h2g2 The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy: Earth Edition

I'm thinking about writing a geopolitics computer game, does anyone know if anything like this has been done before? The only game I can think of that attempts anything like this is the unfinished but promising Elixir Studios game. Games like Civ and AlphaC have a certain amount of diplomacy, but it is pretty unsophisticated. I'm thinking of things like manipulating other countries' election results, sponsoring military coups, cosying up to wealthy donors to sponsor your election campaign at home (if you're playing as a democratic leader), dissolving parliament and creating a military dictatorship, etc. Maybe it would be too difficult to do the idea justice. If anyone here is interested in having a go at such a thing, we could maybe do it as a joint venture?

I'd be interested, but I think i'd be most usefull in the design area, even if your just planning a text game.

will there be any resource managment or combat. and if so how much?

-- DoctoRMO --

I guess you would have to have combat (although you wouldn't involve yourself in the resolution of the combat in anything other than a very high level), but I'd like to steer it away from resource management. Real politicians don't manage resources, they set priorities and their underlings scurry off and do the hard work. I wouldn't want it to end up like just another RTS or turn based strategy game.

Makes sense, so combat but only on a light level and no resource managment. right, but what about the design are you thinking Text based or graphic based, 3D OpenGL? and are you going to have it based on leader or just 'politicion'?

-- DoctorMO --

But there's alot of resource aquisition in politics... Financing, and influance on industrial areas... Import and export policies and much more...


Dancer

yes I thought about that too, but I think he just want to go for a complex forien politics.

-- DoctorMO --

Obviously resources are important, since foreign policy is often about access to resources (particularly water and oil).

I'm open to suggestion as to what it should be like, since so far it's only a whim on my part. What I want to avoid is any hint of micromanagement. Resources in this game should not be "126 units of oil", but something like "Friendly regime in oil-rich country".

I think the difficulty with this approach might be that making a model global economy is no easy task. If we could get it to work we might all be offered enormously highly paid jobs at the IMF .

My guess is that the model economy and so forth would work on the "126 units of oil" but that information would be hidden from the player. They would only get to see highly abstract, summary representations of the variables involved, like GDP or similar numbers for a given industry perhaps.

Thoughts?

Sounds like a good idea. I would be willing to help, although I don't have much graphics ability. I can certainly help with design and coding back-ends.

Okay, I'm brain storming here because I'm trying to avoid learning how to set up a php/dns interface

Sounds like a superb idea for a game. But where to start the scenario?

You've mention that a player may be playing as democratic, so I'd presume tht you'd also have dictators?

So, for the start of the game, where would the player be? A candidate in a local election? or already running a government? Maybe halfway between, running a party, or a junior cabinet minister?

Given the huge scope available within this idea, it could be worth just concentrating on one country and their current polictical system to start with.

On a local level of democracy there is all the stuff involved with local isues, should we safe the school, or bus pupils to a nearby comprehensive?

I personally think that starting straight off in the world arena might be a bit overwhelming. Especially as a major player.

Money and resources do play a major part in goverment and polotics, unfortunatly. Just look at all the bribe scandels around to see this.

Agreeing to favours and swinging polocies for certain businesses gives politicians extra cash for their parties, or themselves. The extra cash in the party kitty allows them to lobby more, to persuade people more. To fund the military, to drop taxes, to keep the voters happy, or to make themselves rich.

You could also select a parlimentary stand (okay I'm based in England and that bias's my thoughts on this, sorry.) If you start the game as, say Labour, but during the course of the parlimentary session your policies become more and more conservative, then you'd be losing voter confidence. So maybe to balance this you'd promise to reduce taxes that affect the working class voter base more then the upper class?

But that's all democracy. In dictatorships you'd be more inclined to send the troops on manouver outside a rival's offices as a show of power. Or maybe just hire an assassin and hope you don't get caught.

Diplomacy with other countries is essential, and not just for resources, although here oil is a prime example. The more friendly you are with an oil producing country (assuming you're not one) the cheaper they'll sell the oil to you for, and therefore the cheaper it is sold onto the public, making them happy. Unless of course you decide to up the tax on it in proportion to the reduction you get, therefore getting extra money for the kitty with the public not getting any or all of the benefits of your diplomacy. If on the other hand you're at war with the oil producers then the cost of oil is going to be extortionate and you'd have to drop the tax to almost if not nothing, just to keep the people at home from protesting in the streets.
But, if the war was that bad, then most of your population would be out there and then there would be less demand for oil at home, and the price might drop. Unless you brought in rationing.
There wouldn't really be a need for micromanagement, but you would need to be able to set/adjust tax levels to supplement your campaign fund and to run the country. There is a huge amount of data type stuff you'd need there if you were to involve cash, and it'd be hard not to involve cash. (this is all on a national scale rather than an international scale, but the two do seem to be rather inextricably linked).
There wouldn't be a need to do anything about the fighting of wars though really, except to agree on how many troops to send, to talk with allies to get them to send troops and to negotiate with enemies to try and end the war by peaceful means. The actual win/loose/casualties stuff could easily be based on the amount of troops on each side with a weighting for the advancedness type stuff of their weapons and such. You could even bring in a terrain modifier. For example, I can't think of the top of my head of an example, but I'm sure there not only is one, but someone else will think of it. As time/weeks/days depending on the way gameplay is set up, goes by then the amount of deaths type stuff would be calculated. As and when allies join or pull out it would alter the outcome. You wouldn't need to actually say, "Move that unit over to that mountain" That would be the job of generals and other madmen.

Lot of stuff there, I'll come back with more ideas as and when. But this is definatley I game I'd buy. Isn't there a game around actually about running a dictatorship on a small island?

I know a programmer with a degree in Economics who's into that degree of simulation in a big way; I'll point him over here...

I'm the guy Peet mentioned.

For diplomacy how about the ftf game "Diplomacy", I don't know if anyone has computerised it to play over the web.

For cold war geopolitics "Balance of Power" by Chris Crawford 1989.
I don't know if its still available. You play a superpower and if you are too aggressive, the game stops with outbreak of Nucleur warfare and you lose!

The difficulty with an all singing all dancing geopolitical/economics game, played over the internet with loads of players. Is making a profit from it. ie the business plan.

But then you probably expected that response from an economics guy.

There isn't actually any mention of multiplay over the net, but it'd good all the same. Many games do it though, you buy the boxed game, register it and then log in and play on specific servers.

Another point that brings to mind though, real time or turn based?
Real time would definately be funky, but not so sure if it'd need to be done like that. I think a sort of weekly agenda for the portfoli/action type thing would work okay.

There are two ways to play Diplomacy on the net: a company brought out a computer version of the game, which has internet play. Also, there are various servers that run Diplomacy Games by email. Further information available by searching the 'net.

> 'Resources in this game should not be "126 units of oil", but something like "Friendly regime in oil-rich country".'

Ick! I do hate games like that. Typically it runs something like this:

game coder: ok, so if you have 0-10 units of oil, then I display "very little oil", and if you have 10-25 I display "little oil". That'll work!

So you start playing the game. And one turn you notice that a "little oil" country has just changed to a "very little oil" country. And hence, you know that the country has about 9-10 units of oil. This is a lot more accuracy than the coder intended. And, worse, the accuracy depends on some arbitrary breaks between levels - so a country with 15 units of oil has much larger uncertainty than a country with 11 or 24 units. Pray to god that you and the coder have the same understanding of these arbitrary strings of text, and hope that the game doesn't suffer from any form of inflation in any statistics.

If you want to model uncertainty, then do so, but don't hide information behind words and think you've solved the problem. Do it properly - with uncertainty that depends on other factors, and isn't purely random. If you want to ease the learning curve, then display "very little oil (10 units)". But don't kid yourself that any serious players will look at the text after the first week.

Hello

So you don't want micromanagement, you do want world politics.

Hmmm...
How about this:
You are foreign secretary for some non-existant country, and so are in control of a department like the foreign office.
In the game you can set what information you recieve and what actions you take and which are dealt with by a chosen simulated official. You will set these for each country in the "world". You will also have a simulated official in some sort of security counsel (an erzatz UN), who will reply to any motion or statement in the counsel themselves if they are not given a direct instruction.
You will be given a selection of officials when your department is set up (set recruitment requirements? so can retire an official an create another?). And each simulated officials personality will determine how they will handle different types of situation (so you will have to be careful where you place them).
Now with this department you will be able to control your departments reaction to events in the world, and also advise other departments (e.g. the ministry of defence).
You will be told of events in the world through telexes, newspapers, and communications from other departments/countries.

Is this to complex? Too much based on the real world? or is it OK?

Just a thought

Researcher PSG

p.s. you will do all the coup organising through you advice (i.e. instructions) to other departments like the MOD, MI5 (or higher) and so on.

Hi everyone, sorry for the late reply, I'm trying to limit myself to one H2G2 session a day, since I've got important exams coming up (I have to do exceptionally well if I want to get a particular PhD place). Unfortunately, I'm an addict

Lucinda, I share your dislike for the idea of an indicator that says things like "a little oil", perhaps I should have been clearer. What I meant was indirect rather than approximate information. To take the oil example, what is important to know about your oil supply are things like: how likely is it that this or that oil producing country might nationalise its oil fields as part of a socialist revolution, thus losing your companies profit, what things might influence this or that oil producing country to lower prices, etc. Stats like "number of barrels of oil imported this year" would perhaps be available, and expert predictions about how many would be available given different possible courses of action, etc. However, none of the knowledge would be certain, perhaps lots of oil is being smuggled in, perhaps your information on how much oil is being exported by this or that country is being faked to raise prices, etc. This is what I mean by avoiding things like "126 units oil".

Others, lots of interesting ideas. I think if we were to actually settle down to make such a game, it would be very important to have a clear idea from the outset of the scope of the game. Some aspects are going to have to be very abstracted. Wonderful though it would be, I can't imagine that a game where everything from the local school to conducting coups in other countries was modelled. It's just too much.

I think we need to settle on some core abstract concepts that will define the scope and the mechanics of the game. It's a bit late now, but I'll suggest a few possibilities.

* Resources. As mentioned above, the key would not be "126 units of oil", but political, military and (maybe) geographic and technological barriers to access. This is obviously a very wide category, since things like fish and clean air are resources as well as the more obvious ones like oil or fresh water.

* Military (including things like spying and covert ops as well as the more obvious overt soldiers, tanks, etc). Here, we'd want to concentrate on the political and technological aspects rather than the actual running of the military. For example, the use of other countries airspace, global military reach, etc.

* Electorates. In a democracy, pleasing them is very important. In a dictatorship, less so, but it might sometimes be easier to let the electorate have their way than send in the troops.

* Businesses (collectively or individually in the case of really big businesses like GE). You don't want them to move out of your country, so they have to be appeased too.

* Diplomacy. Swapping favours, etc.

* Treaties, including international ones.

* Conflict. (That is, conflict of interests. This might lead to military or economic conflict.)

* Property.

* Currency.

Obviously, there are lots more, but I'm trying to get to bed at a reasonable hour...

The other thing we need to do is to define the aim of the game, although there could (and should) be many. It might be that personal wealth is your aim - this could be achieved by becoming a dictator and moving large amounts of wealth into your account, or in a democracy by ensuring that you get a cosy directorship of some big company. Alternatively, you might have grandiose visions of crushing communism, or achieving global socialism. There could be various predefined scenarios like this, or a "free play" mode where you just play for the hell of it without trying to achieve anything in particular.

Right, that's it. I've got to go and get some sleep. Till tomorrow night folks...

Also there is the way politics comes in with resources in other levels, like buying diamonds/oil/gold from some countries might be cheaper, but there is an ethical problem with buying stiff from the country (like third wold countries where diamond exports are being boycoted).


Dancer

I have a few points about Turn vs Real time based, if your going to have developing structurs and resource development, I'd say go for time based, but if all the real managment is going to be done by a third party in the game, then go for turn based, because they won't see the difrence realy. unless there's a crises.

I had a good game called Imperialism II but there was alot of resource managment involved, but it was a good turn based game, and it would work on realy low spec PC's

-- DoctorMO --