Playing Power: From Agon to Gamification in Geopolitics
How Ancient Contest Culture and Modern Game Mechanics Shape Global Leadership
Playing Power: From Agon to Gamification in Geopolitics
How Ancient Contest Culture and Modern Game Mechanics Shape Global Leadership
Pasquale Lucio Scandizzo
Combining the concept of game and gamification with the history of geopolitics, as encapsulated within the leaderships of Donald Trump, is to reveal some fascinating continuity between antique urges and modern politicking. Bernard Suits’ famously defined games as voluntary attempts to surmount unnecessary obstacles by established rules and common ends. Using this revealing definition as well as more general thoughts about gamification as the using of game mechanics beyond games themselves, suggests that a "ludification" phenomenon of governance and policy started in classical Greece and has since continued throughout the 21st-century international arena. In his 1974 book: The Grasshopper: Games, Life and Utopia, Suits offers a formalist definition of games based on four essential features: goals, means, rules, and a lusory attitude. All games include a pre-lusory goal (e.g., putting the ball in the hole) and a lusory goal (e.g., winning), the latter being possible only by playing. Inefficient and rule-bound methods (lusory means) must be used instead of more appropriate methods of real life (illusory means). The constitutive rules choose which means are permissible and decree the unjustified barriers that constitute the content of the structure of the game. To play, one must adopt the lusory attitude, accepting the rules simply because the rules make the game possible, not for extrinsic reasons.
According to Suits, the lusory attitude includes the intention to abide by the rules of the game, and somebody who tries to play without such a condition, for example, by cheating, is not really participating to the game. Other authors, however, disagree for two main reasons: (i) if cheating is widespread in the playing of a particular game, it becomes equivalent to an unwritten rule, unless the ensuing ambiguity ends up by destroying the incentive to play the game; (ii) games may have a nested structure, in the sense that the rules of an underlying game may be the object of a higher level game. In fact, in some cases cheating may be the attempt at changing the rules, by implicitly challenging the power of those who have established them.
The origins of the game are probably rooted in early social life and the depiction and ritualization of problems of competition, cooperation and survival among primitive human tribes. Their explicit connection with politics, however, appears evident in early Greece, where social life, religion and governance were rooted in agonistic culture: agon as contest or fight. Democratic life in the polis cultivated rhetorical contests, military strategy, and athletic competitions as exhibitions of civic virtue. Leaders were sometimes evaluated as much on their ability to play the public "game" of winning over people as on policy. Thucydides and Plato comprehended the theatrics and tactics of leadership: rhetoric as a game, war as a chess match.
Formalization in the 19th and 20th centuries (e.g., Mackinder’s Heartland Theory, cold war models of deterrence) abstracted more international contests for power into quasi-mathematical games. Nuclear brinksmanship in the cold war was framed in terms of the language of game theory, namely the Prisoner’s Dilemma and Mutually Assured Destruction, such that diplomacy and survival were game-like structured strategic choices. Power blocks were regarded as players with clearly defined rules, payoffs, and win/loss conditions. There was, however, a strange dichotomy: on one hand geopolitics was conceived as a series of games and super-games of competition and potential confrontation, essentially managed by unified and opposed national or supernational leaderships. On the other hand, and partially to balance this potentially conflictual context, international economics was considered the realm of cooperation or of peaceful competition under the benign decentralized leadership of the markets.
While Donald Trump appears to be the more overt and powerful actor to play a new class of geopolitical games, it has been a long-time tendency of geopolitics and domestic politics to be subjected to new forms of explicit gamification. Since the fall of the Soviet Union, and of the associated games of deterrence and ideological competition, the need has emerged to redefine the game of international politics with new rules, taking into account the disappearance and the partial transformation of old enemies, and their characters and behaviors. The disorientation following the fall of the Berlin wall, echoed by Fukuyama’s claim of the “end of history”, or by Le Carrè lament on the “Unbearable peace”, has slowly evolved in a new kind of more complex and ambiguous set up. This includes a harder redefinition of geopolitical games in a fragmented world, no more polarized by a simple ideological divide, and dominated by a new confluence of deadly competition and market dominance.
In this evolving scenario, where old rules and equilibria have been eliminated or have autonomously faded away, Trump has introduced some imaginative, if crude, innovations, by treating politics as a zero-sum game with recurring themes of winning, ratings, and spectacle, with diplomacy (e.g., against China or with NATO) more as deal-performance than negotiation. Trump has thus behaved like a game show host in degrading the distinction between governance and entertainment, but also as an innovator by expounding a new technology combining communication and power building. He has repeatedly flaunted or redefined the “rules” of traditional diplomacy to appeal to a political base more comfortable with politics as a reality competition than a deliberative process. In Suits' terms, Trump has repeatedly declined the lusory attitude of traditional diplomacy in favor of attempting to redefine the game itself, if not by rule, then by tone and expectation.
However, it's not only a Trump phenomenon. World leaders from Putin to Modi have followed similar scripts: penning stories of national rejuvenation, leadership charisma, and competitive progression as if they were some ultimate campaign managers. Online news portals, socialized by likes, shares, and algorithms, are exacerbating this spectacle-politics by preferring performative antagonism over consensus-building.
Gamification of geopolitics today is thereby both a return to the agonistic politics of the ancient world and a remake of governance as an aesthetic spectacle and competition. But where classical Greece at least initially saw games serving civic and moral functions for citizens, contemporary games risk violating democratic convention by replacing entertainment for deliberation and collapsing world relations into zero-sum theatrics. Thus, from the Greek agon to Trump’s game-show presidency, geopolitics’ evolution illustrates an enduring, but wildly oscillating, tendency to think about economic and political power as a game to play, win, and watch.
On various fronts, from the attempt at reaching peace agreements among a proliferation of local conflicts, to the new economic negotiations on tariffs and trade, Europe appears to be caught in a key epistemic misunderstanding: that perhaps after some reinterpretation, somehow the old rules apply and the US, as a player, will ultimately abide by them. These misguided beliefs include the conviction that negotiations may search for moderation and proportionality, and cooperation among former allies can be re-established on the basis of cultural and ethical affinities. But this is clearly an illusion and invites defeat, in the face of the fact that on the other side of the negotiating table what is sought for is a new system of power, rather than a solution within the old system. The more glaring signs of this misunderstanding are the arbitrary size and distribution of the tariffs proposed by the USA, which are not backed by any credible study or calculations of their impact even on the United States themselves. That is because it is not their application which is the main target of the new US trade policies, but the mere disruption of the previous economic order, in which the tariffs proposed serve to establish the power of imposing them, alongside with other conditions, regardless of their effects.
The current situation, while never so dramatically cast in globalized geopolitics, is not unprecedented in history. In late Republican Rome, for example, such legislation as the Lex Clodia Frumentaria was more concerned with setting up the rules of the political game than with food policy. Though couched in terms of welfare or public service, their real intention was to redistribute not just grain but power. By distributing free or subsidized grain to Roman citizens, politicians such as Clodius or the Gracchi built a popular mass base against the ruling Senate and traditional elite. This largesse made the urban plebs into a politically active base with loyalty more in terms of state provision of goods than in traditional patronal or familial relationships. Opposers, particularly Cicero, Cato, and the optimates, resented such measures not only on fiscal grounds, but also because they ran the risk of shifting the center of political authority from the Senate to popular assemblies or charismatic figures. The supply system for grain thus became a regime-making device: whoever controlled the grain controlled Rome. Moreover, key provinces such as Sicily and Egypt were involved, and their internal political balances and allegiances depended on the system of rules that controlled trade and taxation under the regime administered by Roman power.
Grain law controversies thus ranged at home and abroad and habitually draped themselves in moral and constitutional rhetoric, freedom, virtue, corruption, but in the final analysis they reflected a disagreement about who controlled institutions. These policies recast state-citizen relationships, relations between center and periphery, elite-mass relationships. In putting grains out of provinces and allocating them within Rome, the state deployed a new rationality of dependency and domination. That continued through the centuries after the end of the republic and eventually of the same Roman empire.
The conclusion of this analysis should be clear: the current Eu-USA negotiations on tariff and trade, mingled with NATO talks and new deals that are apparently made in the name of public welfare and security, are really about rule-making powers: what decides it, how legitimacy is built, and whose interests are secured. The real trade dole is not surplus or deficits, nor the mere provision of goods and services, but key design politics. These include the capacity of Europe to pursue autonomous monetary and fiscal policies and to put an end to its ambiguous status of tax heaven for US multinationals. This should be the real focus of negotiators, economic proposals and diplomatic moves.