The big highlight for me at Eurogamer this year was the amount of really creative, interesting and unique Indie titles on display. These were my personal highlights, starting with Democracy 3.
Democracy 3 is the third in the Democracy series by “one man games company” Positech Games also known as Cliff Harris. The Democracy series puts you in the place of President/Prime Minister/Supreme Leader as you fiddle with policies, taxation and laws that impact the lives of your citizens.
The game takes place on a specially designed neural network that simulates the incredibly complicated voting behaviour of citizens and how the choices you make impact on their opinion of your leadership. It’s incredibly deep, and it’s gripping. There’s no binary in Democracy 3, everything is on a sliding scale and each tiny movement can alienate entire groups of voters. Want to raise property taxes in order to improve welfare? Say goodbye to the middle-class property owners vote.
You’ve got some tough choices to make. From my experiences with Democracy 2, briefly speaking to Cliff Harris at Eurogamer and reading some other hands-on impressions, Democracy 3 changes you. I went into it trying to create a balanced, liberal society. But soon found myself having to raise taxes I didn’t want to, cut funding I really didn’t want to and enact some harsh measures just to win a handful of votes.
Democracy 3 an updated code, being almost entirely written from scratch, the neural-network interface has also been updated making the perilously complex web of policy networks, debt figures and voting behaviour look deceptively easy to understand. That’s how it gets you.
Outside of gaming my other passion is politics; I studied it at college and university, I’m a member of a party and I spend my time watching party conferences and PMQ’s so I found this whole concept absolutely fascinating. Even if you’re not interested in politics but are interested in complex, massively detailed and challenging simulations I highly recommend you check this out. And check back later in the week for a Q & A with the man behind it all Cliff “Cliffski” Harris.
