He also published a book explaining the logic of the game from his point of view. Pretty much concurs with his worldview as you describe it, at least at that time. Although to this day I remember the best bit — the international affairs awards he made up and handed out at the end. The memorable one was for best terrorist group name, which he awarded to “Shining Path”, specifically “for avoiding trite acronyms about people, liberation, and fronts”.

Today he wouldn’t have that problem. We have far more creative people in the terrorist industry.

A few years back (and well after I’d become a horrible reactionary caveman nazi racist homophobe etc), I dug up a copy on an abandonware site and took a second look at it. Discovered things like “total grassland = last year’s grassland – loss from erosion”. That’s right, grassland always shrinks. Never grows. Then there’s the communist economic model where the player is rewarded for massively taxing energy use in the developed world and subsidizing food production for all the poor people (deaths from starvation are a huge negative on the scorekeeping).

I had a book on game design by Crawford lying around and decided to see if the game was a one-off in terms of the dishonesty involved. Opened it to a random page, read a line, I don’t remember the specifics but it was about nuclear power and was both incredibly smug and self-congratulatory and incredibly wrong (both traits which Crawford displays consistently on his blog). I tossed the book in the trash.

If/when I have kids though, the game will definitely form part of their education, as a lesson in propaganda and how to see through it.