Article 3: How Society Can Prevent War

In the previous article, we introduced the laboratory format with its two phases: the game and the reflection. This article, along with the next one, focuses on the first phase: the game.

We’ll take a closer look at its three core components — gameplay, context, and goal.But instead of just describing how they work, I want to walk you through the reasoning behind them. What shaped these choices? What problems were we trying to solve?

My goal is to show you the logic step by step so you can see not just what we built, but how the ideas were born.

Gameplay: Searching for the Core

Step 1: Rejecting the Obvious

At first, the path seemed obvious: make a game about WWI in the usual way — armies, fronts, diplomacy, alliances. A classic strategy game. But pretty quickly we realized: sure, that shows what happened. But is there any real educational value in it?

We didn’t want to just shove a bunch of facts into students’ heads. Our goal was to give them a tool that helps them think. To understand complexity. To spot parallels with their own reality.

So we moved away from modeling "war as a conflict that already happened" and started looking at the pre-WW1 period. What could we examine there? What dynamics might have led up to the catastrophe? Could WWI have been avoided? Those seemed like good enough questions to open up with students.

Step 2: Escalation as Structure

Looking at 1871–1914, we saw how different groups (countries, classes, political factions) interacted under growing pressure. Pressure that kept building with every unresolved crisis, until it finally exploded into war. We realized this was exactly what we wanted students to experience through gameplay.

This insight shaped the structure of the game. Each round is a crisis.Students don’t choose the crisis — they inherit it. But they choose how to respond. And that response either moves them closer to a different possible future or locks it further into the trajectory of war.

But then we had to ask: if each round is a crisis, who’s actually living through it? Who’s making the calls? Politics, nations?

Step 3: Society’s Role

Sure, the easy answer is politics. That’s where most explanations go: rival alliances, failed diplomacy, resource grabs. And we don’t dispute any of that. Those are real forces.

But we wanted to explore an additional layer:

“Can society itself, not deliberately, but through inertia, help set the stage for escalation?”

Political decisions don’t emerge in a vacuum. Politicians grow up in societies. They’re somebody’s kids raised inside social norms, fears, ambitions, and expectations.

For our game, we chose to simulate a society and gave it the goal of preventing WWI. Yes, that’s too ambitious for a single nation in real history. But that’s not the point. The point is to explore, together with students, how we, as parts of a larger social mechanism, can unknowingly contribute to the conditions that make conflict more likely.

That’s why we gave students the chance to play not only as politicians but also as other social groups within the same society — workers, civilians, and elites. The political group sits at a permanent crossroads: they have to respond to external crises and internal tensions at the same time. But that doesn’t make them the “main characters.” It just makes their dependencies more exposed. Other groups face their own dilemmas, and their actions create the very context in which political decisions are made.

This helps students see that politicians aren’t operating in a vacuum. They’re not some isolated power block. They’re part of a living organism called society, and when that organism fragments, its ability to navigate international waters weakens. Internal dynamics don’t just echo outward; they shape the whole system’s capacity to maneuver, to stabilize, or to fall apart.

Step 4: The Logic of Social Pressure

So how does society unintentionally scatter gunpowder at its own feet?

Looking for answers, we found an interesting pattern — a chain reaction: as Robert Cialdini’s theory of social norms describes, behaviors create norms, norms become embedded in institutions, and institutions raise new generations inside those same norms.

The cycle locks in. Gradually, invisibly, without any grand malicious plan, society builds structures that, when crises hit, start limiting the range of possible solutions. Even if an individual wants to act differently, the weight of expectations and institutional pressures pull them back into familiar tracks.

We modeled this dynamic with two mechanics:

• Role Alignment tracks how well your actions match the logic and expectations of your group.

• Ethical Consideration tracks whether your choices stay within socially accepted boundaries.

You can go against your group’s expectations. But you’ll lose influence. And that’s exactly the point: society doesn’t force you — it pulls you back toward what’s familiar. That’s the inertia of institutions, they don’t shift overnight.

Step 5: Crystallizing the Gameplay

The result is the gameplay where students take on the roles of social groups under pressure. Each group has its own goals, fears, and assumptions. But all of them face the same unfolding crises and must choose how to respond.

We deliberately stripped out anything that might artificially stabilize the system — no police, no courts, no external arbiters. Just social groups, all belonging to the same society. This was intentional: we wanted group behavior to be visible, unfiltered by external enforcement, and to show what happens when there’s no one “above” to coordinate or intervene. In real life, between nations and often between social groups, there is no referee. And yet, people still have to find a way forward. Or spiral into conflict.

We’re not trying to recreate the full complexity of reality — that would be impossible. What we’re doing is zooming in on a very specific question: how do internal dynamics shape external outcomes? 

Players don’t just observe history — they live inside it. They make trade-offs between self-interest, ethics, and collective survival. They try to consolidate. They decide whether to make bold gambits or play it safe.

Each decision shifts the balance, bringing the system either closer to or further from the possibility of choosing a different future. And sometimes, even doing what seems reasonable can accelerate the breakdown.

But before we can ask whether peace is possible, we need to define the conditions under which it might be. That’s what we will discuss in the next article.

Context: Why Germany

Now that we've established the core of the game, the interaction of social groups under mounting pressure, we needed to decide what context to place it in.

Germany before WWI is an almost ideal case. A newly unified state, brought together in 1871 under Prussian leadership, but one that still carried deep internal divisions: regional, social, cultural. The process of nation-building that took centuries elsewhere was unfolding here in compressed form. That makes the processes especially vivid and observable.

This isn't about portraying Germany as the guilty party. We're not looking for someone to blame — we're looking for mechanisms. 

Some might ask: why do you model just one society when WWI involved dozens of countries? The answer is: In our vision, there should be many such games — about Russia, France, Austria-Hungary, Britain... Each with its own path to explore. But right now, we don't have such resources.

So we started with one. We chose Germany.