14 DAY TRIAL // We live in a world where more and more young people are uninterested in politics, choosing to never vote or take an official position even if they have that opportunity, mainly because they believe nothing related to government and its features can be changed via individual action.
At the same time, we live in a world where youth unemployment is growing at an alarming pace, where an education can no longer guarantee a great job, and where there’s increased uncertainty over the future of social services like pensions.
To all those who believe politics is too complicated to understand and impossible to influence, I would recommend a short- to middle-term treatment based on Democracy 3, the excellent recent simulation from Positech Games.
The team has done a huge amount of work in order to simulate how the various issues, measures, taxes, citizen beliefs and interests and more aggregate in a democratic regime to drive the behavior of the parties and the population.
The gamer can see how taxes are connected to growth, which in turn links to poverty which inevitably influences brain drain and so on.
They can then try to influence one aspect, by spending political points to integrate new measures or change already existing ones, and see how the entire system reacts to it.
The links are incredibly intricate, but the team gives the player plenty of information, all based on real world data, in order to make the entire system easier to understand.
The challenge of Democracy 3 consists of trying to enact what one’s beliefs dictate as the right thing to do while also making sure that the player remains popular enough to win the coming elections and avoid being physically eliminated by some fringe group.
The game might not make everyone want to become a politician but will surely encourage those who are playing to try and influence the system.
We also offer an official Softpedia review of Democracy 3.