Do you allow genetically modified crops? How about animal testing? The consequences to these decisions can also be severe, but they do allow players a little more freedom to follow their true feelings about certain topics.Īt the end of your political career (and inevitably it will come to an end), you’ll be placed on a standard “left vs. The goal here is to incrementally build a better nation while maintaining political collateral and ensuring that you remain popular enough with the people to be returned to office in order to make more incremental improvements.Įvery so often the game will also through a couple of moral decisions at you via a regular “yes/ no” policy question that will pop up while playing. The game itself is fairly politically neutral, though were I a betting man I would guess the one-man development team that created the game is left leaning. If you really annoy a group, then an assassination attempt is on the cards. If you don’t appease certain interest groups enough, they will vote against you at the election, and if enough interest groups are dissatisfied with you you’ll lose the election. So if nothing else Democracy 3 teaches just how dangerous extreme ideology can be. This screen also shows how much impact that change will have on interest groups – some will like you more for the decisions you make, others will like you less. So for instance, to lower the income tax of the nation you click on the income tax bubble. Clicking on the bubble pulls up a screen where players can tweak just how powerful it is. Some bubbles only impact on two or three other bubbles, others impact on a dozen or more. Hovering the mouse cursor over each bubble allows you to see which other bubbles it affects, or is affected by it. Every decision made will positively benefit some groups, and negatively affect others, and if you’re not careful, and treat any single group too poorly, then you’ll end up with militant cults, internal security issues, and a horrible economy to contend with.Īll of this is represented on screen by dozens of bubbles, each representing an area of decision making that the armchair politician needs to consider, whether that be sustainability, economics, social policy, foreign policy, or law & order. Players will adjust the income tax rate, and then see how it affects his/ her reputation with various interest groups, as well as its impact on the economy. It’s not the perfect simulation on how politics work, but it’s a fair abstraction, and it teaches a useful appreciation on how a decision made in politics isn’t made in isolation it has a fall-out effect on many other areas of political and social life.Īt its core, Democracy 3 is a mass of pretty spreadsheets that visualise an intimidating amount of data systems that are all linked to one another. Seriously though, here’s the thing about this game – it’s not the most entertaining of games ever made, but it’s something that needs to be loaded on every student and politics nut’s laptop. I’m now preparing to run for election in the next (real) Australian election. The second time I played Democracy 3 I took a more… moderate… approach to social affairs, and this time around I dominated Australian politics like something that has never been seen before, winning over 90 per cent of the vote in every election. Despite all that I was doing for the people I was assassinated in the middle of my first term of being a prime minister. This annoyed the middle and upper classes, and hit the GDP in such a way that unemployment took a jump, but on the plus side the nation was in a surplus and the low income groups worshipped me like the second coming of Marx.īut then some other social policies around supporting the sciences and legalising prostitution saw my reputation with the conservative elements of society drop to such a level that a few ultra-conservative militant cults popped up. So I introduced taxes on pollution (suck on that, Tony Abbott), luxury goods and property. Then the world’s economy went into recession, and the budget deficit was starting to threaten the nation’s AAA-credit rating. It also ingratiated me with the left wing interest groups, but my support among the conservatives and patriots plummeted. This had the effect of boosting the country’s international reputation and reducing racial tension (in turn reducing rates of violence). Then I abolished certain laws around immigration, making it easier for people to enter the country and upping the nation’s commitment to provide foreign aid ( suck on that, Tony Abbott). This would lead to an increase in knowledge in the country, and ultimately the nation’s GDP would benefit, but it annoyed the religious folks. My first act was to mandate that schools taught evolution, rather than creationism. When the people of Australia voted the head of the Socialist Alliance to the top political job, they had no idea what they were in for.
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