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Games Entertainment

SimCandidate - Why Aren't There More Political Sims? 112

Posted by simoniker from the president-pikachu dept.
Thanks to Slate for their piece discussing why there aren't more videogames simulating current-day politics. The article posits: "The U.S. presidential campaign may be the first true election of the digital age, but it's still missing one key ingredient. Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004?" It goes on to suggest that "presidential politics lends itself naturally to the idiom and audience of today's games. Political campaigns are already structured like games, with an escalating series of discrete competitions that determine the eventual winner. In addition, there's an existing body of readily available data, going back many decades, that could be harnessed to craft the simulation" Would you play a modern-day political sim videogame?
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SimCandidate - Why Aren't There More Political Sims? More

SimCandidate - Why Aren't There More Political Sims?

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  • Well... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by Captain Beefheart ( 628365 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @06:44PM (#7739963)
    For the same reason there aren't any religious sims, either.

    • Re:Well... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by Carnildo ( 712617 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @06:51PM (#7740027) Homepage Journal
      For the same reason there aren't any religious sims, either.

      You missed seeing Black & White?

    • Re:Well... B&W, Populous (Score:3, Insightful)

      by Zeio ( 325157 )
      Before Black and White there was Populous, rather a fun game that came out for Genesis, PC and SNES, probably others.

      Also, SNES has ActRaiser where you play God and ward of evil though acts of God and an Avatar in a side scroller.

      None really get into the complexities of religion, but they are certainly themed in that way - leveraging mass devotion to an unseen entity that is quantified as mana by which the entity can act on the natural world.

    • Re: (Score:3, Interesting)

      by account_deleted ( 4530225 )
      Comment removed based on user account deletion

      • Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)

        by RevAaron ( 125240 )
        I can't speak of the quality of this game, but it reminds me of some others. It's tough to guess whether or not this EoT game is a super-christian game or if it's just a clever and whacky idea... If I were a super-xian I'd think the idea blasphemous, but so much of what fundamentalists do seems blasphemous to me, so *shrug*.

        Yes, the games. I love wierdo christian games. I remember a game a friend of mine had for his SNES, which sat somewhere between Wolf3d and Doom in its 2.5D quality... You played Noah, a

        • Re:Well... (Score:3, Informative)

          by MalachiConstant ( 553800 )
          I remember a game a friend of mine had for his SNES, which sat somewhere between Wolf3d and Doom in its 2.5D quality... You played Noah, and you had to go around shooting your animals and some evil demons who were trying to prevent you from rounding up your animals. Of course, it wasn't real shooting; you were using a slingshot and you shot out pellets of food with a bit of tranq in them.

          That would be Super 3D Noah's Ark [somethingawful.com].

          See also: Forgiveness [somethingawful.com], Saints of Virtue [somethingawful.com], and Life's Battle [somethingawful.com].

          • Re:Well... (Score:3, Funny)

            by RevAaron ( 125240 )
            Christ, it's even worse than I thought- "Noah has gotten bored and decided it would be fun to stop feeding the animals. Consequently, the animals have organized a mutiny against him..." If that isn't blasphemous, I don't know what is! :)

            Kind of funny in the review of "Forgiveness," when they ask why no one can make a good game based on mythology of the western world- but they talk about Norse mythology games which are good. Which west is Mr. Awful talking about? Last time I checked, Europe was very much
        • Comment removed based on user account deletion
          • I'm not quite sure. I originally heard of this game in some magazine when it came out. I think it's either "Avenging Angel" or "Eternal War," two games that sound roughly like what I'm thinking of.

    • Re:Well... (Score:2, Funny)

      by NanoGator ( 522640 )
      "For the same reason there aren't any religious sims, either."

      Oh I dunno. The way people jump my ass here if I don't sing the praises of Mozilla, you'd think it was a religious sim.
    • Religious Sim is kinda ambigious:
      -If you mean playing a god, then other people have pointed out examples (black and white)
      -If you mean organizing a religious institution (as a bishop or a cardinal) it's a completely different type of game.

      Think about the pleasures of the game:
      -Wage a morality war to censor movies, and videogames. Prove the connection between Heavy Metal, D&D and Satanism.
      -Convince your flock to give you all their worldly belongings in preparation for their final journey with aliens.

  • Better question (Score:4, Funny)

    by buffer-overflowed ( 588867 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @06:45PM (#7739971) Journal
    Why hasn't there been a reality TV show yet, like
    "Who wants to be a Senator?"

    Are you an NBC-Crat or a CBS-ican?
    • Because that would be the collapse of western civilization.
      Just think of the people who get on "reality" tv shows now>
      [shudder]
      Now think of them being in political power.
      [/shudder]
      You should be slapped for even suggesting that.

    • Re:Better question (Score:4, Interesting)

      by anthony_dipierro ( 543308 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:58PM (#7740624) Journal

      Why hasn't there been a reality TV show yet, like "Who wants to be a Senator?"

      Stupid Campaign Finance laws, probably.

      I thought there was supposed to be one though, but the closest I could find was this [hbo.com]: HBO's new series, Candidate 2012, will follow the journey of one curious and compelling young American as he or she travels across the country in an attempt to figure out what it will take to become President of the United States in the year 2012.

      Not sure how they'll get around the soft-money laws, though.

    • I imagine such a show would actually be pretty damn boring. Granted, I've never been a senator, but I have listen to senate and house sessions, and those can be pretty damned boring. I'm sure they could edit enough stuff out to make it interesting, though. It'd be neat to have such a program for your own representatives- see which way they vote, see what they do in a day, etc etc. You could both become a smart electorate and be entertained. A lot more fun than putting real work into paying attention to the
    • You mean like this [gameshownetwork.com]?
    • There has been a heavily televised "Who wants to be Gov of California?" though...

    • I remember reading a while back that Fox had been planning a reality TV show called "The American President" I think where the audience would narrow down the field and finally pick a candidate that would be able to run with some X amount of dollars or something. It was supposed to be like a political American Idol. I'm not sure whatever happened to that idea.

      I think they said it was going to air on FX or Fox Family.

  • FPS (Score:1, Offtopic)

    by Uma Thurman ( 623807 )
    The genre of first person shooters has been so wildly popular that it's pretty much dominated most of the game development that happens. It's had a stifling effect on other types of games.

    There's just not enough money in the cerebrial games .
    • Uh.

      Your point about cerebral games might be correct, but I don't see this huge deluge of FPS games you're talking about. Are there a good amount? Yeah, but there are a lot more of RPG-type games, strategy games, and racing/sports games.

      Saying, "well, it's because action games sell better than thinking games" might be one point, but laying the blame on the FPS genre specifically makes no sense.
      • Especially since a FPS doesn't necessarily have to be a descendent of Doom. Anyone ever hear of Ultima Underworld? Technically, it was a FPS because you walked around in first person view, and sometimes you did have to kill stuff. But it was primarily an RPG. And a damn good one at that.

        Although I will agree that the FPS genre has been more that a little overdone.
    • Who says it can't be a presidential election game AND an FPS? Just imagine running around with a political conversion gun converting hippies into republicans in a commune of hempgrowers, occasionally failing, making them turn democrats or 3rd party candidate voters...
    • agreed, FPS is overdone but that's because they actually sell.

      But RTS is worse IMO... there's a million of them, but none of them actually sell copies. They're so cheap to make (relatively) that everyone has their own crappy RTS release.
  • Until we truly understand schizophrenia, we'll never be able to accurately simulate politics (or religion).

    Sort of how like in the ROTK special effects situation where they had to program independent thinking in the Orcs on the battlefield, and they kept having to make them more and more stupid so they wouldn't keep leaving the battlefield.

    Strange how that works, eh?
    • Linkage? That sounds like an interesting story. Far more interesting than political sims.

    • Let me fix what you said: They had to face the orcs and elves in the proper direction.

      They didn't run away on purpose...they ran away because they were programmed to seek out an enemy yet they didn't see any close by. Without one close by, they ran straight forward to search for one.
      Unfortunately, at the time, they were facing away from the battlefield.

  • nomination pc game (Score:2, Informative)

    by develop ( 88564 )
    Back in the days of the original IBM PC was a game called nomination. It was alot of fun and followed the primary elections. You picked your candidate then answer questions and got results on a timely basis. It was a text based game I believe (blue and white).

  • No, I wouldn't play a political sim. I can't believe anyone would want to play a political sim, even political theorists and hopefuls. Those who are experts in campaign management know they are practicing an art, not a science, and that any sim would be far too simplistic a model to make it 'fun' for the people who are into such things.

    On the other hand, people play dating sims even though most of the same problems apply... and in neither case does the digital reward for success match the real life versi

  • I forget the name but in my junior year of high school civics class we had a choice of writing a paper or playing this poltical sim where you had to act as president to complete a specific scenario (like balance the budget, etc) by working with "congress"

    it was all based on actual voting patterns and records and the sort...i wish i could remember. this is circa 1993/1994 so it was DOS based...
    • You sure that wasent Oragon Trail and your teacher was lazy?
    • In my Poli-Sci class in fall 1993 we had to play a game called "Chimerica", you were the ruler of a 3rd world crap hole in Latin America. You had to balance the interests of each of the groups so that none of them revolted and killed you.

      One of the hardest games I ever played. Balance of Power is also on the short list of near impossible to win games.

      LK
      • There was a great little game on the Sinclair Spectrum called Dictator that was set in the "Ritimban Republic". On the domestic front you had to balance the Military, Landowners and Peasants, but you also had to worry about an aggressive neighbouring country ("Leftoto"), the Soviets and the Americans. There's an online version here [nrtoone.com] and a Q-BASIC port here [volny.cz], and I'm sure the original tape image can be found somewhere...
  • Start with a person running for councilmen, make decisions accordingly, try to raise to the rank of President, and the final goal, ensuring re-election, all throughout the span of a lifetime, with multiple paths to victory.

    I think it would be a bit too complex however. Too bad...

    Hard to program, I think, as well
    • Not hard to program, pretty much all sims are easy to program. The hard part is to generate the model by which the program acts. All the formulaes, statistics, decisions etc are decided within that model (probably not a programmer doing this, but a statistian/PLS). From that point it's more or less translating the model to code.

      The rest of the complexity is the interface.. and that can be simple or complex but that has little to do with the underlying game in this case.

  • There once were... (Score:2, Interesting)

    by Kobal ( 597997 )
    But look at the development costs for a game today. Given that a political game will mainly, if not only, sell in the country which politics it's based upon and that games are a worldwide market (except the very peculiar and specific japanese market), do you think it's a risk worth taking for any large game publishing house? Maybe it could work as shareware or open source. But except a handful of gems, most shareware sims in the past have been quite poor, either in ui and polish (from bothersome to downrigh
    • We could get the government to fund it and then distribute it in countries it is bombing along with their leaflets, to show them just how great our political system really is, and what they can look forward too. I mean, the army has a video game, so why not the government?

  • Realistic! (Score:3, Funny)

    by Alphanos ( 596595 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:02PM (#7740150)
    For added realism, players could have cheat codes which allow them to edit the voting machine results:).
    • When I was finished reading the intro I was thinking "No one has ever written a game that would have enough cheet codes"...
    • For added realism, players could have cheat codes which allow them to edit the voting machine results:)

      Actually, for added realism, players could have cheat codes which allow them to make their brother the governor of Florida!
  • Sim City includes a lot of political aspects. It's not electoral politics, but players do have to deal with keeping their constituents happy. That, in fact, is the primary guiding factor of the success of a city (at least it was in the original, which is the only version that I've used).

    I have been heavily involved in electoral politics for several years, and I'm really not sure of how it would be turned into a game. It basically involves working horrible hours, being paid terribly, and murkily navigati
  • Machiavelli: The Prince was sorta politically based... http://www.mobygames.com/game/techinfo/gameId,3902 / Alright, the link is kinda weak, but I couldn't find anything better.
  • I'd guess that it's terribly complex to simulate the nuance and other features that make politics interesting. Who wants to play SimCampaign1.0 featuring random voting? Until only a few years ago (say 1999, for simplicity), most game makers had really weren't thinking about networked gmaes that would have sampled voting. Now it seems like something that might be a cool tie in for the sims online or something. Get elected to the city council and get paid 50 simoleans a week (have zoning control over a sm
  • make a complete joke out of our election system because of how it really works?

  • This game Pays! (Score:5, Interesting)

    by BrookHarty ( 9119 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:08PM (#7740208) Journal
    Where is the video-game version of Campaign 2004?

    Lol, so, you start out running for mayor, promising the smaller companies (construction) projects if they support you, and donate towards your campaign. After elected, you help nominate judges to ease laws towards construction, which leads into more money for your election for the Governor. Easing tax burdens to keep large companies in your state, and try to make honey deals, you spend money on pork projects for all your supporters.
    Deny the local transportation requirements that might have to cross the richer areas of town. As the money rolls in, you run for Senate. Promise to ease tax laws, or support some religious view to gain support. Slander everyone, showing how righteous you are, never broke any laws (or just got caught), and you are the perfect person for the job.

    Now as Senator, you get to join some nice Committees. Maybe join Energy and Natural Resource, so you allow a nice company from your home state to "Ahem, Bid" on natural gas mining in federal land.

    After some time, you get bored with milking federal and state money and decided to run for President. All you need is a platform. If you're the Republican you have the religious backing, but you have to ban personal freedoms, unless its gun control and force religion on some states. If you're Democrat you have try to pass gun control and help further rights, (gay, women, etc) and spend lots of money public programs that don't work.

    So after you choose your poison, Democrat or Republican, (Not Liberal, as it doesn't support big government) and you get start going to the national caucuses. Oh the fun of promising even bigger pork projects, kick backs and under handed political back stabbing. Debate over issues and sound the same every year.

    Then after elected, you appoint Judges that agree with your "wink" personal views. Make powerful political and business contacts that help family and friends make billions. Purchase some banks maybe. After your term, you quit, and collect a check yearly for the rest of your life. Of course, you have to build a library, and do lots of 1000 dollar a plate dinners. Everyone wants to throw money at you.

    My god this game sounds fun, and it pays well too!

    • Re:This game Pays! (Score:3, Interesting)

      by Goldsmith ( 561202 )
      You forgot some key things:

      You get to work ALL the time!
      No family for you, in fact, people will be trying to turn your family against you with allegations of everything from infidelity to drug use. If you're not a problem to society, your son/wife/cousin will be soon.

      Take out loans!
      That's right, it costs money to run, and sometimes, you just don't have the pork to back it up, so sell your house, take out huge loans and tell your kids they can't go to college.

      Forget your ideals!
      Forget whatever you may be

  • Who needs to play? (Score:3, Interesting)

    by smallfries ( 601545 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:10PM (#7740243) Homepage
    It makes we wonder why we don't use leadship simulators. I'm thinking of something like SimCity meets CivIII. Lots of variables to tweak that can have various effects on the nation and its economy. Then we could have cool elections based on the candidates playing the games to see who can score highest.

    Of course, we'd never agree on how to score the results or which models to base the simulation on. After all, depending on how you slant the models you could have the ultimate propaganda tool...
    • That's a good point. I introduced my wife to Sim City, because of how it's one of those computer games that people who don't play computer games play. She played it a bit, but then got abnnoyed because you couldn't edit the basic economic assumptions - I hadn't really given it any thought, but she pointed out how the whole thing was firmly rooted in a US capitalist/free-market ideology, and there was only so far you could push it, for example:

      1. Put taxes above 7% and everyone leaves town. This, more tha
      • So what I want to know is, are there any system simulations based on different political ideologies? SimCollectiveFarm, or SimCommune, or whatever?

        Sounds like this [the-underdogs.org] is what you're after. ;)
  • The Supreme Court, playing Bush, delivered a finishing move to Gore, splattering a mess everywhere.

    I hope someone else gets a chance to play this time. Quit hogging the controller!

  • Seems to me... (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Otter ( 3800 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:21PM (#7740342) Journal
    • People who aren't interested in politics wouldn't be interested in the game.
    • People who are interested in politics tend to have strong views, and wouldn't be interested in modulating them to score points.
    • The people who are interested in changing their opinions to win approval are already running for office in reality.
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion

    • Re:Seems to me... (Score:4, Insightful)

      by RevAaron ( 125240 ) <revaaron AT hotmail DOT com> on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:54PM (#7740593) Homepage
      People who aren't interested in politics wouldn't be interested in the game.

      A game about politics wouldn't be for the kind of folks who are really interested in the world's real politics. There are tons of folks who would like games full of political intrigue and all the other not-boring political stuff. Think of political novels, not the real world.

      People who are interested in politics tend to have strong views, and wouldn't be interested in modulating them to score points.

      Again, this is a game, not the real world. A game would allow those with errant political views to acually succeed, unlike the real world where they fail. I repeat: we're talking about a game. There's no reason where someone could make modern republicanism work- at least in the altered rules of a video game.

      The people who are interested in changing their opinions to win approval are already running for office in reality.

      *sigh*
      Do you play games? Did Risk fail because anyone who would like such a game would just go play real wargames in the military? Did Quake and other FPS fail because everyone became a murderer or soldier? Did SimCity fail because everyone just got their own town and became mayor? No, no, and no.

      One of the reasons people love games like this is because it gives them an alternate universe where they can do what they can't in the real world. Sure, I could put a lot of time, money and energy into running for City Council in my town- but I'd probably loose, at least the first time. At this stage in my life, I don't have the desire to run or the desire to pump in all of my time, money and energy into running for some public office. A game like this would afford some of the "fun" of politics with a tiny fraction of the time, money, and energy.
      • Think of political novels, not the real world.

        Political novels are about situations involving people who happen to be politicians. They aren't about politics themselves because that's boring. There isn't any "political fiction" category, where somebody writes a story about an entire made-up campaign just for the sake of doing it -- because that would be boring.

        So... *sigh*... do YOU play games? The few games that exist which about *people* simply aren't very good. RPG's come about as close to that as yo

    • Around 2002 (multimedia revolution!), there were a slew of political themed games released, including a doonesbury one, which I bought. I might have been the only one.
      Look at Republic. It suffers from the biggest problem with these types of games. The UI is going to be cluttered, and very very deep, and so reviewers are initially turned off. Unless you're Sid Meir, you're going to have trouble your game off the ground.
      As an aside, I found it took me about 4 hours to figure out most of the wingdings in r

  • Not political but geopolitical... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by gklinger ( 571901 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:26PM (#7740400)
    There was a great game called Balance of Power [mobygames.com] (followed up by Balance of Power: The 1990 Edition [mobygames.com]) which was a simulation of geopolitics and was interesting in that the goal was power and prestige while avoiding a world war. It's quite unique and well worth checking out. You can read a fascinating article [informit.com] about designing Balance of Power written by Chris Crawford, the author of the game.

    I know this isn't 100% on topic but I couldn't resist. I think a lot of people find this game stimulating if they only knew about it.

  • Political sim... (Score:1, Funny)

    by Anonymous Coward

    Would you play a modern-day political sim videogame?

    Now that it's back up [everything2.com], I sure would!

  • Well... haven't we been simulating what would happen if the loser got a chance to govern for the past three years now?
    • Comment removed based on user account deletion
    • Yes, but the Democrats haven't been running their 'simulated president' (algore) around nearly as much as some people predicted. He's been out of the limelight for long spells of time. Heck, the two Clintons have been acting more as 'shadow presidents' than algore has.
  • It was my dream back in the days of BBSes to make an online game called congress. It would have been awesome.
  • Most folks here in the USA can barely stand REAL politics.
    But hey, if anyone can pull it off, it would be Will Wright!

  • Nationstates.net (Score:1, Interesting)

    by Anonymous Coward
    Try out Nationstates.net [nationstates.net]. It's simple, it's addictive, and it wont take more than 15 minutes out of your day.

  • Most people... (Score:4, Interesting)

    by stoolpigeon ( 454276 ) <bittercode@gmail> on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:40PM (#7740493) Homepage Journal
    are not interested enough in real politics - that impact their real lives - to go out and do something as simple as voting.

    I have a feeling that the pool of people that would be interested is very small and of those, many would be too busy doing real political things.

    I guess if it was simple enough and you could become ruler of the world or something people might dig it. I remember when I first played SimFarm. I lost interest because I kept going bankrupt. It modeled reality too closely. I finally found one scenario where it was pretty easy to get rich, eventually buy the crop duster, and I had fun flying around the map.

  • My favorite political game on the C=64 was SSI's President Elect. It was a good simulation of the hard-nosed strategic side of the presidential race. It also taught me that you're all damn lucky that I'm not running for president!

    There was also an early DOS game about U.S./Middle East politics that held my attention for a while. I don't remember the name, but I remember that my efforts usual (and not always accidentally) resulted in nuclear war. Ahhh, good times.

    And Tropico is a great recent political gam
  • Surprised no one has mentioned this. While it isn't really a campaign simulation by the strict idea of what campaigning is, it does simulate a particular method of gaining power. Perhaps it isn't totally to the point that this news story is looking for but it is an option in my opinion.

  • Some old, some new (Score:2, Interesting)

    by ManDude ( 231569 )
    Check out politika, if you can find it.
    Look here [redstorm.com]
    And something more recent: Republic [eidosinteractive.co.uk]

    A place to start. If people find others, please post.

  • President Elect (Score:5, Interesting)

    by orthogonal ( 588627 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @07:52PM (#7740584) Journal
    President Elect [the-underdogs.org] was an excellent game, with (for a game) a realistic grasp of electoral politics based on a database of actual state-by-state results from 1964 to 1988.

    One could run as various historical candidates, or make one's own candidate by selecting the candidate's position on various issues.

    It's mostly a resource management game: you spent money and time on different states or regions to sway the voters in those places. The trick was knowing which states were swing states, and spending your time and money there.

    The game ended on election night, with each state reporting in and showing percentages and the color of the candidate who won it. The states reported in on a staggered schedule based on local poll-closing time, and once or twice I even saw one candidate declared the winner, only to see it change when all votes in swing states had reported in.

    If I were not watching the webcast of Don Knuth's 10th Annual Christmas Tree lecture at 4:15 pm PST,
    at http://scpd.stanford.edu/knuth/, I'd tip my hat to Strom Thurmond's illegitimate mixed-race daughter by playing Strom against Goldwater in 1964 tonight.
    If they made a copy updated with electoral data and demographics through 2004, I'd buy it in a minute.

  • Why would I want to play it? (Score:4, Funny)

    by gothrus ( 706341 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @08:01PM (#7740646)
    Who wants to play a game in which the only way to win is to cheat.

  • SimCampaign already exists - from 1984 no less (Score:3, Interesting)

    by stu72 ( 96650 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @08:38PM (#7740915)
    I thought part of the /. membership initiation was to type in at least 10 pages of Compute!'s Gazette ML code?

    http://www.atarimagazines.com/compute/gazette/19 84 08-campaign.html

    Evidently not...
  • "Political campaigns are already structured like games, with an escalating series of discrete competitions that determine the eventual winner."

    That's just as maybe, but nobody in your typical gaming demographic really gives a flying f. Why? Well, to most of us, it really doesn't matter who's in office. It's about as exciting as a game based on Joe Millionaire. (Although a Quake mod might be a lot of fun...) It has nothing to do with how compatible the politics are to the gaming arena, it has everythi
    • Surely more people would want to be president of SimNation than mayor of SimCity, no? The real reason is that a video game based on elections wouldn't give you the opportunity to propose genuinely new ideas to solve problems--the best you could hope for would be to occupy a typical place somewhere on the standard left/right spectrum--boring. Computers just aren't good enough to simulate new political ideas.
  • No way would I play that; where's the sex and wargaming in polit - oh wait, maybe it could work...
  • Nah, it's not because people wouldn't be interested, or because it'd be dull; it's because all the people who were upset by the murder and carnage of games like Manhunt would kick up a real stink at the level of immorality and depravity a political sim would include.
  • I've thought that the whole political arena would be a fun game idea. I wouldn't limit it to 2004, but I'd let it be a little more universal. Politics has been around a long time. In order to stay in power (the goal of the game), you would need to balance:

    1) The probability that your constituents liked what you were doing
    2) The amount of political power you have
    3) The size of you election fund

    You can increase you funds by pandering to PACs and special interests, but if the voters find out you're du

  • Hmmm (Score:3, Funny)

    by Anonvmous Coward ( 589068 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @09:01PM (#7741089)
    Sierra should ressurect the Leisure Suit Larry engine for a Bill Clinton game.
  • Comment removed based on user account deletion

  • Gee, this is the most exciting idea for a game since they started making games based on... fishing [techtv.com]!!!

    But why stop there? I hear EA is working on something even more groundbreaking: SimPaint!! That's right, a realtime simulation of actual paint a wall, first drying, then aging, and finally flaking and peeling off!

    Can you stand the EXCITEMENT?

    snore...
  • "There's all sorts of cool stuff in the lab. We have two new games in development right now. One is called The Political Machine, a strategy game where you run for President as well as a future sequel for Galactic Civilizations which won't be out any time soon."

    http://www.stardock.com/products/polmachine/ [stardock.com]

  • Interesting... (Score:3, Funny)

    by Hard_Code ( 49548 ) on Tuesday December 16, 2003 @11:13PM (#7741879)
    So...what would this game be like...you sit back and refrain from voting, and it just picks a candidate for you? EA Voter Apathy 2004!
  • I have never played sims but it would be neat - Campaign 2004 and if it has florida governor, people who put websites like http://www.awolbush.com, etc it would be even better and more fun.
    And not to forget, W. Clark who is a great candidate!

  • "The Sims" started it... (Score:3, Insightful)

    by gamgee5273 ( 410326 ) on Wednesday December 17, 2003 @12:20AM (#7742288) Journal
    Remember? There is a political track your sim can follow in the game. But, in all, that's a pretty lightweight idea of political simulation.

    Speaking as someone who has run (winning) real-life political campaigns: no one who plays in the political arena would want to play a game predicated on getting a candidate elected. None of us would really want to design such a beast, either. Politics is a game already, and it isn't always the idea of "he with the most toys, wins," but it comes close. The tactics and the strategy it takes to run and win a campaign is not something I consider "leisure," and I doubt many people would disagree.

  • ... and the idea has definitely been tossed around in my company. After much discussion, we came to the conclusion that there's more interesting shit we'd rather do.
  • West Wing, Wag The Dog, Primary Colours.. ETC...
  • Well, its funny that the post mentions SimCanidate. The only game I remember was the EXCELLENT and exceptional Doonesbury Elecection Game Campaign '96. Read about it here [worldvillage.com] and here [kelloggcreek.com]. The game itself was fun if you were a political junkie but it did have its own quirks.

    I personally loved the game because of my love for doonesbury (you could have doonesbury characters as part of your campaign team). Bonus features of the game were video clips of classic US political incidents in the past 50 years. Highlites
  • I used to play "floor 13", here's a quote from mobygames:

    "The premise of Floor 13 is rather simple. You are the Director General for a secret society that is based on the 13th floor of an office building in London. The sole purpose for its existence is to keep the current British government in power at any cost. Specifically, you must make sure that the current Prime Minister keeps ahead of his competition in the polls.
    You are given a target date of 20 days, at the end of which your performance will be ev
  • There's a new chatterbot-game just released called "AI Bush", created by two Loebner prize winners. I recently briefly discussed it at
    http://grandtextauto.gatech.edu/archives/000161.ht ml [gatech.edu]
    Love to hear anyone's comments over there on our blog.

    Also, on the topic of political games, check out
    www.watercoolergames.org [watercoolergames.org]
  • 1. Go to hollywood and become a star
    2. Align yourself with whichever party's in power
    3. ???
    4. Election!
  • Since politics are very specific to the country in question, there's clearly a much smaller market for this kind of game to begin with. I don't live in the U.S. and wouldn't want to play a game that revolves around U.S. politics. I'd say that today's break-away games depend on international sales as much as anything, and you just won't get that with a political game that's married to any one political system. However, I could see an Indie company doing this sort of thing.

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