The long-awaited game Storytron, from legendary game-designer Chris Crawford, is now visible to the public. Storytron is a system for creating games in which real stories take place — and it's designed to allow you to create your own stories as well. The launch-game, Balance of Power is "a geopolitical strategy storyworld."

You begin on September 12th, 2001. You are the President of the United States and your job is to advance American interests, as expressed in a list of policy goals. These policy goals can be found by clicking on the Things button. Each of these is a policy of some sort, with its "owner" (the country that would actually do it) listed first. The USA's own policy actions are at the top of the list. If you select any of these policy goals, you will see a lot of text explaining exactly what it entails. The desirability of that policy goal to the USA is also displayed next to the bold text Undesirable_Desirable. You want to make certain that the policy goals that are desirable are eventually executed, and the ones that are undesirable are never executed. For now you can just skim through this list, but in order to do well in BoP2K, you'll need to familiarize yourself with each of these, even those that don't appear to affect you. Why? Because you will need to make deals with other countries involving some of those policy-treaties.

Your first task is to select which policy goal you want to pursue first. You'll see the incomplete sentence: "I" followed by a menu entitled "Do What?" listing two choices: "set goal" and "set goal to prevent." The first means "I want to set a goal for something I want to achieve." The second means "I want to set a goal to prevent something from happening." Select the first menu item ("set goal") and a list of twelve policies desirable to the USA is presented. This being September 12th, 2001, you want to get your hands on Osama bin Laden. Select that option and click on the little period button that appears. (It means: "period–end of sentence–that's what I want to say.")