Democratic Spill

Given the current political climate, I thought it'd be appropriate to finally mention a cool game I played a while ago - Democracy 3. Well, I want to preface this by saying that it wasn't the game I was expecting, and I didn't end up playing it for very long (though I eventually want to get all the achievements in the game), however, playing it gave me a better understanding for how hard it is to run a country while trying to stay elected.

You spend most of the game on this screen, which looks incredibly messy, but that's because there are so many things you need to balance in the game! 

The most important section for getting re-elected is in the middle. The bars for each category show how much that demographic like you, and the grey shading in the background shows how much of your total voters are of that demographic. 

You can also mouse-over various parts to see how they're connected to other parts. Red arrows means it has a negative effect, green arrows means it has a positive effect. Though you can't see it from the image, the faster the arrows are moving, the stronger the effect.

The way in which you influence the game is through policies which you can add/remove or alter the extremity of.

As you can see, there's an implementation time for the policy, because it takes time to introduce stuff.

Once you decide to implement it, you can see the effect it has on the different demographics, and you can adjust the slider for how extreme you want it to be, which may end up costing more money, but having a larger benefit.

So that's the gist of the game!

What have I learnt from the game? Capitalists hate me. All the time. No matter which country I play as, I usually end up with death threats from capitalists. If not them, then the religious people, or the patriots.

I really cannot cut down on welfare. It just feels wrong to me. Even though it is by far the largest expense that I have, I feel things like disability benefits are the right thing to do, even though it's hugely unpopular with my voters. That's my biggest problem with this game - I can't seem to let go of my personal beliefs when playing it (by problem, I don't mean it's a flaw in the game, I mean it's a flaw in me that makes the game more difficult than it should be). There are some policies that are completely against my values, that I can't bring myself to implement them even though it would really help my popularity with certain important demographics.

The reason the religious groups always want to murder me is probably because I am very pro-science. Well, pro-choice. I don't like policies that force people to do things. For instance, there's a policy that involves forcing very child to pray at school. I have nothing against praying, and in my yoga classes, we do a lot of meditation and spiritual things, but I don't like the idea that something is compulsory for all children. 

I guess Grad Paul was right about my political leanings, although I don't seem to be as socialist as he claims according to the in-game political compass. It's interesting to see that most of my friends also lie in the same area.

(I'm the one with the eye and the barely visible santa hat.)

Another thing that has really boosted my sympathy for the government is the implementation time of policies. I can't count the number of times I've had capitalist death threats, or had one of my capitalism-leaning ministers threaten to quit, while I have an awesome policy that'll be popular with the capitalists on its way, they just have to wait a few more quarters. It is incredibly frustrating. I can imagine it's only worse for real politicians, as in this game, my policies go through regardless of whether my cabinet supports me, but I believe in Australia, it has to be debated and voted on, and it's all about getting enough support from the others to push it through. And you also have to handle seeing yourself on the news and hearing the public's backlash firsthand. Luckily this game spares you that aspect of politics, because I don't think my skin is thick enough to handle it.

Overall, I think it's a fun game, but I don't think it has much in terms of replayability. The countries aren't all that different (though I've only played three so far: UK, Canada and Australia), and maybe because of my personal beliefs getting in the way, they always end up the same for me. Although I think there is a mode to make the starting state random (rather than based on what the creator has put in for a particular country), so I might try that some day.