Category: game design

As you may know, I make the ‘Democracy’ series of video games. They are pretty serious, pretty complex, fairly in-depth simulation games where you run a real world country. At one point I experimented with fictional countries, but it turns out everyone hates that, they want to be the president of their own country, and show they can do a better job than the current leader. Fair enough.

The only problem with this is it means that I need to simulate real world countries accurately enough that people living in them think I have made a proper effort to do so. This is staggeringly difficult to do with a single (albeit flexible and complex) model of politics and economics. What makes it way more difficult, is that it has to be politically, economically and temporally flexible as well.

Allow me to explain.

Imagine you spend months reading statistics and articles and set all of the values of all of the policies for a single country in Democracy 4, for example the UK, and you get all the various values in the model as close as possible to reality. Unemployment looks about right, GDP looks about right, Wages look about right…and on through literally hundreds of different measures. This is VERY hard to do, and a lot of values need to be flexible in interpretation. For example what level is income tax in the UK? Obviously it depends on how much you earn and many other factors…

…but then the very same model has to work if you change some of those variables. Maybe a player decides to abolish the national health service. Or double the minimum wage. Or scrap nuclear weapons, or introduce a new tax on luxury goods. The same model has to cope in all these circumstances, and it has to be credible over time. The national debt is a certain level NOW, and we know roughly what impact it has, but how do we possibly model what will happen in the future? How do we model the impact of increased automation on unemployment, productivity, wages, and international trade? Ideally a video game is made to be playable for many years. Will Democracy 4 make sense in 2025? in 2030? When we all have self driving cars and teslabots, what do the economics look like?

This is all hellishly hard, but one of the particular aspects of what makes it hard is a thing I’m encountering today. I am taking the first gentle steps into looking at an expansion pack that would add some extra countries to the game, and trying to be more organized, and sensible about adding them so that the model is consistent and makes sense. Its way harder than it sounds.

Take for example: BRAZIL. An exciting country to add to the game, as its so different to the others. I am looking forward to adding a special situation for the amazon rainforest, with all its potential economic boom, tourism value and also massive environmental controversy regarding deforestation. Lots of cool stuff here for a potential Democracy 4 player! But lets zoom in on a single statistic:

What is the correct value for the military spending slider for Brazil?

This is not as simple as it sounds. Its pretty easy to google the military budget of Brazil, in USD terms. Thats 25.1 billion USD with a source here: https://worldpopulationreview.com/country-rankings/defense-spending-by-country. It would be easy thus to look at the UK spending (55Bn USD) and do a relative comparison to where we position the UK slider (42%), and use that calculation to set the Brazil military spending at 19%. However, doing a straight USD comparison is fraught with inaccuracies. I cant even find out if that USD number is actual real USD (ie: the value of the Brazilian reals converted at the current exchange rate to USD) or ‘purchase-power-parity‘, which is a different (and generally better) measure altogether. To put it simple: You can probably pay a Brazilian soldier less in USD equivalent than you would pay a US marine. If a Brazilian soldier can buy a house and clothes and food way cheaper than the USD-equivalent spent in a US town, then in effect your military budget is going further…

One way to adjust for this is to take a second measure, using totally different comparisons. So for example, you can also look at the percentage of GDP that is spent on the military, and use that as a baseline. In this case Brazil spends 1.4% of GDP on defense, compared to 2.2% in the UK. Making that adjustment means that the Brazil military slider turns out to be 28% instead of 19%.

To start with, before I go back and play balance and adjust everything (which will take weeks) I’m setting the initial value for those military sliders to be the average of these two measures, so comparing military spending as % of GDP, then absolute value in USD and then averaging the two slider positions. This gives me the following values:

Greece 29%

Ireland 3%

Poland 26%

Switzerland 9%

Turkey 35%

Brazil 23%

At first look, these seem reasonable. Switzerland is famous for its neutrality. Poland is naturally (given its history) more jittery. Ireland… well I cant remember having ever heard of the Irish military at all. Turkey, given its location, probably thinks it can justify quite a strong military.

You might think this is a paper-thin approximation. You are right. I’m sure multiple people have phds in studying the relative military spending of countries around the world. Sadly, I’m just a video game designer and do not have that time, but I do what I can to get sensible numbers where possible, and have to keep in mind that the first priority of any game is to be fun, not accurate.

Still a lot of stats juggling to go!

I don’t think I’ve even officially announced that I am doing this, so any games journalists reading this can consider this an announcement I guess :D. I am working on an expansion pack for my political strategy game Democracy 4, and that expansion pack will be called…

Democracy 4: Voting Systems

As you can clearly guess, its an expansion that is focused on the way people vote, and on how you campaign in the election. Its mostly a features, rather than just content expansion, so it includes new policies, but also a bunch of changes to expand on that part of the game associated with the election campaign and the voting. Here is a rundown of all of the new stuff I’m working on:

New Policies

There are a whole bunch of these, including the minimum voting age, a scary ‘maximum voting age’, rules on corporate donations to parties, and state funding of parties, bans or limits on donations, robo-calls and TV ads during the campaign. There are 11 new policies in total. Some of these will already be in place at the appropriate setting, like the minimum voting age, for all countries, and the compulsory vote policy for Australia

Campaign Focus

A year before the election, you will need to pick a single metric, from a pre-defined list, to be the main metric that will feature in your campaign literature and campaign advertising in general. This is the game equivalent of Clintons ‘Its the economy, stupid’ or Tony Blairs ‘Tough on crime, tough on the causes of crime!’. The idea here is that you pick a metric that you think makes you look good, and hope that nothing turns bad with regards to that metric before election day. Once chosen, a new effect will run from that metric, to all the voters. If you improve the metric…great but if for whatever reason it turns bad, there will be a big negative impact.

Once the campaign focus is chosen, its highlighted with a small red icon in the corner of that metric on the main UI, and also highlighted when viewing that metrics details. Once the election is over, assuming you won…the focus goes away.

Voting Systems

The majority of countries in the game use some sort of ‘proportional representation‘, but some use a constituency based or electoral-college system, that is called ‘first past the post‘. The two systems can give very different results, and you can now pass a law to change from one to the other. Proportional representation results in higher turnout, and can favor smaller parties in 3 party countries. You can expect to see more coalitions in countries with proportional representation.

Campaign Style

Immediately before the election, you have the option of tweaking how your campaign is run. You have a slider that lets you select anything from an optimistic, safe and respectable campaign, right through to a scandalously cheeky dirty-tricks style negative campaign that tries to smear your opponent. The extent to which such a campaign works (rather than backfires) is partly dependent on how trustworthy you are in the eyes of the electorate. Depending on the outcome, the effectiveness of your campaign spending can be increased or reduced.

Better Polling Data

A new option will appear on the polls screen. Currently, in the base game, this simply shows the voting intention of all voters, along with the current approval rating for all voters. This will get an extra option, via checkbox, that lets you change this to see the likely voters, rather than the whole electorate. Some people are more likely to vote than others, so viewing likely voters gives a better impression of the actual result. Toggling between the two will also allow you to see if you should take action to increase (or cynically maybe decrease) turnout in the election.

…All of this is coded, and implemented, and in the DLC that I am currently testing. Testing an expansion pack can be a pretty long process, because I need to ensure it all works, that its balanced and that it adds something cool to the game. I then also need to get all of the text for the new content translated into every language we currently support (which is a lot…and Arabic is coming too!).

This will likely take me a few weeks, and then I’ll be getting it into the hands of the Democracy 4 players! Hopefully all of these additions sound quite cool. Its certainly been interesting working on it. I know that a lot of people think I should add states/constituencies to the game, and support a whole bunch of different types of PR voting systems. I understand the appeal, but its likely overcomplex for a game like this. Most people are not *that* interested in the pros and cons of different types of PR, and certainly very few people know the political characteristics of all 50 US states AND all 650 UK constituencies and so on…for every country :D

I am currently working on some voting systems DLC for Democracy 4. In doing so, I have carried out a lot of testing, and balancing, and evaluating, and have just encountered something that I think is lacking in the game. Or more precisely…wrong…or at least imperfectly modelled.

Take as exhibit A this chart (on the rhs) from the game showing the distribution of happiness (0 at bottom, 100% at top) of all of the simulated voters. Because this is in debug mode it draws 2 exciting lines, which are showing the voting thresholds in the game, drawn across the chart in red and blue

These (hidden from the player) thresholds are used to decide what party voters vote for, have sympathy for, and may even become members or activists for. In a very simple 2 party system, there is just 1 line at 50% (to start with..) in a 3 party system, they are at 40 and 60%. Below 40% = opposition party, 40-60% means centrist party, above 60% means the player party.

Canny maths experts have already spotted that this is not an even split. TRUE! but thats ok, because it represents the fickleness of a first-past-the-post electoral system. If you change it to PR, the game swaps to a 33/66% split, with each party representing one third of the available ‘approval space’ in the game. This is how we represent the fact that voters are more likely to find a party they can support at the ballot box if a more proportional system is used, with fewer wasted votes…

…also I need to point out that the system is not that simple! Over time, the position of the opposition parties moves towards that of the center-of-gravity of the electorate. So if, for example, all the voters are very unhappy, those thresholds will move down, as the opposition parties position themselves so they can win more votes. If you can imagine a new ‘gravitational center’ line in the middle of all the voters, both that red and blue line are getting sprung (to an extent) towards it.

So far so good. Thats how the game works right now.

BUT. Two things are amiss here, and I am now working on improvements. For one thing… in the real world, parties change their positions in order to WIN VOTES not to improve the ‘average approval’ of themselves. In previous blog posts I have labored the point that average approval and voting intention are different things entirely! I have edited the games code for 3 party PR-systems to take this into account. Now… in a 3 party PR system, the opposition parties move towards the gravitational center of voting intention (not approval) only for opposition voters. Let me explain with examples:

The UK has 3 parties of size: Conservative, Labour and Lib Dems. In the old system, the labour and lib dem voters would be essentially moving to a policy position that kept everyone in the UK as happy with them as possible, while still remaining vaguely rooted in their principles. However, in this new system, the Labour/Lib Dem parties will still gravitate towards this position…but the dividing line between those parties will now only be affected by the firm voting intentions of non conservative voters.

Under the old system, a policy change by the non-centrist opposition party (labour), that seriously upset conservatives, but made lib-dem voters happy… would maybe not be adopted, because the average approval of ALL voters (including conservatives) was being measured. Under the new system, labour policy totally ignores the hardcore conservative voters, and is only concerned with winning votes from the lib dems, and more importantly…winning VOTES…not just a change in opinion. So for example, a policy position that has no impact on right-wing lib-dems, but may well win over voters floating between lib-dem and labour…will get adopted.

(Of course the game abstracts this, and you don’t get to see oppositions literal policy positions, but its all represented in the way these thresholds move.)

Why does this matter? Because by making this change, a more sensible position is chosen for that red line. What that means is, under the new algorithm, with a PR system those red and blue parties are more likely to be equal sized, and we are more likely to get coalition outcomes. This is EXACTLY what you would expect under a system of proportional representation.

So thats one change… and something I am definitely still testing, and will be specific to PR, and thus the new DLC. However, when working on this I realised a fundamental misconception about party membership that is unbalancing the game.. <drumroll>

If you look at that chart again (in fact I’ll repeat it with some arrows..) you will see that the 3 parties also have a center point, which is used to determine how much someone believes in the party:

These locations determine how big the membership of your party gets. Someone close to the blue arrow is likely to join the bluie party, someone close to the green arrow is likely to…etc. See the problem?

Yup, the system is total bullshit. The centrist party has its membership center slap bang in the middle of its political sphere, but I placed the other 2 parties at the extremes. At the time, this made sense to me, but now… Ha. no. This makes no sense. Think about political parties on the edge of a mainstream political spectrum. Where are the members and activists? They are likely to be in the same position as the members in the centrist party: At the location CLOSEST to the center of policy position for that party. The voters shown at the red and green arrows are not diehard loyalists! they are the extreme libertarians or fascists or communists who consider the party they vote for to be a reluctant watered down compromise! They are actually the voters on the verge of ‘wasting’ their vote on a fringe party. No! The correct positions should be:

In other words, we should have some red party members here, and ok… maybe not a green party one yet, but certainly more likely than under the old system.

This is a fundamental coding screw up and design miscalculation. Its not exactly critical, but I strive for accuracy of my political modelling. This change will affect non-DLC vanilla games too. If you have been playing Democracy 4 and bemoaning the fact that only the middle party in 3 party countries ever gets any members, you are not wrong to do so. I’ll fix this for the next update.

Democracy 4 has been released from early access over a month ago, and has had 2 big updates since then, and further updates to the game, especially regarding balance tweaks, are definitely coming. However, I am a big fan of the ‘expansion pack’ model of the business, because I think it has a number of positives:

• It allows players who are only casually into the game to play an approachable and simple base version

• It gives scope for players to choose which expansions to get, based on their level of interest

• It means that I can learn from peoples’ feedback on the base game and produce the sort of extra content people might want

Of course, the big question is exactly what part of the game to expand upon or add to. There are a bunch of ideas floating around in my head, and I thought it only sensible to get those ideas out there in the wider world to canvas feedback from real players of the game, so in no order at all, here are some idea.

DLC idea #1 Voting Systems

We already did an electioneering expansion pack for Democracy 3, but all of that content is already included for free in the base game for Democracy 4. However, I think there is a lot of scope here. For example, right now the player has no influence in direct terms, on the voter turnout. We could add policies to encourage voter turnout, like information campaigns (which may or may not benefit you, depending on your electorate). Perhaps polling data could show what the result would be like when polling only likely voters! Also we could model voting reform, so whether or not to lower (or even raise) the voting age, whether party donations are capped, or can be anonymous, can come from corporations or foreign nationals…

There could also be some modeling of campaigning tactics. I like the idea of the player having to choose from a list of different metrics (GDP, Unemployment etc) on which to focus a year before the election, so the player has to be wary of what they drew attention to in their campaign literature. We could also allow attack ads, at a possible risk of backfiring.

Also, some countries like the UK ban political TV ads. We could have this policy, and also maybe a ban on robocalls. We could also have limits on who can stand in elections (US president must be US born etc), and if the state funds political parties at all.

DLC idea #2 Situation Room

This one would expand on the terrorist threat element already in the game. I’ve spent a fair bit of time on this idea. Basically it would introduce time-limited decisions to the game, where a serious threat or event takes place and the president (you) has to make a decision on what to do RIGHT NOW, in a ‘the clock is ticking’ style. This would mean no time to consult a lot of data, and a gut decision.

An example dilemma is shown below. I think it would be interesting if the advice and intelligence given in these sudden events would be dependent on how involved your intelligence/security network was, so it would be harder for liberal democracies, and easier for more authoritarian states, to add some tension between liberal principles and security:

I think of this idea as a sort of ‘west-wing situation room meets 24’ style political thriller expansion, where the player has to deal with lost of situations that with any luck, the general voting population never even hear about. We could have dirty bomb threats, suicide bombers, espionage from other countries, and the possibility of using illegal measures covertly to protect the security of the country.

In game-mechanic terms, I keep coming back to the idea of this involving what are in effect spruced-up dilemmas, but with a timer, and no opportunity to gather extra dat and come back to them.

DLC idea #3 Dirty Tricks

This would basically be a corruption, scandals and dirty tricks expansion, where the game effectively tempts you to be corrupt, with potentially bad consequences later. We can all sadly come up with tons of ways in which we could model this. I know one game (might be tropico) actually used to let you put money in your own private account, and we could do a similar thing here, literally taking money in exchange for policies :D

I think there is a lot of scope here. You could order the secret service to look for embarrassing or compromising information on opposition leaders or campaigners. You could literally bribe the press to give you better media coverage. There would be an option to just flat out lie about some government statistics, to prosecute whistleblowers, to threaten journalists and so on.

We have a very slight element of this in the game already whereby general media censorship means that political media spin events are more likely to be perceived as positive. However, I can imagine it being an option where an event clearly backfires but you can then choose to flat out threaten any journalists that reported on it.

Intimidation at polling stations by violent gangs ordered indirectly by you would also be included here.

Perhaps we could track both your own morals (on a good -> corrupt axis) along with your private bank account, as things that a player could choose to focus on for their own satisfaction :D. I can imagine an interesting situation where players who decide to play a game completely fairly and with principles would be tempted before a difficult election to bribe some journalists “just this once” etc.

DLC idea #4 Country Pack

Pretty self explanatory. I think there are a bunch of interesting countries that could be added to the game. Switzerland strikes me as interesting, as does Poland, maybe also Turkey and perhaps a country like Honduras. I think the goal would be to pick interesting countries, not just ones with the most players, and take the time to represent them as well as possible, so doing a lot of research into the economics and political environment for each one. That probably involves a bunch of new policies and situations and dilemmas for each country to represent their specific challenges.

Anyway… I have not decided yet, and am not currently working on DLC, but I was interested to get anybody’s first reaction to which direction to head in. I’ll check comments here, and post a twitter poll at https://twitter.com/cliffski/status/1504400682836758541