Game Design, Programming and running a one-man games business…

Category: game design

Healthcare cost and benefits in democracy 4 (kind of)

Posted on April 1, 2020

I read the infamous article yesterday that a lot of UK people are screaming and hurling abuse at over twitter. Basically a commentator wrote about the tradeoffs between continuing with a lock down in the UK due to COVID19, or letting people go back to work, and the relative impact on health in the short and long term.

99% of people hurling abuse did not read the article, and if they did, they did not understand it.

Here is a shorter & simpler version of the argument:

  • The UK lock-down will prevent X deaths from people with an average life expectancy of Y and a general state of health of Z.
  • The economic cost of the lock down will result in W extra deaths from suicide/obesity/other factors and K extra deaths due to the reduced funding for healthcare over P years as the economic cost of the lock-down bailout package is repaid
  • Therefore it MIGHT be the case that the cure is worse than the disease and we should stop it, allowing X people to die.

Now pretty obviously, whether or not the argument is right depends MASSIVELY on the values for X,Y,Z,W,K and P. These figures are all highly speculative, and open to interpretation and re-evaluation, and we cannot be sure of any of them…but thats fine, it doesn’t change the core of the argument, an argument which we already have enshrined in UK government in an organisation called NICE.

Britain's National Health Service Continues to Struggle | Neil ...

NICE is the national institute for health and care excellence, and its job is basically to look at drugs/treatments the NHS might like, and work out if they make economic sense for the NHS to use them. Given non-infinite money, and cash spent on treatment Y cannot be sued on treatment Z, so obviously NICE has to do a balancing act to ensure that the most lives are save for a given health budget.

Sometimes, people get upset about NICE refusing drugs, and thats understandable when it affects you, but I cannot help but see what NICE does as logical, and essential. Budgets are never infinite, choices MUST be made.

In Democracy 4, the player makes these decision all the time. If you set the state healthcare (or alternative policy such as vouchers) budget to maximum, then health will go up. The link may not be linear, but it will definitely go up. However, the budget for this needs paying for, which if you are unlucky, can mean a debt crisis, or cutbacks in other areas leading to recession, thus unemployment, obesity, poverty…all things that will…reduce the standard of health…

This feedback mechanism, where in some cases raising X to boost Y, also reduces A, which causes B which then paradoxically REDUCES y… is a common theme both in the game, and in real world economics. Basically…real-world-shit is complicated! Its also something that is intuitively hard for us to grasp. As primitive mammals we didn’t need to think 6 moves ahead. We barely needed to think 2 moves ahead, which is why Democracy 3/4 is an interesting challenge and feels interesting to play. Its also why most people suck at chess, and go. We are not good at this.

Sadly this is disastrous for public policy. NICE *HAS* to exist, despite peoples anger, and the calculation as to the economic cost of a healthcare measure OBVIOUSLY has to happen. Modern political discourse (shit-flinging on twitter about comparing this to eugenics) means that it can never be openly debated by grown up politicians. We force them to lie…

So a politician may say we will do WHATEVER IT TAKES to get the virus under control. This is a lie. You also hear people say “If the only effect of this $50 million policy is that it saves one persons life…its been worth it.” This is also a lie. But modern sound-byte culture means the truth can never be discussed.

I think I need to work on reflecting this a lot more in Democracy 4. Maybe we need event to pop up and say more media-style things like this:

“Lucy Matthews, age 24, has died due to breathing difficulties partly resulting from the high level of pollution on our streets. She leaves behind a daughter Emily, age 4. Her death could have been avoided if the country had introduced emission limits on cars.”

That might be a bit harrowing, or distressing, or maybe a bit…manipulative, but I think it would accurately reflect the dilemma for real politicians who have to balance the knowledge that they are absolutely choosing to let some people die, with every decision they make. Thats just inevitably part of the job.

Should I add that sort of thing?

CO2 Policies in Democracy 4

Posted on March 21, 2020

I’m starting to fine tune some of the values in the simulation so that they reflect a better approximation of real world choices in 2020, as well as keeping the game fun to play, and taking into account some new policy options that we have introduced. A runthrough of all the current options in my policies list that affect CO2 emissions DIRECTLY gives me this:

This is in NO WAY the extent of the CO2 sim, because its also affected indirectly. For example we now model veganism/vegetarianism and its impact on emissions, and you can indirectly affect them by policies that encourage less meat consumption, which happens (again indirectly)( through tougher food standards and food labeling and certain dilemmas and events.
Also a lot of emissions come from Cars and Planes, and we have taxes and other systems such as bus and train subsidies that allow you to affect the take-up of those forms of transport, as well as the conversion from fossil fuel vehicles to electric..

HOWEVER! That does not mean I should just throw my hands up in despair and go ‘its too complex!’. I need to keep checking values to ensure they make at least some rational sense right? :D So what do I need to change here…

Obviously the carbon tax is WAY too good. It has negative impacts too, in that it damages the economy and upsets capitalists at the extremes, but not nearly enough for a policy that brings in so much cash. At the extreme end it brings in more than twice as much as inheritance tax at its extremes. Something I REALLY should model is one of the paradoxes of taxes like these…

A carbon tax is an externality tax. Its basically punishing people for doing something bad thats not otherwise reflected in the market. If such taxes do their job… people do less of that thing. if people do less of that thing… the tax REVENUE goes DOWN. In other words, as we put the tax up, the revenue should rise and then plateau and then fall…

Luckily thats easy! because we support all sorts of equation types in the game, Currently the game has a multiplier on the income from the carbon tax like so:

CO2Emissions,0.5+(1.0*x)

Which is rubbish, because if we reduce emissions to zero, the tax should clearly be zero too. We need to change that to be a straight linear multiplier instead. Also I think we need some extra negatives for that tax. It effectively acts as an energy tax (annoys everyone) a car tax (annoys motorists…scaled by the electric car transition…) and a flight tax (annoys wealthy and reduces tourism).

Looking at the other end of things, Carbon Capture & Storage is ludicrously ineffective yet expensive. Is there a reason for this? Well it is VERY fast acting, unlike many of the others (which makes sense, as it ACTIVELY takes carbon out of the atmosphere, instead of hoping one day people buy less polluting cars…), but even so… I may have to bump up its usefulness and tweak the cost down a bit…

Other noticeable ones are new car subsidies having minuscule effect and huge cost. It reduces our emission by 4% at best. Cars contribution to emissions is roughly 12% of the total (data here). Assuming that the new car subsidies at their peak involve maybe 50% of cars being replaced, that should affect 6% of emissions…so new cars being more efficient really is a drop in ocean. Yikes.

Meanwhile in the real world about 50% of CO2 is from the energy sector, yet my renewable energy subsidies only reduce emissions at maximum by 15%, whereas pollution controls are 19%. That seems backwards at best, but maybe pollution controls needs a major reduction in effectiveness. After all, its just ‘controls’ without specifying more, so that might limit emissions, but certainly not stop them entirely. Its likely focused on particulates and even water/ground pollution too…

Also mandatory micro-generation looks a little generous. As effective as centralized subsidies? I doubt it. Even if EVERYONE starts to retrofit houses with solar panels, that still doesn’t cover winter/night-time generation, and in terms of bang-for-your bucks, Hydro and Wind (esp offshore huge farms) are likely to be more cost effective.

Also I reckon eco home regulations is under-effective. It will take a LONG time to take effect, but as someone who RIGHT NOW is getting new windows fitted (see below my thermal camera image showing the new (Blue) and old (yellow!) and can feel the difference… I think that this should be a more effective overall and per-dollar policy.

warmerhouse.jpg

Lots more to tweak!

Progress on Democracy 4 speeding up

Posted on December 8, 2019

It must be hell being a ‘producer’ in the big budget triple-a games development system. The development of a video game proceeds at almost any conceivable rate other than linear. I’m sure for some games there is an immediate sprint of exciting new stuff…then a drought as bugs are fixed. In the case of Democracy 4, we have had a whole lot of under-the-hood re-coding with little to show for it visually, and now a sudden rush of cool stuff happening.

Of course a lot of this tracks from the point at which artwork and music and sfx start rolling in. I use contractors to develop music, sfx and art, so I don’t have the option of just hearing the odd new piece of music or peering over an artists shoulder to see how stuff is going. It can be hard to drill into people that “yup, you can send me new stuff EVERY DAY, its fine”. As a result, Democracy 4 seems to progress in sudden jumps and spurts when new stuff goes into the game.

When I talk to players of D3 about the new game, they are always focused on new options and content. What new policies will go in? what new events? what will they be able to do that they couldn’t do before. This is all vital stuff, and I’ve kept quiet and felt bad about discussing the games development for quite a while because we simply haven’t been working on that.

For ages, it feels like I’ve been tweaking the shape or size or color of buttons, the layout of dialogs, and jeff has been recoding the way everything gets rendered (especially text, allowing us to support Russian/Chinese when the game leaves early access rather than four years later…) This is all super-vital stuff, and i’m glad we have been giving it the attention that it definitely deserves, but its probably left an impression that D4 is a shiny re-skin rather than a proper sequel…which is not true.

I recently mentioned that we now have third party support (if people choose it), which is the first new feature. We have also discussed (and its on my personal todo list) adding support for nationalization and privatization to the game. This will make quite a difference, but we haven’t reeled off any of the new simulation data we will be adding to the game.

Today I added some new simulation values to the game: healthcare demand and Internet Speeds. These are both pretty cool. High tech means more healthcare options (operations & treatments) are possible, but also increase demand. Immigration and actual healthcare problems such as contagious diseases, alcoholism and obesity will also feed into demand. Balance this against private and public healthcare provision to work out if you have a hospital overcrowding crisis.

Internet speeds is a fun one because its a much-needed policy that allows us to make young people happy or unhappy depending on speed. I’ve also added an effect where it makes people more likely to be self employed, which is relevant to me, living in a tiny rural village where there are lots of people working from home. Internet speed is way more of an issue here politically than you would think.

Other stuff we added recently includes multinational tax avoidance (especially by tech firms, such as ones that rhyme with ‘moogle’ or ‘blapazon’), and a ‘diverted profits tax’ (also sometimes called a transfer-pricing tax) which helps to combat it. There are a LOT more to come, and yes, to avoid 99% of the replies…universal income will be one of them :D.

Because I have been a bit slack on blogging and am reducing my twitter usage, I should point out to anybody reading this that OH MY GOD, you can now get our awesome pharmaceutical cure-em-up ‘Big Pharma‘ on the Playstation, The XBox and on something called the Nintendo Switch. I think those are game ‘consoles’, which all sounds very young and hip to me. It sounds like a perfect Christmas gift to me. (but not for me thx, I’ve got a copy).

Democracy 4 – Multi Party Support

Posted on November 19, 2019

So I had a sudden mad rush of adrenaline this past weekend and decided I should code multi-party support into Democracy 4. This is something people have asked me for over a very long period, but I’ve always resisted it. I thought it would change the game into some horrible three-way negotiation and back-room dealing simulation rather than be focused on actual policies and theories which is what I am more interested in…

Actually I’ve always found it weird people WANT the game to be basically more like the corrupt, undemocratic bullshit that a lot of western multi-party politics has become. Surely in our heads what we want is a trial of ideas and philosophies where the best policies for the people win? nobody fantasizes about having to implement policies you hate because you need to haggle with some other party leader?

The sheer optimistic joy of coalition government

Anyway…eventually me and Jeff got chatting and decided that there WAS a way to include some elements of multi-party politics, without totally breaking the way the game works, and which could work within the existing framework of political capital and policy decisions. But first, I had to sort out the UI.

Democracy 3 has always had 2 parties, and because I never intended to change this, there were actual hard coded ‘pointers’ to the player and opposition parties everywhere in code. Essentially this just meant a lot of donkey-work going through code and changing this to an open ended list everywhere, and checking everything would save and load ok, and that we didn’t have any legacy stuff referring to ‘the opposition party’ in the code.

Then I needed to re-jig a lot of GUI code. There were basically three places where parties get referenced, the party screen (showing members/activists over time), the fundraising screen (this was part of the D3 electioneering DLC but now integrated into the game) and the election results screen.

As I write this, I’m done changing all the GUI apart from the post-election breakdown of each voter group and how they voted (it needs different colors for each opposition group too). So right now, the post-election screen in a 3-party game looks like this: (work in progress BTW)

shiny new user interface (work in progress)

I’m thinking (for now) that a 3 party limit makes most sense. To explain that, I need to delve into the two areas that are needed to make this work within the simulation: Joining parties, and coalitions.

In the current game (Democracy 3) party joining is simple. Players build up over time a sympathy to a party if they are super happy (player) or super unhappy (opposition) eventually joining that party. A weakening of sympathy for a party over time results in the player leaving. I decided to keep this system, but to position the new 2nd opposition party as a ‘centrist’ party between the player and the opposition. In other words, if a value of 100% happiness means joining the players party, and 0% means joining the opposition, 37.5% means joining the new centrist opposition. Why 37.5%? because we still see 50% happiness as being the point where you will vote for the player (if you vote…)

Let me explain the term centrist. I’m not referring to politically centrist at all. In fact the game makes no explicit assumption about the political position of either opposition party. Basically the ‘opposition’ are the party who absolutely oppose your party position on everything, and the ‘centrist’ party (the new 3rd party) are midway between you and the opposition. In theory, your party could be centrist, the opposition right wing, and the new opposition mildly left wing. The key point here is that the new opposition is *closer* to your position than the old opposition is.

random image of yang for no reason

So…I’ve done all the code for this and modeled correctly voters joining and leaving all 3 parties over time. So thats in the game and working (hurrah!). The next thing I need to do is to code in the effects of a coalition.

If your party gets >50% of the votes in an election (ignoring absent voters) then you win just as before. If you do NOT get that, but you ARE the largest party…then you go into a coalition in government with you sharing power with one of the other parties. At first sight, this makes no difference to how the game is played…

…but actually it reduces your political capital each turn dramatically. In other words…you really cant get much done. HOWEVER, you will be regularly offered deals by your coalition partner, where they basically say ‘implement/cancel/change THIS policy, and we will give you X political capital’. Obviously we will engineer code that will always make that an *interesting* decision for you to make. In other words, to reference my own countries recent coalition government, this is ‘give us a referendum on political reform and we will stop blocking your economic policy’. Obviously in real politics this happens all the time (in >2 party systems).

yet another group of happy politicians in a coalition! compromise feel so great!

Hopefully this strikes an interesting and acceptable compromise between having all the machinations of multi-party government, while still keeping the game playable and understandable to people who enjoy Democracy 3. I do intend to make this totally optional as a parameter when you start a new game, so you could (for example) play the USA as a true 3 party system, or Germany as a 2 party system, whatever appeals to you.

This is the first big ‘gameplay’ change that makes Democracy 4 different to democracy 3. So far its been tech changes (multi-language text rendering and vector graphics) and UI changes (OMG it looks so much nicer). We also have a lot of content changes planned (policies,events etc). More on that over time…

Democracy 4 GUI update

Posted on November 9, 2019

We are still working away on Democracy 4…although I have not blogged about it much. This is partly because Jeff is doing a lot of ‘under-the-hood’ debugging and GUI support stuff, so there has not been that much to show for it yet. Unlike many sequels we are doing this GUI first and Mechanics / Content second, so for a while, it will look like a beautifully re-skinned democracy 3, until we start adding all the new events and policies etc.

Anyway… I sometimes forget how much slicker and cleaner the new UI is because I stare at it a lot, but here is a side by side comparison of the electioneering ‘perceptions screen’ for both games:

(BTW we likely will not use those same Democracy 3 icons for those 3 things, they are placeholder).

Re-sized screenshots do not do the GUI justice really, because its vector based and super-super-crisp. I do think that having a proper UI style guide, and vector graphics is going to make the new version feel SO much nicer to use. The previous game is from 2013 and starting to look like it…

There will be a lot more updates to come once we start putting in the new events. We just ordered all of the event graphics (and there are 95 of them this time, for even more actual events) and I’m looking forward to blogging about the new stuff we are adding.

Oh and in case you didn’t realize from the above screenshot, ALL of the content from Social Engineering, Extremism, Clones & Drones and Electioneering will ship in Democracy 4 as standard.