A Serious Game

New Century City, an ethnically mixed city of 150,000, is afflicted by many of the same problems as Southern California cities--gangs, racial tensions, rising murder rates--plus one more: It doesn’t exist.

New Century is the fictional backdrop for a role-playing game that allows its players--police chiefs, community activists, politicians--to explore strategies for curbing drugs and violence. Created by Rand Corp., the scenario is the evolution of the war games the Santa Monica think tank started producing for the Pentagon decades ago.

But today’s enemy--an array of social problems--is not neatly defined or easily defeated.

The Rand game masters will convene the New Century scenario at UCLA on Thursday. Among the players will be the Los Angeles City Council’s ad hoc committee on gang violence and youth justice, and mediators from the city’s Dispute Resolution Program--more than 50 people in all. Next month, the game will be played in Pasadena, drawing together politicians and community leaders.

“Most people in any organization stick pretty well to themselves,” said William Schwabe, a Rand senior policy analyst who is putting together New Century. “The hope here is to give people vision and innovation . . . and encourage them to go beyond what they’ve been able to do so far.”

This week’s game will open with a speech from New Century Mayor Pat Jackson. “Because of violence, we are becoming a city possessed by fear,” she will say. “We cannot remain victims any more. Something must be done. And I intend to do it.”

The players then will form five task forces--public safety, health and social services, schools, business, youth and gangs--and an executive panel that reconciles and prioritizes the panels’ proposals.

Players typically are assigned to areas outside their expertise. A police officer might be on the schools committee, while a social worker goes to public safety and a City Council member to business.

“One person brings in an idea and someone else builds on it,” said Orna Johnson, a mediator with the city’s dispute resolution program, who participated in a previous incarnation of the game last spring. “There’s a synergy of ideas.”

After an afternoon of brainstorming, the groups will present their ideas, which must fit within budgetary constraints, and the executive panel will make its recommendations. Then everyone will goes home for two days.

(Last spring, in a game based in the fictional city of New Elsinore, recommendations included random weapons searches in schools, an ammunition tax, and a lawsuit against the city in an effort to improve services to one of its poorer, more crime-ridden sections.)

When the players return on Saturday, two years will have elapsed in New Century time. Through computer projections based on data from real cities and through educated guesses, Rand experts will tell the players what changes their programs have wrought in the make-believe community.

In last year’s New Elsinore scenario, Rand said the random searches cut the number of gun incidents in schools, the ammunition tax raised only a small amount of revenue and the lawsuit did little except alienate City Council members.

The recommendations had negligible short-term effects--a mere 1% reduction in violent crime one year later. Fifteen years down the line, however, the recommendations would have reversed the trend and led to a 9% decrease.

A greater emphasis on preventive programs could have cut crime by nearly a third, the experts said.

“You don’t come out of one of these games saying, ‘We won!’ ” Schwabe said. Rather, the players report being “energized,” he said.

“It was really a phenomenal exercise,” said Gisselle Acevedo-Franco, executive director of Pasadena’s Coalition for a Non-Violent City, another of last year’s participants. “People don’t understand how difficult it is to create policy.”

A second lesson was patience. “You have to be courageous, implement and then wait,” Acevedo-Franco said. “We’ve lost one child at a time. We need to get them back one at a time.”

George Regas, who last year played the mayor of New Elsinore, said he initially dreaded the exercise. “I felt a game would be trivial,” said the former pastor of All Saints Episcopal Church in Pasadena, who currently serves as president of the Coalition for a Non-Violent City.

Afterward, however, “I was just stunned at how effective it was,” Regas said. “It made people look at how policies can shape a city in a new direction, put aside all of their prejudices and their vested interests, and collaboratively work together.”

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What made the exercise work was putting all the people and information together at once--something that occurs only sporadically in the real world. “I never sat down with that information with that talent around me,” Regas said.

“It’s like a potluck dinner of professional chefs,” Schwabe said. “Everyone brings something, and it has quality and substance to it.”

Schwabe started creating role-playing scenarios in 1968 for the Navy. He started off with war games, later expanding into international diplomacy scenarios. He moved to Rand in 1980.

While politicians often speak of a war on drugs or violence, the situations are fundamentally different from a military war, Schwabe said.

For one, there’s not really a bad guy. “You’re pushing against Jell-O,” Schwabe said.

Victory also is not a clear-cut concept. “What level of illicit drug use or homicide . . . would be tolerable?” Schwabe said. “People don’t like to address that.”

Even if the game raises awareness, what is most important is what happens after the game.

“If they go back home with an occasional phone call, the synergy is lost,” said Steven Margolis, coordinator of community policing in the Los Angeles Police Department’s South Bureau, another of last year’s players. “You’ve got to get them to take it into field action.”