The one I really like the sound of is the Economic Realism mod, and I really need to find the time to give that one a spin! Harris: To be honest I don't get the time to play too many of them.
Shacknews: Positech has been fully supportive of Democracy 3 mods. In terms of simulating the results of this election, actually a few people have been doing that online already, so I've been hugely entertained watching them do that! Our voting system is just appalling at giving us the results people actually vote for. I think the most depressing thing about our results is the huge gap between votes and representation. Harris: Haha, there is a question! My politics are pretty complex, I'm like the complex voters in the game, and I've voted for different parties over the years. What are your feelings on the results? And also, were you tempted to simulate this week's events in your game to get something of an idea of how the future might play out?
Shacknews: As a resident of the United Kingdom, you closely followed this week's elections. That makes it a much more complete and rounded game. The first one introduced subtle policies that take into account gradually, the second let people introduce extremist policies that are generally never enacted in real life, and the third introduced the idea of technological change and the sort of issues we will face in the future.
Harris: The biggest changes were the three expansion packs that we added, and I think each one addressed a defined area that let the game grow and become more realistic.
#DEMOCRACY 3 LETS PLAY PATCH#
Shacknews: How has Democracy 3 progressed since it was first released? What's been added to the game and has anything changed through a patch since its release?
#DEMOCRACY 3 LETS PLAY CODE#
It's a hideously complex game to write code for. Its a bit complex to explain how it works, but basically the whole game is modelled as a custom-designed neural network, making the whole simulation a sort of 'brain' made up of lots of individual brain cells who are voters. The game simulates about 2,000 virtual voters and every single one is unique, because they all represent a mixture of varying strengths of allegiance to each social group, so for example we have a voter who is 42% socialist, 22% commuter, 75% liberal, 63% environmentalist, and so on. As we know, real people are a lot more complex than that. Harris: This is something that is absolutely key to the design of the game, in that it does not simply model people in two-dimensional terms as 'a socialist' or 'a patriot'. How important was nailing the political habits of the individual person when creating this game? Democracy 3 actually dives into deeper complexities than that, in terms of capturing individuals. Shacknews: There are so many voters of different stripes, whether it's the idealistic college student, the conservative older voter, or the cynical thirty-something. These systems are very different, the UKs second chamber is unelected, France has a President and a Prime Minister, and so on. The difficulty was coming up with a 'generic' political system that you can use to represent the UK, USA, France, Germany. Harris: I'm a complete political geek, so I already had a pretty deep knowledge of politics, the issues, and the mechanics in various systems.
Shacknews: How did you go about approaching Democracy 3 from a design standpoint? How much research did you need to conduct into the inner workings of government, as well as the various branches related to it? However, the player may wish to interpret the phrase "better." Shacknews: For those that are unfamiliar with the game, how would you describe Democracy 3?Ĭliff Harris, Positech Games: It's a political strategy game, turn based, that puts you into the position of president or prime minister, and gives you the job of keeping the electorate happy enough to stay in power whilst also changing the country for the better.
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