Value of Peace in videogames

Values@Play
Find the value of “PEACE” in videogames, hopefully in gameplay situations.

To start the assignment I thought the value of peace would be easy, since it’s a concept that a lot of games that involve any type of violence (a lot) touch, so my goal for this assignment is not to only look for the obvious cases but to cross the line of the simple value of peace and try to explore it in more non-expected situations.

To start my first game when I can find the value of peace is with the obvious answer of the game Peacemaker.




As the game states the game is all about a simulation of the Israel-Palestinian conflict where in many situations the conflict will continue, but as shows in the previous video in second 00:43 there is the possible solution of being able to simulate a specific situation where both countries stop war and are at peace.
The previous sample is of course the first thing that came to my mind for the assignment, and of course to go in the same type of games, Civilization is also a game where during the experience you will be able to sign peace treaties which shows another perfect example of the value of peace as Peacemaker so for that reason I won’t go deep in that example.

Now to go a little deep into Peace in videogames I look at Wikipedia for the definition of peace: “a state of tranquility or quiet” or “A state of security or order within a community”. As this definition shows the concept of peace can be very related to war games, not as a specific event, but as a main goal. To demonstrate this I show the following video of Command and Conquer.



As the video states, the purpose of Kane (game character) in the game is to fight a war with the ultimate goal of achieving peace as a final event. So if we look at any aspect of the game, it’s not wrong to assume that all the actions of play either by allied or enemies are with the purpose of achieving peace at the end. Additionally if this example of peace works, we could assume that most war games nowadays are all about peace, as a sample I put Call of Duty, where the end of the game is to end the war and thanks to that all of our actions are tools toward ending the conflict at the end, or also knows as achieving peace.

To conclude maybe the value of peace itself is not what the goal of war games like Command and Conquer are trying to show, but since they are touching the concept of war, they are also involving the concept of peace in their games. But for what the value of peace show in a game, I believe that Peacemaker is probably the only good example thanks that the game is trying to show this as a design aspect, and other games might be able to do it more slightly like Civilizacion or even Spore where you may take the peace or war path, but its not the main goal of the game for these last two examples.