Democracy 2 for Mac

I sat down with my good friend Conor McArdle and discussed the joys and pains of Positech’s democracy simulator, Democracy 2.

Conor has completed a degree and a Masters in Politics, making him super qualified in reviewing Democracy 2. In fact, Conor only did his degree and Masters to review Democracy 2. Hardcore!

Me, I’m an uneducated bum who is only now doing a degree. I am softcore education wise, but have played many, many games. And I’m better at Democracy 2 than Conor. So there.

Alex: Democracy 2 by Cliff Harris from Positech. UK developer, used to work at Lionhead. He speaks out on a lot of things that are game related; piracy, shit games design, programming. I read something on his blog that all his games are based on neural networks, which is very interesting.

Conor: Neural network, what does he mean by that? Interconnected and all that?

Alex: I think so. To get into details, you’ll have to read about. I think it’s the idea that everything is linked and related, in a way that I just can’t explain…

Conor: Democracy 2 is like that. Linked, balanced, related.

Alex: Neural networks can be used for AIs. Data had a neural network in Star Trek.

Conor: Who?

Alex: Data? Android? Star Trek? Had a cat?

Conor: Sorry, you just said two words – Star and Trek – I automatically switch off when I hear them.

Alex: Cliff likes Star Trek. He may hunt you down for saying that. He posted something recently on his blog about people slagging him off too. Apparently he receives hate mail about his games.

Conor: Why?

Alex: He speaks out quite a bit on games. He says many games are clones, copies. He also talks about piracy, which I’d imagine many people don’t like. Maybe they hate uniqueness! Democracy 2 does something very unique – puts you in charge of a country as the elected president and sets you off. I’ve not played a single game that has been like Democracy 2. Maybe one on the BBC Microcomputer, but that’s ancient history.

Conor: There’ll be games out there that kind of work the same but I’ve certainly not played one nor have I gone out to look for one.

Alex: So the idea in Democracy 2 is that you’re coming into power and you’re up against another opposition party. You have your party – Green Party, People’s Party, or something like that – and you’ve got all these situations which are marked red, like disease or homelessness, which are a result of the policies in place. You have to solve all these issues, do what’s best for your little country while simultaneously getting enough votes to for your next term. The game is three terms and it’s really fucking difficult!

Conor: Yeah, I haven’t actually won an election yet.

Alex: I won two elections…

Conor: [hateful silence]

Alex: …and got into my third term and then it all went wrong, I failed miserably and everybody was unhappy. Peons.

Conor: You must have played it longer than me, as depending what country you’re on I think there’s various degrees of how hard it is. For example, America is quite easy as you’ve got more money but with the impoverished country, my budget just went to pieces straight away.

Alex: I went for Freedonia I think and it just worked. The whole thing feels like a balancing act.

Conor: You’re not in control. The age old thing about the economy is that the things you do at a specific time don’t have an effect until later on. Imagine you’re driving in a car and you’re going down a hill. You apply the breaks but the breaks don’t start working until you reach the bottom. So the idea is that you can’t really predict what will happen, you can tinker and implement policies to try and attain some form of control. If you do radical things you won’t feel the effect until much later and by then they’re usually changed by other factors that are connected to it.

Alex: Some of the policies take 6 months to 12 months to implement. I found that because each game is about 20-30 minutes, after a few turns you forget what you’ve implemented and then you’ll suddenly start making money. All my liberal policies are working, I’d assume. And then you realise, no, it’s just because the combination, this vast network of choices are coming together and you’re either fucked or you’re making money. But I find it’s sort of at odds; you can get great popularity and lose a lot of money or make a lot of money and then everybody hates you. I couldn’t balance it over a large period of time. Did you find it easier than that?

Conor: I found certain groups harder to appease. It seemed parents were quite difficult and also the Capitalist lot, but that’s because of the policies I implemented. The parents, whichever country I went in, always started very low and they were affected by some weird things, like hand guns…

Alex: That’s not weird! What parent likes handguns? Gun fiend parents, maybe.

Conor: I think the key is to make a note of the composition of your country. The bars in the centre show their mood, not numbers. So you can piss off Motorists (if there’s not many of them) at the expense of going after Environmentalists (if there are a lot more of them).

Alex: Start subsidising buses or airflights and all that stuff from the beginning, everything that’s an alternative to cars and the number of motorists will reduce over time. While you have a group at the start that you have to appease because you want their support, you can over time steadily reduce them if it’s not beneficial to have a large group of mototists. So it’s quite interesting that you have a control over what groups there are. You know, if you put the tax on Alcohol higher then people will stop drinking.

Conor: When the crisis’s pop up, you can get rid of them by quite draconian methods. For riots you can just whack up the armed police. Riots won’t disappear straight away, you’ll lose lots of money for a while, but it’s fairly easy to get under control. It’s the ones like debt and tax evasion that are difficult, as the higher the tax you have then the greater the risk of tax evasion.

One of the negative things is Political Capital. One of the niggley things is that if you want to sack someone in order to get more Political Capital, when you look at your potential ministers it doesn’t tell you how much Capital they generate.

Alex: Do you think the game could be made easier and what do you think Cliff could do for Democracy 3?

Conor: What, to make it easier?

Alex: Well, it’s kind of daunting when you switch it on – there must be 60 icons ranging from state housing to GDP, foreign relations, prison and then in the middle you’ve got a block of groups of people and then you’ve got icons at the top to tweak and look at graphs and trends. Do you think that could be simplified?

Conor: I actually think Cliff has done a good job of making it simple. For example the colour coding. The important thing to remember is the grid behind, which tells you what aspect of the economy you’re looking at.

Alex: Yeah, you’ve got Foreign Affairs, Welfare, Tax, Public Services, Law and Order and Transport, which all contains statistics, policies and crises.

Conor: And if you hover over one of your policies, then you can see what effects it has. It doesn’t tell you in figures, it’s simple colour code. It’s just a line and how fast the line moves tells you how much effect it has.

Alex: So you think he’s done a good job of making something very complex into something that’s manageable?

Conor: Totally.

Alex: There’s quite a learning curve, as I remember when I first played. It was the evening and was knackered and I decided to go back to my FPS, because it’s suitably mindless.

Conor: Not as gratifying in the same sense, is it?

Alex: All I try and do is get to the next election and get re-elected. It’s not like you reach a certain level and you coast, it’s a constant juggling act. You raise something, it effects something else, but you sometimes can’t see what it effects until 12 months later and you’re suddenly losing 20 million every 3 months!

Conor: [laughs] It can go wrong really quickly. Which is why it can be incredibly frustrating. Especially if you don’t have enough Political Capital. You can turn off the Political Capital and have complete control, which is tempting, but I thought it kind of defeats the object of the game. You’ve got to juggle.

Alex: Have you noticed that there’s lots of preset countries that you can choose when you start the game and a lot of them have different policies? I’ve noticed that the eco-aware state has hybrid cars and recycling whereas, I can’t remember what state I’ve chosen now, but for instance mine only has labour laws and things like that.

Conor: Yeah, but you can add more policies to any country.

Alex: Can you?

Conor: Yeah, if you click on the lightbulb you can introduce a new policy and you go through and find new policies and add them.

Alex: Ah ha! I’ve completely missed that!

Conor: Every time I’d start, as you need money, I racked up all the taxes. [laughs] I’d go for tax policies straight away, which is probably why I’m so unpopular. You can get luxury goods tax, hybrid cars, you can have common policies. You’ve done quite well if you’ve gone that far without touching new policies. Maybe my problem is I’ve tweaked too much.

Alex: I completely missed all that!

Conor: You didn’t do the tutorial!

Alex: No, I did! But after seeing 25 little boxes with little text, I think I zoned out. But I’m an FPS whore, so there you go. I don’t mind Democracy 2 as it reminds me of Sim City, in the sense that you muddle along, see how it fairs, end up buggered. In Sim City, because I barely scraped a profit, I always had to put in shitty things like nuclear reactors and garbage dumps in return for hard cash to keep me afloat.

Conor: You do start off with quite high principles. Eventually they’re eroded as you need the popularity! It is quite an eye opener. Everyone knows you can’t just jump in and change everything, you have to make concessions, but sometimes I think it’s easier to forget some of the people you have to appease, when in fact, there’s many other groups that need pleasing and it all contributes…

Alex: I don’t know if you’ve watched any of The Wire, but there’s this central theme of genuine progress vs. climbing the ladder. It’s this balancing act that inevitably comes to appeasing those in power, getting the vote, just to remain in power or climb the ladder.

Conor: The closer you get to the election the more willing you are to make concessions. You start off heavy handed and do what you want, but the closer you get, you need the votes! I haven’t actually won an election. I was like fuck you, I was Margaret Thatcher – this is a bitter pill, you’re gonna swallow it!

Alex: [laughs] So you’ve done a MA in Politics and I’m a better politician than you.

Conor: Well…you’ve played it more than me.

Alex: [laughs]

Conor: Although you managed to get through without adding new policies. I tinkered with everything. That was maybe my undoing. I tried to do to much. Eventually when I felt the effects, I’d gone on to do something else.

Alex: Each turn is three months, sometimes I’d ride out the debt or just wait and see what happened with various policies and see what effect they had. I have a feeling that if you tweak it too much you create this wave of money and influence that muddles everything.

Conor: I played it quite fast and loose, like speed pool. I decided I wasn’t going to read that much but make as many changes as possible.

Alex: Do you know what’s shameful? That trash like Call of Duty 4 will sell 10,000,000 copies and will make Infinity Ward a boat load of cash, but Democracy 2, something that’s very original, very clever and very telling, and does open your eyes, won’t make anything near that.

Back to the future of the game. How could it be improved? What would be changed? More realistic? Less?

Conor: I haven’t played the first game, but apparently it had real countries. Democracy 2 has made up countries. That might take some of the backstory away so you can just focus on the policies and not act a certain way because of the country you chose. Maybe it’s a dead end? What can you do in the next one? Make it more instantly reactive, not so static? But that requires animation…

Alex: I think graphically it could be improved. There’s nothing wrong with the interface, but that’s as much positive as it is negative. It does do a good job of showing a myriad of choices, but if there was something clever, like you saw your country with percentages or graphs, stats on the fly, instead of clicking through pages, that’d be easier. But that’s a lot of work. I read something on Cliff’s blog about user interfaces and how it’s very time consuming. And remember that Cliff codes and designs this himself – one guy! A hugely clever UI would take an enormous amount of time.

Conor: You can customise the game – the difficulity, the cyncisim [laughs], you can turn on the political honeymoon, switch off dilemmas, enable unlimited power – but I mean, the more you tinker and make it easier, the more you defeat the point of the game.

Alex: Each term is three years right? So nine years max?

Conor: You can extend that. I racked that up straight away!

Alex: And you wonder why you didn’t get through an election?! A new leader comes in and makes each term 12 years and you can be re-elected an unlimited number of times! Smells like a Dictator to me!

Conor: [laughs] If you win all the elections, the game ends?

Alex: I guess…I’ve never completed three terms!

Conor: It’s not gratifying enough. You don’t see your country grow, you’re just looking at figures and stats.

Alex: But what do you want?

Conor: Busty ladies.

Alex: You get busty ladies when you complete your term?

Conor: Exactly what I want.

Alex: Interesting. Well, you’re saying there’s no end. But there is no end to a simulation game. The Sims – where does it end? It doesn’t. So Will Wright says, right, you can have children! But where does that end? They can have children! And it goes on and on and on. Maybe that’s our mindless existence. It goes on and on, it never ends…

Conor: Speak for yourself!

Alex: Maybe an ending is a good thing.

Conor: As soon as it’s gone, it’s gone! There’s no payoff. You don’t feel any better, you just feel kicked out!

Alex: That’s because we’ve never beaten the game. The game beats us! Would you buy it? It’s £16.50.

Conor: That’s quite a lot. The problem is we’re so used to looking at games in terms of the graphics punch. It’s the first thing we comment on.

Alex: Because it’s the first thing we’re shown by the developers! There’s this thing going round a few blogs at the moment that iPhone apps are being priced at 59p and it’s making £6.99 titles look hugely overpriced. So developers scale back what they’re doing and make cheaper games to compete which doesn’t improve quality. Cliff has put a boat load of effort into this game -

Conor: – all behind the scenes -

Alex: – yeah, that’s the thing. Possibly not shown off gameplay wise. It’s very clever, there are hundreds of options. And remember, there’s a limit to how low you can sell a game. Like this Tesco chicken thing – how low can you sell a chicken? Is a £2.99 chicken good, should you buy it? Should there not be a minimum price to ensure the living conditions of animals are ethical? Chickens really should be £6, £7. Maybe developers need to stamp ‘Organic’ or ‘Home Made’ on their games or something.

Conor: You can apply that to all sorts of things. Piracy has eroded how we think of entertainment (in terms of value). Most stuff you can get for ‘free’. And it makes a difference. These things are expensive. They’ve had it good for years. A Mega Drive game – £50!

Alex: PS3 Online, xBox Live, Steam, make it possible for small developers to get in there, whereas once it was the domain of large companies, now there are small studios, indie titles. But, they have to make money – there’s only so low you can go in terms of price.

Conor: I feel the game will probably only appeal to people who are curious or political junkies.

Alex: Like you!

Conor: In a way. I mean, the best thing about politics is the arguing and coming to decisions, compromises and debates. That’s the most gratifying thing. In Democracy 2, there is no debate, you just click. There’s no way of making it that realistic, so I’m not criticising it for that.

Alex: So you’re coming here with a more profound message: choose life, not a videogame!

Conor: This isn’t the sort of game, if someone plays it, it’s going to change their life. You aren’t going to go out and become more politically active. It has a useful educational quality in it though – you can see the interconnectedness of all the things and how you can’t just do what you want. It has educational advantages and maybe should be employed that way. Plus, kids love to click on graphics, don’t they!

Alex: By your argument kids could just click around in Windows Explorer and have as much fun!

Conor: [laughs] Probably! It’s not a fun game, but it’s kind of like when you have to watch a physics video in physics class. It’s shit, but you’re enthralled because it’s better than sitting there and writing down maths! The kids are stupid – they’ll go for it!

Alex: [laughs] Democracy 2: it’s a very unique game, that will be lost on the vast majority of people.

Conor: It’s a unique game that doesn’t present itself in the best possible way. The design is simple, it works -

Alex: – a bit stale -

Conor: – yeah, it sells the game short in terms of what it can do.

Alex: Cliff, for Democracy 3, stay true to your roots but have busty ladies, guns, explosions and Crysis graphics.

Conor: Big explosions!

Alex: 10,000 barrel physics explosions!

Conor: This is what we expect in terms of entertainment now.

Alex: Positech have a lot of other games, so if Democracy 2 doesn’t take your fancy, take a look at their other titles.

Thanks to Conor McArdle (aka Maggie Thatch) for taking the time to chat about Democracy 2. Here’s hoping he never gets into power in real life.