Choose Between Baltimore Cops and Protesters in this Riot Simulator, Coming Soon

Leonard Menchiari started developing his riot simulator before we saw police officers with armored vehicles fire tear gas grenades into crowds of protesters in Baltimore.

Riot: Civil Unrest was originally focused on four campaigns of violent protest in Italy, Spain, Egypt and Greece "plus many more unlockable sites around the world." But it also features a level editor, allowing users to create, upload and share any other clashes they wish to see replicated in the game's intricate, gritty pixel art style.

In other words, when the game's released this summer, we'll likely see multiple simulations of the recent race riots in Baltimore and Ferguson, depicted from the point of view of either the police or the rioters.

You can trash squad cars and try to overwhelm the ranks of cops. You can crack down on the rioters and watch the crowds scatter.

Menchiari, a filmmaker and former Valve employee, claims that "each character will have his own psychology" and react to the unfolding mob chaos. All movement in the game will be physics based so that every individual is influenced by the contact of the masses around them, allowing players to devise emergent scenarios undreamed of by the game's creators.

Menchiari, who currently lives in Bologna, Italy, tells me via email that the impulse to create a platform for reenacting actual riots—where in some cases real people were wounded or killed—isn't just for the thrill of it.

"The main purpose is to inform people about some important riots that recently happened in Europe and around the world, events that influenced the new era of revolutions," Menchiari said. "Hopefully, through playing, we can all get a better understanding of what these events were really about."

It's easy to imagine some sparks of outrage going off as people strategize a simulation of Ferguson on their smartphone during a morning commute, but Menchiari tells me that he doesn't foresee a problem with playing through recent real-life events. To the contrary, the game is meant to "push out" information about actual riots. As Riot's site states: "[user-made] levels will be rated by players based on quality and historical accuracy."

At one point in our correspondence Menchiari mentioned "living a few riots firsthand." When I ask him to elaborate he says that the Spanish "NO TAV" Riots, a movement against the construction of the European High-Speed Train called TAV through the Italian countryside, is depicted in one of the simulator's campaigns, and is in part based on his own firsthand experiences. For the other riots represented in the game Menchiari worked with writers who had their own experience with those events.

"Many times," Menchiari writes, "I found myself in the middle of clashes. I looked in the eyes of people who gave their life to protect the future of their neighbors."

With his own experiences as a foundation, Menchiari deepened his understanding of how riots played out by studying videos and by speaking with people who had taken part in them—both civilians and police officers. Finally, he studied official crowd control documents and tactics, trying to simplify what he learned into something that was comprehensible and approachable for any user, ultimately making large revisions to the game as his understanding of riots grew.

"I learned an insane amount of surprising things about riots in the last few years," he says.

Apart from the "NO TAV" Riots, the simulator's four main campaigns take players through Egypt's Tahrir Square Revolution against Mubarak, Greece's Battle of Keratea, where police and town residents clashed over an allegedly toxic dumpsite that was to be built near a residential area, and Spain's Indignados Movement, in which the youth of Spain rose up against the festering corruption in banks, politics and capitalism. While America is "not the focus of the game," there are references to the Occupy movement.

While the settings and circumstances are real, Riot is not intended to be overly didactic once the player understands that the dramatic events they are playing through really happened. "Everything else can be researched more in depth on a personal level." Menchiari said.

Are riots a necessary part of political change? Menchiari writes, "it's a hard question," and that he doesn't have an answer. But he hopes that people will seek to "picture clearly" the problems that underlie many riots and what might be done to remedy them.

"By playing this game," he writes, "hopefully we can all come out with our own conclusions."

Perfect Worlds is a series on Motherboard about simulations, imitations, and models. Follow along here.