DISQUS

Collision Detection: collision detection: Democracy, the game: My latest video-game column for Wired News

  • Laurence Brothers · 1 year ago
    Democracy (or at least the not-all-that-democratic American republic system) is supposed to be resilient, with checks and balances and so on. While we see many horrible abuses at every level of government and by both parties, there must be something to the design, after all, when you consider that the two parties do manage to hand power back and forth every decade or so without really major disruptions.

    Computer games in comparison are considerably less robust and self-regulating. Indeed, single-player strategy and RPG games are rarely very well balanced, and in fact are often deliberately unbalanced, so that almost any strategy will win, which makes a single play-through fun, but can limit the replay value.

    MMOs are a more interesting case, but even then the initial release is rarely very well balanced, and "nerfs" or "buffs" to various character classes and other gameplay elements occur continually over the course of the game as the designers try to cope with situations and strategies they had not anticipated.

    So while your original posting is interesting, in the end I have to say "no" to the notion that national politics really resemble computer games all that much. The Political Machine is indeed a fun little game because of its superficial mapping to the election campaign, but if you look at it closely, you see that the basic gameplay is primitive and the computer AI is only rudimentary, a far cry from real election politics.

    On the other hand, considering politics as an abstract game and applying mathematical game theory techniques is not a new idea, and seems like a fruitful form of analysis. It should be pretty straightforward to model the elimination of the apparently imbecilic electoral college "game mechanic", and to assess the relative stability of the resulting system. It's hard to imagine that the situation would actually get worse than it already is.
  • Clive · 1 year ago
    Oh, I agree that the Political Machine is a very rudimentary game, as far as simulating the electoral process goes. But I'd disagree that no video games display the sort of excellent balance you see in the US constitution! I can think of lots of games that do have superb built-in balance.

    One good example is the balance between weapons in the online mode for Halo (versions 1 and 3 of the game). There's no weapon so powerful and versatile that it is universally useful, and universally able to overpower other weapons. It's much more like a game of rock-paper-scissors; the skill in playing comes from having to constantly adapt on the fly to what your opponent is coming at you with.
  • Laurence Brothers · 1 year ago
    I haven't played Halo, but of course I agree that some games are very well balanced. However, just as you suggest with that often-used rock-paper-scissors model, such games tend to be rather simple.

    Consider all the RTS games in which some sort of rock-paper-scissors approach can be seen -- maybe something like this: infantry beats artillery, artillery beats tanks, and tanks beat infantry. It's a gross over-simplification of the way that different kinds of military units interact in the real world, and once this simple relationship is understood, it also makes the game kind of boring -- you start with a balanced unit base to avoid vulnerability, and if your opponent seems to emphasize one type or another, you switch to the one that beats it.

    In comparison, the political system is much more complex, but because the stakes are so high, and I suppose because the original design had some merit, it has evolved over time into a more or less balanced and static state. The stasis is so strong, in fact, that in the US third parties have almost no chance of successful entry into the game. I'd argue that very few if any computer games have equivalent complexity and balance at the same time.

    Anyhow, since you mention the constitution, that suggests an interesting question: how much of the US's political stability is due to the constitution and the original design of the "founding fathers", and how much is due to the evolution of the system over time in response to various party and political strategies, or to apparently random events. Seems to me you can view the Bill of Rights as an emergency patch tacked on right after the badly-managed launch of a major MMO, and I really think the Bill of Rights is much more significant than the original constitution....
  • Clive · 1 year ago
    Sure, good point! The Constitution has already been extensively patched ...

    One could also wonder: How much of the durability of the political system is based in a) the authors of the Constitution correctly intuiting some basic aspects of human nature, and writing their ruleset to optimize the upside of said human nature, b) the authors of the Constitution creating a ruleset that explicitly attempts to shape, in a longitudinal sense, the behavior of the polity, such that people born into it, and those attracted to immigrate towards it, behave in the way the authors envisioned, or c) some messy mixture of a) and b).
  • susan · 1 year ago
    The major shortcoming of the current system of electing the President is that presidential candidates concentrate their attention on a handful of closely divided "battleground" states. In 2004 two-thirds of the visits and money were focused in just six states; 88% on 9 states, and 99% of the money went to just 16 states. Two-thirds of the states and people were merely spectators to the presidential election. Candidates have no reason to poll, visit, advertise, organize, campaign, or worry about the voter concerns in states where they are safely ahead or hopelessly behind. The reason for this is the winner-take-all rule under which all of a state's electoral votes are awarded to the candidate who gets the most votes in each separate state.

    Another shortcoming of the current system is that a candidate can win the Presidency without winning the most popular votes nationwide. This has occurred in one of every 14 presidential elections.

    In the past six decades, there have been six presidential elections in which a shift of a relatively small number of votes in one or two states would have elected (and, of course, in 2000, did elect) a presidential candidate who lost the popular vote nationwide.


    The National Popular Vote bill would guarantee the Presidency to the candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

    Every vote would be politically relevant and equal in presidential elections.

    The bill would take effect only when enacted, in identical form, by states possessing a majority of the electoral votes—that is, enough electoral votes to elect a President (270 of 538). When the bill comes into effect, all the electoral votes from those states would be awarded to the presidential candidate who receives the most popular votes in all 50 states (and DC).

    The National Popular Vote bill has passed 21 state legislative chambers, including one house in Arkansas, Colorado, Maine, North Carolina, and Washington, and both houses in California, Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, Maryland, Massachusetts, Rhode Island, and Vermont. The bill has been enacted by Hawaii, Illinois, New Jersey, and Maryland. These four states possess 50 electoral votes — 19% of the 270 necessary to bring the law into effect.

    See http://www.NationalPopularVote.com
  • Greg Stolze · 1 year ago
    D00d, I totally munchkined my mudslinging populist -- that class is TEH L33T if you max out your hypocrisy!

    -G.
  • remotely close · 1 year ago
    Absolutely minor note: your phrase "increasingly less sense" seems a bit awkward.
  • Clive · 1 year ago
    Yeah, "less and less sense" would have been a more elegant way of putting it.