I cannot ask the player to be an idiot and play Donald Trump — although that could be a fun variation. Since no rational person would ever do any of the idiotic things Mr. Trump does, the player must be the ruler of China. The player’s objective is to adroitly take advantage of Mr. Trump’s blunders to further Chinese geopolitical objectives.
Mr. Trump’s “strategy” will be simple to implement: it’s just random. I’ll have a long list of tweets and nitwit policy decisions for Mr. Trump to choose from. For his tweets, I could probably use something like the headline generator in the original Balance of Power.
Hold on, here’s a really great idea: why not apply the old inverse-Poe algorithm? Thousands of his tweets have been archived. They provide a rich source of material. I’m sure that I could build a good inverse-Poe algorithm; but should I use letters or words as the atoms?
That really would be great, but how does it comprise policy? I may need to have two engines for Trump: an inverse-Poe engine, that has no policy implications, and an actual policy engine. That would be a matter of randomly choosing from a list of idiotic schemes. I’ll need to write down that list. The inverse-Poe engine would probably use words as its atoms, not letters, because Trump has such a small vocabulary and such predictable patterns to his sentences.
I’d want to make them relevant to the most recent events, but more important, they should be funny. That will take some doing.
The player’s verbs as the Chinese leader must fit into China’s geopolitical objectives:
1. Bringing Taiwan under Chinese rule.
2. Establishing territorial control over the South China Sea (the nine-dashed line)
3. Finlandizing South Korea and Japan
4. Putting Kim Jong Un into a safe box
5. Advancing the One Belt, One Road Initiative
6. Cowing India
7. Finlandizing Vietnam