(Also read Part One)
Balance of Power was a highly researched game. Crawford began his preparations for a game about global war by reading Henry Kissinger's two-volume, 3,000 page memoir of service in the Nixon and Ford administrations. These proved instrumental in forming Crawford's opinion of the key aspects of foreign diplomacy, including the ideas of credibility and consistency that keys to playing the game successfully--not only to avert war but also to maximize prestige, a necessary component in a winning match of Balance of Power. Despite the richness of this and other source materials, in the 1985 New York Times Magazine article about the game Crawford described his frustration in having to simplify his interests; human rights, material well-being, and total deaths were other values Crawford had hoped to incorporate into the game.
Though such factors didn't make their way onto the disk, they did make it into the game's manual, at least in part. Today's game manuals offer a half dozen page overview and control summary; most people don't read them. But in the 1980s, manuals were more like books, featuring both basic instructions and sometimes complex background materials on the game's fictional world or subject. In these days, the manual was much more a part of the product than it is today. Such was the case with Balance of Power.
Naturally, the tighter coupling of manual and game made issues of transparency more facile. Discussing how and why a game was constructed in the way it was would have been a natural part of manual authorship, just as it was for Crawford. The small-scale development team (in this case just one person) aided this process. Today, even a solo developer's discussion of a game feels more external, tacked on, ad-hoc than it would have in the 1980s. Take Paolo Pedercini's written discussion of his own game Oiligarchy. The very fact that he calls it a "postmortem" rather than a manual is telling: a set of explanations, missteps, and excuses, written afterwards, rather than a reflection on the game as artifact, authored to accompany it
In fact, Crawford went still further than a simple manual. In 1986, he wrote a stand-alone book about the game, Balance of Power: International Politics as the Ultimate Global Game, which Microsoft Press published in 1986. The book is long out of print, but it is available in full online at Crawford's website. In it, Crawford explicitly explains his pleasure at being able to "offer more information on geopolitics than I could put into the game's manual."
The book is interesting as an extension of Crawford's in-game statement about geopolitics. But it is also an important text on the problem of transparency in videogames. Crawford's decisions include a simple but important one: instead of publishing the source code or key algorithms in their native Pascal, he chose to "translate" them into pseudocode, legible by anyone with basic mathematical knowledge. Here's an example:
For example, if we wanted to calculate a person's average income over the last two years, the traditional computer listing might read like this:
AveIncm := (Incm[t-1] + Incm[t]) div 2;
My own presentation of such an equation would read like this:
Average Income = Last Year's Income + This Year's Income
From here, the book goes into excrutiating detail about almost all of its key algorithms, from models of prestige to obligation. The book interestingly wraps the game's algorithms back onto its author's opinion of foreign policy more generally, creating a kind of sandwich of transparency and reflection. Balance of Power offers a particularly natural way to incorporate expression, reflection, verification, and transparency into the game through both simultaneous and subsequently released secondary materials. And in the case of this game, those materials were far less secondary and far more primary than today's perspective might suggest.
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