Hello everyone,
I accidentally saw this game (Democracy 2) and because I study political science I was somehow curious about it. But first thing (and I’m writing this because of it) was the guy who represent socialist group of people in the game. I know that someone could say it’s nonsense but the T-shirt with the hammer and sickle is completely absurd. These are symbols of communism, not socialism, and it’s incorrect to put equals sign between these two doctrines. I would go past it with little smile but then I read ambitions of authors who declares theirs game to be tool for educating politics, polity and policy, or shorter political science. Well, I’m pretty sure that if I say the main symbols of socialism are hammer and sickle at school, I wouldn’t be very successful. I played demo and it’s obvisous that the game is based on American democracy, althrough the developers are from GB, so I’m not surprised since in the USA amongs the wide public is almost no distinction between socialism, welfare state or communism. But please If you do game which tends to be educational, try to be as objective as possible.
About the game itself, it’s quite good, I think that the game basically represents all three dimensions of politics. But then again, it’s based on American model of democracy so this model is presented as only possible model of democracy which is engrafted or exported to other states. It has been found out that in practice this solution is pointless and democracies with imported American model collapsed. So, that’s where the game fall behind.
The characters are all exaggerated stereotypes. Check out the wealthy voter, and the environmentalist. I know a lot of environmentalists and none of the look like him, and nobody I know who is wealthy has a top hat or a monocle.
The characters need to be extremes so its obvious at a glance which group you are looking at. You can;t actually stop people in the street and tell socialists from liberals very easily, so the game has to use extreme version purely for icons. In the same way, men don’t all stand with their legs apart and women don’t all wear skirts, but if you looked at signs on toilet doors you would think so :D.
I’m well aware that socialism isn’t communism. very different things indeed, although for a long time the prevailing attitude in the US did equate the two. Post financial meltdown, I expect socialism to become more respectable in the US possibly… (although communism will likely always be seen as evil by the majority of people in the USA). In the UK and France, people definitely see the difference between the two.
ooo for the battlefield i preffer just green that is ready for combat tee shirt