Democracy 3 Exclusive Interview: Politics Done Right

Democracy 3 is a very interesting game with the ambitious goal of simulating the entire democratic process and I had a chance to interview its developer, Cliff Harris, about the title and its various surprises.

How does a developer decide that trying to simulate the political process of a democratic country is a good idea?

Cliff Harris: It’s clearly an insane idea to make a game with this subject matter and the difficulty involved in doing the topic justice, but I have always tried to make the exact kind of game that I personally enjoy, especially if there is not already a similar kind of game, and it was clear that if I wanted to play a game in this genre that worked the way I would like, I was going to have to make it myself!

What are the most important new features added to Democracy 3 and how do they change the experience?

Cliff Harris: The underlying simulation was totally rewritten to make it more accurate and more stable. It also models complacency and cynicism of individual groups of voters, so you can have cynical patriots and complacent socialists at the same time.

Pressure groups now act as feed-in’s to more serious terrorist groups, there are two new voter groups that replace the old drinkers and smokers, and a whole host of new policies and situations, plus a totally rewritten user interface that makes the game a much nicer experience to play, and also the game models public debt and ratings agencies properly now.

Is there any chance I will manage to eliminate riots and homelessness without generating a Brain Drain event?

Cliff Harris: Absolutely! You just have to be careful about making any changes in the game gradually, and take the population along with you as you change society. You can’t go raising taxes without there being consequences, and you can’t implement authoritarian policies without consequences either, but it is actually possible to have a happy population and low crime :D

Do you ever worry that the game is just too complex to capture a wide audience?

Cliff Harris: You would think that from the GUI, but actually the mechanics of the game are quite simple. Once you ‘get’ the way the game works, it’s not actually that complex at all in terms of game mechanics.

I’m currently playing Eve Online, which is at least a thousand times more complex than Democracy 3. I cannot begin to imagine explaining to someone how the mechanics for that game work in their entirety, whereas I could easily explain Democracy 3 to someone, in terms of ‘how to play’ in around half an hour.

Have you even though about pitching the game to politicians and to students of the discipline to see how they perform?

Cliff Harris: Yes, I did this with democracy 2. I’m afraid that politicians are incredibly wary, in general, of being seen to play any video game, regardless how complex or mature it is, because they still have this silly idea that games are only for kids, or they are all about killing people.

I think it’s a great pity because I’m sure if any game is going to change a politicians opinions about computer games, it will be this one, but getting them to play it with an open mind is sadly incredibly difficult.

What is the inspiration for the unique art style and interface?

Cliff Harris: It look a very long time to get the interface for the game right, because I cannot think of any other strategy game that has a complex, yet purely abstract and iconic interface like Democracy does.

I had to spend a lot of time looking at books like ‘information is beautiful’, and other classic examples of displaying complex technical information, to come up with a way in which the player could make sense of all these complex interactions. Because the game is so different t to everything else, there really was not any easy example to look at and say ‘this is how it should look’, which you do have when you do a typical ‘genre’ game like an RTS or an FPS.

Was it hard to gather the data required to build the simulation and link the various areas of government with potential laws and decisions?

Cliff Harris: It’s very hard, because you have to not only look for data that is relevant, you also have to make it ‘fit’ into a simulation which covers many different countries, and still make the game fun and interesting to play.

That means a lot of the data has to be fudges in different directions. For example, foreign aid budgets and science spending are often really very low for many countries, to the extent that they can both be pretty much considered a rounding error, along with funding for the arts.

In practice, simulating this accurately makes for a very boring game with uninteresting decisions. If you artificially inflate those values a bit, the game becomes more interesting, and I’d rather make a fun and interesting and thoughtful simulation game, than a really accurate one nobody enjoyed playing. How many parallels do you see between the game mechanics you have created and the real-life politics of the world?