We will describe a project to produce a series of site-specific, game-formatted CD-ROMs utilizing multiple-scenarios strategic-planning algorithms as the basis of the user-friendly interface. The purposes of this CD-ROM series are: (1) to teach multiple-scenarios strategic-planning methodology via an interactive game format; (2) to do so with real-world data bases on concrete settings so as to positively influence future history in those settings; (3) to begin commercial development of initial versions of the software required to electronically float m-valued e-monies as market implementation of local sustainable development indicators; (4) to undertake interactive-media-type initiatives in public education on specific local issues of development relative to fundamentals involved in all such processes. The argument will be made that completion of such a project will be a public relations coup for XYZ Group and put it in the global forefront of several fields: [a] innovation in multiple-scenarios strategic planning as a mode-of-thought discipline; [b] computer applications at the interface between e-money and public policy implementation; [c] development of new issue-specific interactive interfaces for real-time local indicator-referenda used as one factor in weighting the m-values stacked on a local currency base; [d] applications of strategic approaches to cultural resources and tourism planning at world heritage, amenity migration, and tourism destination sites. It will further be argued that proper design of this project will insure that, at minimum, it pays for itself.

computer gaming, decision-need, and domains of political speculation
Trading-in representation for referenda is a hard sell in political frameworks based upon decision sciences, action-based sociologies, and power theory. By-issue judgments are much more labor intensive than picking a communicator, a forceful personality, an honest face. The notion of an “electronic commons” founders on this point alone. Consider, however, that decisions call for speculation. Absent speculation, no decision need be made: the concern at issue is a foregone conclusion. This is not a black-and-white situation, however: the less speculation, the less the decision-need; the more difficult the decision, the greater the speculation involved. So, selling referenda as opposed to representation involves reducing the speculation of decision-need. Forecasting, virtual futures projection, multiple-scenarios strategic planning, even practice at tactical improvisation reduce speculation, hence reduce decision-need, hence reduce the labor intensity of by-issue judgments, and consequently make substitution of referenda for representation an easier sell. Therefore, any computer-game/virtual-reality simulation of the interactivity of decision-tree variables in a domain of political speculation -- such as a city or town’s development plan -- could become a factor through which decision-need is mitigated by reducing the hazard in judgment. If the game is sufficiently well designed as to be fun, even fascinating, then many people will play and more and more of the infinite number of virtual futures implied by decision-tree factorials will be made explicit through use -- thus reducing the hazard of speculation. If a method for public posting of game results were made available, the more the game was played, the more would there be a drift to consensus or criticality in the domain of political speculation circumscribed by the game. If weighting of local sustainable development indicators were in significant measure linked to results of game playing, then design of the rules of the local game would itself become a domain of political speculation amenable to computer gaming and virtual reality simulation. We propose the following justifications, grammars, and methods of entry into such discourses of the public’s rightful process.

traditional precedents for decision-free self-organization in the
“electronic commons”
Contrary to contemporary Asian studies, historical, anthropological, and archeological treatments eulogizing imposition of the modern nation-state, six traditional Asian “informalized” but informizing folk communities of practice can be understood as having mitigated decision-need by reducing the hazard in judgment: (1) human chess; (2) cockfights; (3) the gift economy; (4) poetic dueling in the marketplace; (5) public grievance/shaming displays; (6) synergistic fusion of astrology, prophesy, geomancy, architectural design, and landscape ecology.

Throughout Southeast Asia, the gaming of versions of human chess was a traditional village practice festively engaged in by all members of the community. The chess board was writ large in the turf of the village commons (communal lands) when the game was staged with human persons standing-in as pieces on the board. Such gaming continued for long periods as strategies unfolded, were debated, were referred to precedents, folklore, proverbial sayings -- all as stand-in metaphor for prototypic human dilemmas and the interplay of decision-tree variables in everyday life of the community. Cockfights -- particularly in Viet Nam and primarily before advent of metal spurs -- served as another gaming venue for communal exploration of I-Ching-like archetypal situations of conflict and resolution (lexicographic, typologic, taxonomic classificatory systems reducing the complexity involved in decision processes). Again, like human chess, this cockfight venue was a group occasion for strategy debate within a community of practice where the eternal verities were related to evolving circumstances in a dynamic laden with speculation and the hazard of wager. Theories of physical and temperamental types (often debated in terms of breeding characteristics) as a means of reducing speculation were rendered in folk poetry with its own allied rules, constraints, conventions, joys of discovery and surprise.

Gift giving in traditional village life was a consensus-building and conflict-resolving economy for two reasons: first, the object exchanged was not the subject of exchange. The exchanged object stood-in for the identities of the parties to exchange, symbolizing shared properties of identity and incorporating both identities into a common identity -- thus minimizing potential at-decision conflict. Secondly, gifting frequently transpired at group festival occasions as public act -- often a kind of posting of gaming results -- and not merely was a form of income re-distribution, but, because of the metareferences (identity incorporation being but one such) stacked upon the gift-tender, the object exchanged was a currency of multi-utilities functioning to knit together many communal dimensions: economic, artistic, psychological, spiritual, administrative, and so on.

In Viet Nam and China, functions of simple cursing are not the functions of cursing in poetry. Subjecting rebukes in marketplace barter to rules of poesy -- if only through in-the-blood osmosis -- binds the cursers in an invisible web of convention by which the tonal familiars of banter beat against divergent tendencies, often resolving conflict into peals of shared laughter as garrulous name-calling hits just the right chord to appease the patsy. A low-tech public posting is the grievance/shaming display: rather than threat of the not-so-thin-blue-line, there is recourse to enveloping moral economy justified through metareference to cosmogony. The lone hysterical female voice in dead of night chanting its grievance litany is the spirits come down from the mount shaming all who have forgotten natural laws of reciprocal maintenance.

In Chinese astrology, the stars were in the ground no less than on the sky -- and the naked-eye geomantic ordered the articulations in the garden of public space according to the involved correspondences, all decisions being matters of the functions of the unknowable: f(x). Chronomantic “games”, like tosses of the I-Ching yarrow stalks, limited the unknowableness of the unknown, and, when played by many, reduced decision-need by mitigating speculation -- the form of tosses entering even architecture, town planning, and the landscape ecology of very large-scale irrigation systems from Bali to the Tonle Sap. Indeed, in medieval Japanese residential architecture, the design system employing the ken unit length was so well designed and metareferenced, it became a game the whole family could play by moving tatami mat-proportioned cut-outs around on the design grid-matrix board. This was done to seek the mat arrangement most pleasing, most propitious, most pregnant with symbolic reference -- the architectural features following automatically from the mat arrangement chosen. In spite of post-modernist social-science dissimulation (e.g., Clifford Geertz’s treatment of cockfighting in The Interpretation of Cultures) such gamings as these traditional precedents represent are a far cry from modern team sports which have served as psychological induction funnels for massed warfare and to cultivate the prerequisite behavioral concomitants of colonial and post-colonial political frameworks.

initializing scenario dimensions
A strategic planning CD-ROM would allow the gamester to initialize scenario dimensions (themes of the story line) by choosing the involved societal driving forces, subjecting them to impulses determined by the underlying logic sets, and then follow out interactions of decision-tree variables to discover likely scenario outcomes. This could be done over and over, each time choosing different sets of critical variables and watching, via the graphical interface and CAD software simulations, scenario outcomes emerge. More sophisticated later versions of the CD-ROM would permit running simultaneous stacked collections of scenarios (programmed using adaptations of multiscale numerical modeling techniques drawn from applications in meteorology, for instance) to view consequences of their interactions in a virtual reality venue. As the data bases would be accurate and site-specific, all such simulations would have real-world implications -- and thus would carry valid indicator-referenda consequences, if publicly posted via, say, Internet, for eventual tagging of local sustainable development indicators to weights stacked on a local m-valued e-money currency base, within a LETS or Local Exchange Trading System.

Cesky Krumlov: an instructive example which can be computer-gamed
For instance -- not to detail decision-tree sequences, but to outline a scenario dimension -- in the aftermath of the “velvet revolution” and fall of the Soviet Union, people in the pristinely preserved 10th century walled Bohemian Czech town of Cesky Krumlov decide: “These new Russians with money are just as crazy as the old Russians were without! We have 300 publicly owned buildings in this town and we are not about to follow the policy of crash capitalism and instant privatization: Cesky Krumlov would be owned by West German tourists! We would all be made into serfs. These Americans don't follow the advise they give others. Was their rural electrification and power grid developed in significant measure with privatized financing? Not by a long shot. Privatized infrastructure development advise is entrapment! Modeling on American success is not a viable strategy for the planet as a whole. Since World War Two, America has controlled, milked, and taken by threat, overt and subtle, the bulk of planetary resources, human and natural -- while manipulating the global financial system to that end. Small wonder America is so rich! The economic policies by which this has been achieved cannot successfully be adopted by all. Of course, propagandizing for self-interest is propagandizing, and only to be expected, but the mind actually believing this propaganda an inaccurate portrait of postwar events is either extraordinarily naive or utterly deluded. We need to keep the Harvard whizz-kid types away from here and find some other kind of advisor.”

Decision-tree variable: Choose a planning advisor for the Mayor of Cesky Krumlov. The portfolio of applicants includes: (1) a 27-year-old Harvard whizz-kid Ph.D. with experience working as an aide to the American President's Council of Economic Advisors; (2) a Japanese bureaucrat retired from MITI who spends most of his time vacationing in Europe; (3) a Canadian planner educated at University of California, Berkeley, who produced the transportation plan for the city of Bangkok in 1971; (4) a city planner from the firm in Athens, Greece which produced the comprehensive urban development plan for Saigon in 1965; (5) a French engineer specializing in cadastral plans, whose most recent contract was in Phnom Penh, Cambodia; (6) an Australian tourism development advisor whose early advisory experience was with the U.N. High Commission for Refugees; (7) a Vietnamese, trained as an architect, naturalized as an American citizen in 1978, who retired from a career with the U.N. after being stuck in Baghdad during the Persian Gulf War; (8) a petroleum engineer who worked for many years in Libya and developed a unique approach to general systems theory which he has successfully been applying to Indian corporations located primarily in Bombay; (9) a retired official from the American EPA with advisory experience in Central Europe, an enduring interest in river ecosystems, and personal knowledge of the Vltava River which flows through Cesky Krumlov; (10) A Czech ecologist who received the first Ph.D. in ecology granted by Kyoto University, who has field experience in the Sumava bioregion surrounding Cesky Krumlov, and whose Japanese-Brazilian wife is a radiation biologist specialized in the study of DNA.

planning process itself a scenario-factor array
The above description of applicants suggests the sort of detail scenarios on a given CD-ROM may contain. The sketch that follows simply gives the flavor of a scenario format or dimension, but this is sufficient for the purposes of a preliminary proposal. Scenario logic sets, the arrays of societal driving forces, stakeholder analyses, key decision factor arrays, and the like will only become interesting to gamesters when presented concretely with interactive graphics, animation, on-site photo workups, video documentation, sound effects, and so on. In planning practice, scenarios are “built down” from generalities to particulars by the planner: the planner himself is not a scenario element. Here, we consider that the planning process itself is a scenario factor array, with internal decision-tree variables at play. As we know of no public sector case where a full-blown multiple scenarios strategic planning process has been carried through actual implementation via tactical improvisation, disjointed incrementalism, or any other modus operandi, this removal of the planner from his usual role as transcendental to the plan seems, at the very least, judicious.

negotiating at-play decision-tree variables
Close scrutiny of the resumes and supporting materials from applicants revealed that the Government of Thailand, for various reasons, followed few if any of the recommendations contained in the 1971 Bangkok transportation plan, and that the Berkeley planner who authored the study went on over the next 30 years to become a leading figure in urban planning internationally. He founded the School of Human Settlements at Asia Institute of Technology in Bangkok, subsequently had strategic planning consultancies in over thirty countries, pioneered cultural resources planning, and created amenity migration studies as a field distinct from tourism development planning. Moreover, he has made extended visits to Cesky Krumlov over the past several years, established friendships with Cesky residents, informed himself regarding local issues, and has begun to participate in discussions of Cesky Krumlov's future. Decision-tree choice within the framework of Scenario-A: the mayor's advisor becomes the Berkeley planner. Choice of each of the other applicants is associated with formats of Scenario-B, Scenario-C, and so on.

Negotiating the factor array of the strategic planning process itself is the early history of Scenario-A. This involves local and national politics, scientific societies, Charles University in Prague, foundations based in New York City, the government of a Western European country, and societal driving forces related to the collapse of the Soviet Union. Briefly, a small foundation in NYC agrees to provide the Berkeley planner with a sacrifice salary, which he agrees to because of interest in the paradigm setting possibilities of the Cesky Krumlov case. Part of the contract involves him teaching graduate seminars in planning methodology at Charles University, which in return will make available expertise on the technical aspects of generic sustainable development indicators which will need unique formulation relative to the local circumstances of Cesky Krumlov. Interest by this planner in part comes because of the prehistory of the case. Cesky Krumlov has a young, very insightful, perhaps even brilliant, and certainly most innovative mayor, with a national reputation, who has assembled capable people around him and moved things well along by the time the planner takes up residence and the formal strategic planning process is initiated. A five-pronged approach is undertaken: (1) setting up the strategic planning process within the local government; (2) enticing local citizen direct involvement; (3) the 300-buildings issue; (4) the surrounding Sumava bioregion; (5) reconciling national policies to local initiatives. Expertise of the Czech National Academy of Sciences, Department of Landscape Ecology, is tapped, some of its members being brought directly onto the Town Planning Board.

facilitating locally-chosen initiatives
Cesky Krumlov is at risk of becoming severely degraded, physically and culturally, by the effects of a tourism monocrop economy. Options are available for diversifying the economy and setting up filters to attract the types of amenity migrants who can help facilitate locally chosen initiatives. Scenario-A focuses upon the “strange attractor” visualizing Cesky as becoming the leading center for the fine and performing arts in Central Europe. The 300 buildings are catalogued in detail down to their antique furniture, and 150 of them are selected for use-prescribed privatization, with remodeling guidelines and a design-approval process imposed as conditions of sale. The proceeds of these sales will be used to set up the Cesky Krumlov Development Fund, a joint stock company with the town of Cesky Krumlov retaining a 51-percent share, to go into initial public offering soon after the Czech stock market opens. Two dozen of the remaining 150 buildings are designated for restoration or renovation: the Opera House, Concert Hall, Theater, Academy of Music, and so on. The rest of the buildings are held in reserve, remaining in current use. The idea is not so much to greenhouse the arts by creating a supportive atmosphere and hope for the best, but to actually start doing things: commission works, compositions, plays, films, research -- no mere staging of performances, concerts, retrospectives. And not to be neutral, objective. To be opinionated! To develop a Cesky take on things, express the intellectual sophistication Czechs are known for. Reach into the Czech soul to bring forth vision: a man without a soul has no vision; a man without vision has no soul.

As the Town Planning Board (which invited various important stakeholder business leaders to directly participate) sets about the (year-long, in Cesky's case) task of moving through the various stages of a multiple scenarios strategic planning process -- including the holding of public meetings to solicit input and criticism, as well as to keep the local citizens abreast -- a parallel and longer running effort, involving the National Academy of Sciences, the political expertise of the Mayor, and efforts of strategically connected individuals at Charles University in Prague, yields a plum: 1600 square kilometers of the best preserved forest ecosystems in Central Europe -- the “Green Roof of Europe” -- are designated a Protected Landscape Area and National Park to be locally administered by Cesky Krumlov and three satellite villages (with technical advise from the Department of Landscape Ecology of the National Academy of Sciences). This is probably the first time anywhere on the planet a national park with watershed integrity is designated for local administration.

Cesky's locally chosen “strange attractor”, i.e., to become the center for the fine and performing arts in Central Europe, is in every respect compatible with being a paradigm test for m-valued exchange involving currency-weight-tagged local sustainable development indicators effectuated by real-time, on-line, “electronic commons” gaming-referenda. Why? Tenth century medieval European “people's” theater, long ago practiced in Cesky's central market, is a traditional precedent for the functions of the “electronic commons”, no less than are the precedents discussed above relative to Southeast Asia. Once set in motion, gaming-referenda will establish many connections with contemporary arts.

foundering on the nation-state and superordinate levels
Scenario-A begins to fall apart on the issue of reconciling national policies to local initiatives. The Cesky Krumlov Development Fund's initial public offering keeps being set back because opening day of the national stock market is repeatedly postponed. Worse yet, the next stage in the strategic planning process, that of specifically formulating the array of local sustainable development indicators, runs into funding problems. A Western European government, which once had funded a public sector strategic planning exercise in Asia, initially expressed intense interest in the Cesky project on local indicators. Now, word has arrived suggesting that this national government will not fund this local project, as the US$200,000 grant application is regarded too small an amount of money to consider. This is yet another repetition of prior experience: on the hierarchical scale level superordinate to the nation-state, the multilateral institutions (ADB, IMF, World Bank, IADB, et cetera) also consider town-scale (indeed, city, and in some instances even mega-urban region!) projects too small to be concerned with. No innovative framework, therefore, can be built from the bottom up, only imposed from the top down (a recipe for failure in most cases: particularly so that of mandating crash capitalism). One must draw the conclusion that “a system that works” is well down on the list of priorities of those controlling the nation-state and superordinate levels of the New World Order’s administrative hierarchy.

Further foundering of Scenario-A occurs when ongoing attempts to get funding for the post-indicators stage of the planning process -- i.e., initial studies for interfacing the local sustainable development indicators with an m-valued LETS for Cesky Krumlov -- run into brick walls in Prague and New York City. No one in the Prague office of a large New York City foundation can understand what an m-valued exchange unit might be. That this is not a failure of communication, is not due to poor writing capabilities, is not due to low IQs in the Prague office becomes apparent when the experience is repeated with the New York City home office. Emotional stops on cognitive function clearly set the limits of what is possible in a New World Order foundering on the nation-state and superordinate levels: even private foundations cannot tolerate the idea of new ideas. Added to Scenario-A, therefore, is an additional societal driving force: emotional stops on cognitive function determine scenario outcomes.

The final decision-tree choice in Scenario-A determines whether it ends with the present hiatus or branches into one of the other scenarios. The StratPlan gamester must choose between: [a] the Berkeley planner drops the ball and moves on to his next consultancy; [b] after repeated failed attempts, a funding source for the local sustainable development indicators project is found, but the funds are inadequate to do a proper job; [c] the planner becomes an amenity migrant, himself, and relocates to Cesky Krumlov; [d] the Mayor of Cesky Krumlov is elected to national office; [e] one of the other scenarios, Scenario-(the gamester chooses which one, B through J) finds a funding source.

excerpts relative to notes on production
Were XYZ Group to undertake this CD-ROM series project, it would be most cost effective, in terms of photo and video workups, software development, and production costs, to do a minimum of two CD-ROMs simultaneously: Lijiang as well as Luang Prabang. The choice of two is dictated by the potential gains in community goodwill at those locations where XYZ Group currently has major building projects in progress. The project will require one year and six months to complete, as multiple photo and video shootings are required at different seasons of the year (this is particularly the case for Lijiang).

Since elaborate photographic studies of each site will be made, coffee table photo books on each location will be the first products to issue from the project. Accompanying texts should be at minimum trilingual (Japanese, English, and Chinese or Lao). The multilingual book texts will come at no extra cost, as the CD-ROMs will have to be multilingual to reach their full market potential. Japan will be the major target market, as considerable interest in the two sites exists in Japan and CD-ROMs are an established retail market there.

The texts accompanying the photo spreads should be planning oriented, which will give the books a unique character. There will be no additional costs incurred in producing these texts, as they will be forthcoming in process of CD-ROM production. An innovative layout for the books is also likely to emerge, as the graphic artists working simultaneously on the CD-ROMs are likely to carry their multimedia orientation into page layout design, with probable innovative result.

Developing materials for inclusion on the CD-ROMs will be a fairly straightforward task, as both sites are associated with abundant historical photo archives and are extremely rich in traditional cultural resources, which can be documented and woven into the historical aspects of societal driving forces in strategic planning scenario development. Musical resources available in Lijiang and Luang Prabang are quite elaborate, thus there should be no difficulty commissioning CD-ROM scores.

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