November 11th, 2019
I’ve been thinking about doing a political game for a long time. Certainly the presidency of Mr. Trump has motivated me to build such a game, but I’ve never come up with a design I like until today.
Let’s start with the design of my 2010 version of Balance of the Planet. It was organized as a huge network of related cause and effect. I think that fundamental structure is necessary for a game about politics at the highest level. Everything effects everything else.
In Balance of the Planet, each page in the hyperdocument represented one variable; the variables all affected each other but there were a few final variables that determined the success of the player. In this game, I want the player to be able to specify their values at the outset. So let’s work backwards from there. What should the final values of a game about America’s future be? GDP is an obvious one. I don’t think that we need one for environmental quality (although there will be plenty of intermediate variables about environmental quality): that will manifest itself in GDP, but what other measures can there be? We could use all the variables used in Balance of the Planet: poor world deaths from starvation, pollution, and climate change, along with rich world deaths from pollution and climate change.
But I’d like to include the geopolitical elements included in Balance of Power. For example, if China annexes Taiwan by force, that’s clearly bad, but how do I measure it? I could use a some sort of Freedom Index, but that will be difficult to measure.
Should I break the world down into individual countries, large blocs, or just USA and the rest of the world? My sense right now is to go with blocs: USA, EU, Latin America, Africa, Islamic World, India, China, Japan, and Russia.
I think that I shall disdain reality and make the player the President for Life with an infinite life span. That’s the only way they can directly experience the consequences of their decisions. This also implies a compressed time span.
I can’t make it a single-turn game as I did with Balance of the Planet; other countries will take actions in the future that will reflect decisions taken by the player. For example, without careful statesmanship, China will annex Taiwan by force. This won’t happen for at least a decade, but already Mr. Trump is setting up the conditions for it to take place. My inclination is to make each turn equal to four years to match presidential and Congressional terms. But do I want the player to experience resistance from Congress? I don’t think so; that brings up domestic political issues that are rife with problems. This suggests that perhaps I should make each turn equal to five years; that lines up more neatly with the calendar.
So what should be the set of variables I use? Let’s start with final variables: the ones that determine the player’s success or failure:
American GDP
November 14th
I’m back, with another angle of approach: let’s list the various policy options (the VERBS) available to the player. This breaks down into two groups: ongoing verbs, like a carbon tax, and event verbs that require some sort of reaction from the player (e.g., “China annexes Taiwan”)
Ongoing verbs:
carbon tax $/ton
Income tax progressivity: %/$
environmental price: $/death
military spending: % of revenue
Interest rate: %
Tariffs on Country X
Spending on nuclear, solar, wind, HVDC ,etc.
One-time events:
climate-caused disasters
China annexes South China Sea
China annexes Taiwan
China announces closer trade ties with country X
Paris Accords I, II, III, IV, etc
Russia annexes Baltic States
Japan, Korea, Philippines finlandize to China
terrorist attacks
EU dissolves NATO
Iran attacks Iraq
Iran announces nuclear missile capability
Israel attacks Fordham facility in Iran
You know… I could build this stuff like the Encounter System: lots of little events that permit you to establish your position step by step. Conferences, meetings with foreign leaders, etc.
November 16th
Problem: BotP was written in Java as a standalone; this project must be made directly available on the web, so it must use a combination of HTML and JavaScript. There are too many variables to pass from page to page, so I must use a single page that hauls in data from a dataset. This is similar to the problem I’m facing with Le Morte D’Arthur. Should I therefore bite the bullet and learn how to access data held elsewhere? Damn, I absolutely refuse to learn SQL. There’s got to be a way to do this. So off I go to do some research.
November 21st
I’ve been thinking about these problems in the background, and I have come to the conclusion that I am ready to proceed with experimentation. First I must solve the problem of accessing data from JavaScript.
November 29th
Oops! I realized that the encounter system is much better suited to this design problem than the hypertexty approach used in Balance of the Planet. I must completely rethink this design.