Watch The Skies 2

Last Saturday I went to Watch The Skies 2 (wts2) in London and played as the UN High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR). On our team we also had a Secretary General, Deputy Secretary General and World Food Programme (WFP) guy.

This is a long rambling post based just on my experience. It’s not possible to know everything that was going on and I’m certain I missed a whole bunch of stuff that the other teams did and even what the rest of my team were up to.

As the UNHCR rep my job was get funds from the other teams and deploy UNHCR tokens in crisis areas to help relieve the crisis. The WFP guy never showed up so I ended up doing both roles as a sort of generic ‘humanitarian aid’ thing as they overlapped considerably. Given the overlap one suggestion for future games would be to make a generic ‘aid’ token from the UN as it was unclear what the difference between the WFP and UNHCR tokens were in game terms (indeed it was unclear if they were even doing anything).

Losing that fourth person really hurt us though as each member of our team already had like 5 things to do at the same time and another 5 we could/should have been doing. For future games it would be good to look at rolling the WFP and UNHCR into one role and have a fourth guy for science/diplomacy.

First of all, when I got there I met my teammates (who I’d never met before but were really great, if you’re reading this, you were great) and we began brainstorming for the first meeting of the security council. As an example of how much stuff we had to do at any one time here’s a quick summary of that first meeting’s agenda.

1. Introduce ourselves and the members of the security council.

2. Get funds from members for UN missions.

3. Tell everyone about the two crises; Greece, a non-played country, is overthrown by a military junta who have seized the oil fields, and Robert Mugabe has died leaving incredible unrest in Zimbabwe.

4. Pass resolution for, and get funds for humanitarian missions in Zimbabwe

5. Pass resolution for economic sanctions against Greece

6. Pass a draft resolution (from our team briefing) regarding a first contact protocol

7. Get more funds.

8. Remind everyone about the Antarctica treaty prohibiting military missions in the region, because just in case

9. Get still more funds.

That’s a lot to do in the 10 minutes or so allocated for security council meetings. The first turn also had the council meeting in the middle of the hall where it was so loud you couldn’t hear anything. Eventually we referred to this first location as ‘New York’ and our second location, which was the stage from turn 2 on, was ‘Geneva’ (and Geneva was a lot more peaceful…ish).

You may have noticed a pattern emerging from above. A pattern involving ‘funds’. Well as the ‘humanitarian’ guy, it became my mission to (in addition to deploying aid which could only be done at the start of turns), I went around the room fund raising. I think I hit up everyone for money all day long.

Things I learned about fundraising;

1. Walking up to huddles of people and yelling their country’s name is a totally ok thing to do.

2. People liked giving funds affecting crises in their region, but were generally pretty generous.

3. Corporations are stingy.

You may have also noticed a thing about ‘pass resolutions’. At the UN we were unable to make any deployments until after the security council agreed to pass a resolution irrespective of whether or not we could do it. Which meant in practice that even if we were able to deal with a crisis on the turn it surfaced, we weren’t able to do anything until the following turn, especially as all deployments had to be made at the start of a turn.

This just meant in practice that I was thinking a turn behind and ahead constantly. I quickly fell into a pattern that followed like this;

1- dash around all of the tables with wedges of cash/tokens to place deployments/nag control based on resolutions passed previous turn

2- run to UN table to find out what current crises are and what solutions we expect to make

3- run back to tables to see if our deployments are having any effect (to which most of the time I was told ‘you don’t know’)

4- hit up everyone for cash

5- get told by control that something somewhere is going sideways

6- tell UN team things are going sideways and we don’t have enough money

7- hit up everyone for cash

8- make little piles of money/deployments for start of next turn

That said, by turn two/three things were looking good. Zimbabwe’s instability was cleared in one turn as the UN threw aid and peacekeeping efforts at it and Humanity First (an independent aid concern with corporate sponsors that may or may not have been a cult I still don’t know) helped as well. We also had sent a UN Observer (in game terms an ‘agent’, a kind of spy that tells you wtf is going on because control are too busy and gtfo we’re rolling dice or something) to Greece. That told us the economic sanctions were working but that the military junta just ploughed it’s remaining money into armed forces. As a result, the security council agreed to send in a UN mandated peacekeeping force. Basically international forces working in co-operation (in theory).

We hadn’t passed the First Contact resolution, simply because I think we were too busy to make it a serious part of the agenda at this point, but everyone was totally on board with the Antarctica thing.

Also Japan told the press that the UN had moved to it’s ‘lavish new Geneva offices’ thanks to the misspend of their money, which we refuted.

Some interesting things started happening at this point. Completely without our assistance or nagging, most of the different regions began forming entirely autonomous peace-minded power blocs. South America (Brazil, Venezuela and Argentina became SATO: South American Treaty(?) Organisation) who would fund things as a whole unit making negotiations surprisingly easy as they would all just agree to give me huge sums of cash at the same time. This was especially useful when the two South American nations they weren’t influencing began fighting each other and needed aid like nothing else. Brazil, as nominal head of SATO, just gave me all the money I needed to cover it.

Pakistan’s foreign minister told me they were forming a defence pact in their region and were committed to resolving the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. A noble goal, solved by turning Palestine into an independent but international territory which makes sense because idk but don’t tell anyone yet because its a super secret.

Missed opportunity 1 (probably) – be seen to be involved with negotiating these ‘peace-blocs’ and encourage one to form in every region (I don’t think europe or asia had one aside from EU I guess).

We also had several new crises at this point to contend with. In no particular order or completeness; a hurricane struck the American continent, some sort of zombie virus started spreading through Africa, I think a coup happened in Chile and an Asteroid was spotted hurtling towards Earth.

We then began a very expensive series of deployments to contain the humanitarian issues, but did literally nothing about the asteroid. I was focused on raising funds for the aid while the secretary general sat with the security council and the deputy sat on the table fielding enquiries. I think we got one of the teams to send scientists to investigate the asteroid, but we were unable to subsidise the research. Eventually we found out it was going to land in the Antarctic, so we figured it’d sort itself out. We didn’t need to send WFP/UNHCR tokens to an uninhabited wasteland so wasn’t my problem as far as I was concerned.

Also Russia announced the existence of alien life making everyone in the room boo as it caused everyone’s PR (and subsequent income) to plummet.

Yes there were aliens, and no I didn’t actually get to speak to any of them.

Missed opportunity 2 – Find out wtf the aliens wanted and if they could be invited to UN chamber.

To be fair we did have a chance to do this. The Humanity First aid group/cult told us clandestinely that they could allow us to talk to the aliens and that they were interested in speaking to the UN. We agreed as a team however that without the security council’s input, it might be inappropriate to talk on behalf of all the earth without such a mandate. We also weren’t entirely sure what Humanity First’s motivation was, as they would always sound so very shady “of coooourse we’re only here for the benefit of all mankind” so we left it for a bit.

I believe we were offered a mandate by the security council at one point several turns later, and I think our Deputy General did speak to the aliens, but I don’t think it was terribly productive. He didn’t seem to glean anything useful from them.

Meanwhile I found out that USA and Mexico had both been paying for the hurricane relief deployments on top of the payments the UN had been paying. It had to be renewed every turn so anything on top of the normal maintenance was just wasted. As the aid deployments had a big UN logo on top of them I felt like they’d been stepping on our toes a fair bit and I think subsequently burned them with regards to paying for aid.

Turn 4 was a bit of a mess. You see most of the security council is made up of temporary members so every 4 turns half of them would step down and be replaced by elected nations. So we’d been getting nominations for future members up till now, and held the election (on top of the other 20 things we were doing) but I guess we forgot to tell people that only security council members could vote on new members. This annoyed Mexico, Saudi Arabia and Indonesia, as they had been hoping their respective power blocs would vote them in, ignorant that as they mostly weren’t council members, that they couldn’t. Mexico in particular had been courting the wrong nations and were very annoyed.

So we lost a lot of support there and things were shaky for most of the rest of the game.

Meanwhile in Europe, we found out from control that Italian and Spanish companies in Greece were suffering from our economic sanctions, and it was affecting their source nation’s income. The response? A ridiculous multinational force piled into the country and basically just sat there as it deteriorated further.

Bolivia and Afghanistan both erupted into civil war. Bolivia at the behest of shady corporate overlords bidding for fracking rights, Afghanistan because I forget. I spoke to a Weygand (I think) rep about the fracking rights and environmental issues, and with his best villainous beard stroking, lied to me that they weren’t involved, but it doesn’t matter because it was outside my remit and I shouldn’t worry anyway.

Missed opportunity 3 – maybe find a way to enforce international law on corporations, not just nations.

We did get support for a peacekeeping op in Bolivia, but couldn’t fund Afghanistan. I asked Humanity First if they were able to send aid to Afghanistan because they hadn’t yet revealed themselves as Cylons, so I thought maybe they were legit/red herrings. They did keep sending aid there as well as committing to helping in Africa with the virus, so I think they were good guys.

Control also told me that the UN had learned that the Antarctica treaty had been blatantly ignored by multiple nations. I asked him who and he just nodded at the stage/Geneva and told me mostly by folks up there. My response? Put out a press release asking nations to please respect the treaty please come on. I had to do my best to dodge questions regarding ‘which nations’ for two reasons, which became the crux of the UN’s dilemma.

1 – we aren’t independent, and the signatories of the treaty had never agreed on a provision to enforce/sanction nations who contravened it.

2 – the permanent security council members (UK, France, China, Russia, USA) can veto any proposals immediately, so we could not sanction anyone who was contravening the treaty without risking their veto/disapproval of the UN. I think it was also basically those five contravening it anyway.

Basically, the UN had very little real political power, so we just continued to focus on aid and making ourselves look good/relevant.

The zombies virus in Africa continued to spread right up until the end of the game. This was probably the single most expensive series of deployments we made all game, with five per turn for like 7 turns. It did not help that around turn 5 ISIS appeared in Nigeria and neighbouring countries, giving the virus a way out of it’s containment. We sent an observer to one of the infected nations near the end of the game to find out the status of the virus, despite the UK, Angola and us lot sure it must be gone now, only to find it was still there. We then doubled the amount we ploughed into it only to find that the African nations had developed vaccines that turn and distributed them.

So the next few turns before the next election on turn 8 was pretty much just fund raising and putting out fires.

-There was a multinational UN mandated force sent to the Antarctic to find out ‘whats up’ because maybe this asteroid hitting it was alien related which as far as I know, turned over nothing.

-Greece and Afghanistan continued to get worse and worse with or without our help.

-And we checked the in-game twitter feeds to learn that the Pope had become Brazilian (he later moved the Vatican to the moon or something?.

-Whales were allegedly sentient (and we made absolutely no effort to protect them because idk can you send World Food Programs to the ocean? Although I did have an excellent conversation with the ambassador for Saudi Arabia which began with him asking ‘So what’s happening with the Whales?’).

-There were multiple alien factions who may or may not all be peaceful.

-Israel and Iran declared peace, settling the dispute with Palestine in the process.

-Iran may or may not have been selling nukes on the black market. I don’t think we as a team ever discovered what was happening there.

-Angola told me they heard a rumour that Robert Mugabe’s death was a cover-up for his abduction by aliens, which I didn’t hear about again for the rest of the game so I don’t know.

-Also apparently the Japanese were angry that they’d given us money and we hadn’t told them what for and had gone to the press?

I was standing at the Africa table during turn 7/8, clutching tokens and money when we heard an announcement that the entire UN security council had been abducted by aliens. This was very frustrating because now there were only two of us and oh my god what is going on why is this happening to us. The Deputy General spent the rest of the game sweating and hyperventilating while I kept barking at people for cash.

Our first point of business after this was get all of the security council members to send a representative to an emergency session ‘in New York’. This as you may recall was basically the middle of the floor where the first session was as no-one could go on the stage (Geneva) because I don’t remember. Then basically every team just decided to send one or two people and it became something of a huge huddle with a very panicky Deputy General squashed in the middle. He invited everyone to the next session and people dispersed. Before they did though I yelled ‘MAY I HAVE YOUR ATTENTION! WE NEED MONEY FOR TSUNAMI RELIEF IN THE PHILIPPINES!’ Five minutes later Japan sent over a hitman holding 4 mil telling me it was ‘For the Philippines.’

Of course it did not seem reasonable to have every team represented at the following session, so we agreed to only invite the permanent council members. This may or may not have been illegal, but it definitely ruffled some feathers. About 20 something feathers.

Again Mexico and Saudi Arabia were livid. I had to explain how utterly ridiculous it was to have 30 people on the stage, health and safety etc, and they weren’t being shut out, besides they weren’t council members anyway, oh yeah the turn 8 elections…umm.

Thankfully the security council were shortly returned to us and I had a phone call with the Secretary General from his shuttle to confirm that, yes they were treated well by the aliens, yes there was an election held and here are the winners. I ran around and informed the new members (which included a relieved Mexico and Indonesia, but not Saudi Arabia who were still angry). I may have forgotten to tell the Deputy General though who I think just started making it up. Following all of this we were told by Control that given the disgruntlement towards the UN and lack of participation, that he was close to disbanding us if we didn’t sort things out. We didn’t really, but he never disbanded us so I count that as a victory.

The original council never returned though, their shuttle was shot at by the UK, and they had to return to space/adjacent room.

Missed opportunity 87 – like seriously, we didn’t even put out a statement saying ‘DONT SHOOT AT OUR DELEGATES for gods sake man’.

And then Tokyo got destroyed because of reasons.

Their prime minister gave us a ton of money to put down aid, just as press began printing stories suggesting financial irregularities involving the Japanese and the UN.

According to Control after the game, they’d been dumping cash on our table without saying it’s for anything in particular. Which was all news to me because we were totally broke by this point.

And then the whole game ended and I needed a fag.