I am 17 and an A level politics student (I also love Democracy). As a personal endeavour alongside my academic study, I am planning to write a political novel. It will be set in a fictional ex-Soviet, eastern European country. The country in question will be in the process of forming a new, independant state and as such will focus on the consequences of different forms of government.
I was hoping to explore some ideas by using the game as a metaphorical drawing board (please excuse the stupid analogy). However, I am very limited in computer skills and, in particular, text editing. So, I was wondering if anyone could assist me in creating a new country and possibly some new policies.
I’m doing the same thing, only with a real country. For the past few days I’ve been modding Slovenia, which is not quite your typical ex-soviet country, but there are similarities nevertheless. You should probably want to think about denationalisation of property, that is one of the most serious problems.
Also, Democracy IMO is better suited to explore the limits of the current system of government not for trying out new ideas. The main problem is that if you create a new policy you also have to determine what areas it will influence, rather than being surprised because of unforseen circumstances.
Politics is like the weather - there are so many variables that affect the outcome; in the modern times we are able to make detailed forecasts with scientific accuracy, but unfortunately the weather man makes mistakes. It is a way too complex system of causes and results that it will ever be realistically simulated by a computer. Democracy should (and I bet that it will, eventually) evolve in a simulation of a country’s economic system with various taxes, expenditures, subsidies, etc.
I’d certainly like to take democracy a stage further if I do a sequel, one that models a lot mroe of the nuts and bolts of the economy and social environment of a countrys people. I’d like you to be able to instigate long term socio-economic change. Maybe investing money in school meals and better schools leads to a less criminal generation 10 years later etc. Maybe you can have policies that have long term effects on the birth rate, divorce rate etc.
It would be a nightmare to balance such a game though
One of the problems of making the game the way your talking about is that, me as a libertarianist do not think the outcome of certain actions would be the same as a socialist
I hope you take it one step further, but leave the option to mod it there
That would be cool. You’d have to include in-depth statistics - following the idea of school meals, the level of childhood obesity etc.
Michael I think you mean that some people think a free market will eventually lead to less poverty, etc. but I think a game like this would have to model it on the accepted wisdom.
