randy mathisen

["rantron 3.1.7" <rmathisen@gmail.com>]

Randy Mathisen
My playing of the role of Amnesty International was wrought with
frustration and feelings of impotence.  This was a surprise.  I was
expecting to be ignored by my some of my fellow players, but not all.
This unfortunately seems to be the manner in which real governments
and some news agencies treat Amnesty International.  Other news
agencies, such as BBC and CNN give Amnesty International coverage in
reality. The way in which Amnesty International is empowered in
reality is through public opinion and public pressure; which are
simulated in the game by the media.  A simulate public opinion is
missing from the simulation and would balance the disproportionate
importance of the media in the simulation.
In the playing of Amnesty International my team attempted to closely
replicate the actions of our real life counterparts.  We did so by
taking a humanistic mind set.  A mind set that would allow us to put
the rights and needs of a world citizenry, all of humanity, above
religious, economical, or political concerns.  We did this much the
same way that Amnesty International does, by releasing press releases
and calls to actions .  The press releases that we sent out, and in an
attempt to remain realistic we sent them only to the news agencies
were ignored.  This was, unfortunately, a realistic reaction from Fox
News.  I found in a search of Fox news  that they sited Amnesty
International only three times in the last year, and none during our
simulation.  The BBC and CNN on the other hand who like Fox News
ignored us in the simulation, did not behave as their real life news
agencies.  A search of the BBC website for Amnesty International found
1056 hits.  The same search of CNN found 1540 hits.  I briefly went
over some of the articles that came up from each web site and found
several  that corresponded to press releases that we sent to these
news agencies.  The unrealistic nature that the news agencies dealt
with our role in the simulation lead to us becoming a complete none
factor in the simulation.
One exchange that bothered me was from the CNN team.  We sent them a
story and the responded with the act that they could not "check" our
story.  This seemed strange as Amnesty international stories are
reported all the time by their real life counterparts with (see
footnote three for examples) without second sources.  When Amnesty
International publishes a report it is check for inaccuracies and
other biases.  When I told them this they simple stopped responding to
us (I could of used kinder tone but these are not acts of kindness we
are reporting about).
In future versions of the simulation you could add a public opinion
character to of set the amount of power that the news agencies are
given.  This may need to be a control character, but the public
ability to except the news or effect their government is lacking in
the simulation. Or maybe I am optimistic about the role the citizens
of the world  play in any form of government, let alone global
politics.

--
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debreifing.doc