Category: game design

Sooo.. I found myself almost sleepwalking into adding a new feature to Democracy 3. I honestly can’t remember actually making the decision to include it, it just seemed to ‘happen’. In democracy 2, the model for income of voters is fairly basic. You can implement policies which affect different levels of income (luxury goods tax hits the rich, for example), and that would affect the membership of the poor, middle income and wealthy voter groups. So far so good.

But it turns out that life is more complex than that. My example of choice is ‘agriculture subsidies’. In the current game, Agriculture subsidies make farmers happy, and they also encourage people to become farmers (so farmer voter group membership rises). This is accurate, and logical and works well. But it has no actual effect on anybodies personal income. This is clearly wrong. So in Democracy 3, I’ve changed things so that each voter group has an ‘income’ value, and policies (and events) can feed directly into them. You also get an extra tab on the graph, and list of effects to see these things happening.

So now… Agriculture subsidies have their usual effects, but also they make farmers wealthier. The subtle effect is to push farmers out of poverty, and towards wealth. This may be more logical, and detailed and accurate, but why is it good game design? what does it add?

let’s say you have identified the poor, and farmers as two ‘core’ groups that you will base your support on. They are the bedrock of your voting block, and you will keep them happy. So far so good. One of your policies, as demanded by your poor farming supporters, is higher agriculture subsidies, and so you do their bidding. One of the side effects is now that a chunk of those poor farmers are now not so poor. They start joining the middle income or even wealthy groups, and that brings with it a host of other influences to their thinking (voters are in multiple groups, at varying strengths). Suddenly, there are more farmers thinking ‘hold on, I don’t think I appreciate this luxury goods tax, or inheritance tax. What were you thinking???’. Your policies that subsidized the poor and hit the rich (including those taxes on the rich you levied to pay for the subsidies) are now inadvertently affected the very voters you were trying to help…

it’s a subtle effect, but I think it’s real-world, and also represents an interesting trade off. I see this in British politics a lot. The left were concerned about child poverty and pensioner poverty, so to combat it, we got better provision of child benefit and winter fuel benefits for the elderly. Worthy goals, but they also push up the living standards of parents and the retired. This has side effects. Now, in a time of austerity, the government finds it extremely hard to reduce either benefit. This is the problem of so called ‘middle-class’ benefits. A policy designed to do one thing has had other effects, due to the changes on people’s income.

I think this is an effect worth modeling, and it’s fascinating to see it in game. When trying to make environmentalists happy, all my feed-in-tariffs and grants also make them better off, and suddenly I’m the champion of the wealthy and not the poor. I love trade-offs and compromises like that. They are the key to what makes Democracy interesting to play.

Sooo… the system for pressure groups in Democracy 2 was fairly simplistic in comparison to this. See how this sounds.

There are a host of different pressure groups in Democracy 3. Some are relatively harmless and are mostly a way of registering dissatisfaction by voters. Some of them are more aggressive, some are extremist groups that are actively dangerous to your government. The extremist groups contain the rioters, the assassins, the corporate mega tycoons, fascists and crazies who will try to blow up your presidential car and so on…

Every voter in the game has a predisposition towards militancy. Each group has a required militancy level for people to join it. if you are mild mannered, no matter how upset you are, you will not join the peoples revolutionary army, although you might join the peoples socialist party (for example).

Here is the fun part…

The extremist groups (revolutionary army) have parent groups that are used as a ‘funnel’ into their membership (and that is the only way they get members). So if you are a member of the relatively harmless peoples socialist party, you will, providing you stay angry at the government, get ‘radicalized’ over time. If this radicalization meets a certain threshold, and your innate militancy is high enough, then you become a recruit of the more extreme group. There is also a point at which your radicalization will fall enough for you to quit the extreme group. Only the extremist groups are really worrying.

I think this is much more realistic, and should give rise to some interesting phenomena, especially ‘lag’. By this, I mean that carrying out an action that really upsets a group of voters (say… a war for oil) will have long term effects because it will push people into radical groups where previously they were happy to just shout slogans. The key is that the ‘leave’ threshold is way below the join one (giving groups some internal momentum) which means that once someone joins the revolutionary army, you need to really cheer them up if you are going to reduce the long term threat and have them leave.

It also means that a large and growing ‘harmless’ pressure group, is a warning sign that you could be looking at an extremist faction developing if you do not take steps to keep that group happy. If the peoples socialist party is huge, you need to be careful what you do to upset socialists further. if it’s tiny, you can probably risk it.

Obviously it will be fun to code stuff like the effects of intelligence services on radicalization, and dilemmas etc. If we arrest a radical without trial, that should accelerate radicalization, as should war. The trouble with this game is it could balloon to be the most complex software in the universe :D

A short video with me going through the new stuff in Democracy 3:

Sooo… One of the drawbacks of Democracy 2‘s model was that it only really accounted for public sector pensions, housing, schools and hospitals. This was unrealistic and I’m fixing it in Democracy 3. In D2, if the state didn’t provide schools, people were illiterate. You don’t need to be Ron Paul to be convinced that it isn’t as clear-cut as that. So how am I planning to fix that?

Democracy 3 has policies (things the player chooses to implement, or not, and adjust) and also ‘simulation values’, just like D2 did. A simulation value is basically a statistic, something that arises out of the simulation and which you have zero control of. Pollution levels are one example. Literacy (a catch-all for general educational level) is another. In Democracy 2, a player couldn’t change the literacy level, but they could implement various state policies that would indirectly affect it, like state schooling.

Democracy 3 has the literacy level stat, and also a private schools stat. By default, private schools are at a certain level (tied to GDP, and therefore the general level of wealth), and they have the same effect (roughly) on literacy as state schools do. However, they have effects public schools don’t, such as a reduction in lower and middle incomes. This is because those values represent ‘disposable’ incomes for those groups, and having to pay for private schools eats into that. The truly wealthy laugh off mere school fees, so it’s not an issue for them. Also, unlike state schools, the private schools don’t reduce inequality, or boost state employees and trade unions, and they keep capitalists, rather than socialists happy.

Now let’s revisit state schools. they work exactly as they used to, except they have an effect on private schools. The more you spend on public schooling, the less private schools there are. In effect, the better the state schools are, the less people are prepared to empty their pockets for private education, which makes sense.

So hopefully, the net result of this is a system where either approach (laissez faire or state intervention) can get you decent schooling, but you have to pick how to handle it. The state schools have to be paid for, which will mean cuts elsewhere or higher taxes. The private schools are paid for by people direct, but they can cause problems of inequality (with knock-on impacts on crime etc), and the people will need more money left in their pockets to pay for it (lower taxes). To further enhance the whole area, I could introduce policies which gave tax-credits for private education, which would allow me to keep private schooling afloat during a recession. Maybe a system of state scholarships could reduce inequality and compensate for private schools as the only option? (technically this is tricky).

Obviously this is a VAST simplification of the real world, but I think it’s far closer to reality than the Democracy 2 system. My plan has pensions, housing and healthcare working the same way.

Thoughts?