Peace Games (by Douglas Quirk )

Peace Games is about strategies that might be used in achieving peace, organized around the factors we that my colleagues and I found to either foster peace or disrupt it by virtue of the fact that they either disturb people’s human relationships. It is at once a novel, a self-help book, and a manual for an engrossing game, framed in essentially rational, problem-solving terms.

In this novel, eight couples try to put aside their fears of a life-threatening storm and weather it by seeking solutions to some of the puzzles posed in an attempt to find routes to peace. Their conversations can be read as one account of people trying to solve some basic human puzzles and they can be read for the guidance they might offer to others seeking solutions to the same kinds of problems. Or they can be used to define a means and a set of “rules” by which others could themselves play Peace Games.

To determine whether the method works, Peace Games was tested with people having quite different characteristics. Although each group pursued some issues unique to itself, all the groups addressed most of the topics selected for this volume, and the contents of their conversations were essentially similar to those contained in this novel. Because these groups were intended as “test” Peace Games, the author consciously avoided taking a leadership role, beyond sending out announcements of the “Peace Games” to potential participants, handing out copies of the “rules” to those attending, and serving as one, relatively quiet, participant.

There is another set of issues that affect our ability to achieve peacefulness and peace, however, and that is the motivations that drive us to disturb ourselves (and others), not only within the intra-personal sphere but at all levels of peace or its absence, from serenity vs distress, through harmony vs disharmony, and cooperation vs crime, to international peace vs war.

As any sensible person knows, in order to achieve an outcome, anyone needs both a strategy and the necessary motivation. But that is a story for another day. On the other hand, Quirk began his original preface to Peace Games with reference to “the Reynolds Principle of Perversity,” which I think gives me license to be just a little perverse. Although Peace Games quite rightly stands by itself, I just happened to have at hand a paper on Overcoming Negative Emotions – which is at least relevant to the motivational issue referred to above – and, since I was in a sharing mood, it was included as a sort of addendum to this book, as a sort of bonus for you for having shown an interest in Peace Games.