Comment on the article Virtual Vatican: Video game that lets you play Pope by Tom Kington in The Times, April 23, 2020.
Funny, that game makers haven’t come up with a pre-1990 ‘East-European democratic opposition to communism’ simulation and ‘East-European democracy post-1990’ simulation. I understand that games of this kind might be accidentally revealing too much.
Games like the one mentioned in the article are an excellent tool for shaping cognitive horizons of young persons. Very useful politically to train and shape ways of thinking of the youth in countries of the West.
Here is one scenario. You are a young cleric in postwar Poland. You are recruited by the Communist security service. You already have had some theatrical schooling. Your aim is now to rise as high as possible in the church hierarchy, while continuously serving your Communist handlers. You win the game if you (1) become pope, (2) you manage to celebrate the 26th anniversary of your pontificate with a concert of the Red Army Choir in the Vatican without raising public suspicion. Allow for the variant of first being recruited by the Communists and then becoming a cleric.
This game scenario has the obvious fault of being unrealistic. The game should be played in a collective mode. In other words, you need to control and influence actions of the clerics (one is not enough), political officials in different countries and security operatives. You win, if (1) one of the clerics progresses to be a pope and celebrates the 26th anniversary of his pontificate with a concert of the Red Army Choir broadcast to both Italy and Russia, and (2) some dozen years later he is declared saint in a falsified canonization carried out at a turbo-speed. So, to summarize, the aim is to go all the way.
This game has, in fact, been played in real life.
@LechSBorkowski