Riot!

So, were you amongst the protesters at the G20 conference in London this week? Personally, just as I did during the anti-Iraq war demonstrations, I followed John Lennon's example and held a 'bed-in' instead. Obviously, the bed involved wasn't in a hotel or shop window - it was in my bedroom - and I wasn't sharing it with a Japanese conceptual artist. Nevertheless, it was a 'bed-in', I was definitely thinking anti-capitalism thoughts whilst I laid there, right until I got up for work. Once again, these protests brought out the ludicrous, not to mention patronising, response from opponents that these people should think themselves lucky they live in a society which allows them to protest. The attitude seems to be that you should just be glad to have this right, rather than actually exercise it. Perhaps the idiots who come out with such sentiments would like us not to exercise a few more of our rights - the right to vote, maybe, or the right to privacy, or a fair trial? It was also pretty depressing to see the media focusing on the few isolated incidences of violence which took place, implying that these characterised the whole of the protests.

If nothing else, the G20 protests rekindled my interest in developing a boardgame on the subject of civil unrest. 'Riot! The Game of Inner-City Violence' has been an on-off project for me for over twenty years. The concept first surfaced when I was an undergraduate and I've periodically come back to it, with little success. Obviously, it would be a two-player game, with one playing as the rioters, the other as the police. The key to the gaming mechanics would be the concept of escalation, with various events - arrests of peaceful protesters, assaults on the police, heavy-handed policing, for instance - in the early turns would begin to escalate say, a civil rights march, into first a confrontation before becoming a full-scale riot. As the escalation factor increases, so the resources available to each side increases: body armour and tear gas for the police, fire bombs and barricades for the rioters, for instance . Naturally, the objective for the police player would be to prevent escalation, for the riot player it would be to ferment a complete breakdown of civil order by escalating the whole situation out of control. For the police player, there is always a risk that its actions to contain the unrest could actually escalate the situation further. The rioting player could try and further escalate the situation by deploying things like agitators and rumours of police brutality, but a too rapid escalation could result in the situation burning itself out before the objectives are reached, or in martial law being declared and troops deployed. Ultimately, I'd envisage the game offering a series of scenarios encompassing such classic examples of civil unrest as the 1984 miner's strike (perhaps focusing on secondary picketing), the anti-poll tax demonstrations in London and the Brixton riots. I really think this one could be a winner.