I was the first to be reduced to a non-entity and then eventually killed off. Why? Because my deck was built around a few global enchantments that caused major pain to everyone else on the board. My brother on the other hand, would only cast global enchantments if they were beneficial to everyone, a mild inconvenience to most but not so badly to make them be the first to break the tenuous balance of multiplayer, or extremely bad but only for one or two other players.
6)Every now and then be nice to someone else for either no apparent reason or for a reason far out of proportion to the favour he was bestowing. The one I remember was the time he cast a useful enchantment on a friend's creature in return for not attacking him the previous turn. This is roughly equivalent in real life to rewarding an acquaintance for not spreading an ugly and damaging rumour about you, whether or not there was any chance of them doing so.
7)When someone tries to really do damage to you respond immediately and with overwhelming force. Keep attacking them until they are no longer a threat.
8)In cases where two players have a grudge against eachother, make a clear show of neutrality where possible.

So the question I'm sure you're all pondering here is what does this have to do with world politics?

Well.. the strategy of keeping a position of obvious strength where other players are afraid to be the first one to attack lest they be singled out for retaliation, where you 'generously' don't make use of your force to hurt anyone else except where everyone can agree that it was justified, and when you are attacked respond immediately and with overwhelming force? To me that sounds awfully like the US.

Also, the overwhelming force tactic and keeping a position of strength is, to a lesser extent, what I believe Israel is trying to do. It's widely accepted that they have the best trained army in the world, one of the best intelligence networks, and some of the best technology courtesy of the US and having some of the best scientists working for them. The war now going on between Israel and Lebanon over an attack that resulted in 8 dead Israeli soldiers and 2 captured is, to me, a way of Israel saying “You crossed the line. Now you can either produce the captured soldiers, or we can use you as a lesson to everyone about why you shouldn't fuck with us.”

Of course, the parallel between Magic and real life isn't complete. In Magic it was extremely common for one player to take himself to the brink of death in order to win. And in real life willingly taking that much damage would be unacceptable. But the diplomacy, the use and abuse of power, they're all there for someone willing to see beyond the game and apply the principles learnt. Like in Ender's Game, perhaps future wars will be composed of over-intelligent gamers who spend hours honing their skills with wargames.

PS : I am neither condoning or opposing Israel for its actions concerning Lebanon. I have no opinion either way, what I am saying is that given Israel's history of going to extreme measures to rescue its people, its actions have a justification from their point of view. America on the other hand, I'm not all too happy with but I can't be bothered going into it since my argument would involve the right to interfere and other philosophical stuff like that.