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We started working on the political model in A Force More Powerful from the very beginning. The idea was to have an underlying system that was fundamentally simple, but could absorb a lot of different variables to produce realistic and useful effects.
So, we created Groups and Characters. Groups would represent organized or semi-organized interests, which may or may not be politically active. Often, it's the player's job to make Groups politically active! Characters are named individuals who have the potential to take an active role in the conflict. This gave the society some names and faces for the player to relate to. It's no fun just manipulating faceless masses of people, defined entirely by their agendas.
A second element of the political model involved ideology. It is very difficult to quantify or "number-ize" a person or group's ideology. Luckily, there has been some research in political science and economics about ideology and how it might be measured, and we simplified the research and devised a system that embraced its central idea. In particular, the idea was that people have "ideal points" or "ideal sets" of policies that they support, and they throw their political support to the coalition whose manifesto is closest to that ideal set. In AFMP, a character or group's Ideology support is derived from the total difference between an alliance's manifesto values for each active policy in the scenario and that character or group's personal ideal set. This is a very nuanced and unique way of handling ideological support.
The problem of which policies to include in the game was a difficult one. Some policies had to be considered in every scenario, since they affect the game model (for example, Corruption greatly affects the regime's effectiveness). Those policies couldn't be simply removed. Yet clearly some scenarios would include policies that would be irrelevant or out of place in others (the "Luthanian Independence" policy in Unwelcome Guests would look awfully odd in any other scenario!). So, we chose to adopt "custom policies", and let scenario designers put in any policies they wanted, right down to the labels for each level of the policy. That had the added benefit of not forcing our audience to accept our labels for the policies - if they want to change the meaning of the "maximum" setting for something like "Health Care" because our default label doesn't suit their personal views, that's easy to do.
Elections were another dimension of the political model that we wanted to get right. It quickly became apparent, after a lot of experimentation, that no single election model would suffice, since AFMP was required to model elections in all sorts of different places and times. Many political scientists often have trouble getting a good model to generate realistic election results with much more well-defined assumptions! So, we opted to handle elections entirely through the scripting system. This allowed each scenario to have its own custom election rules (so, for example, some scenarios have systems like the U.S. electoral college, and some have systems that emphasize the popular vote more, and one has an election in just one region - a local referendum).
The political model in AFMP is fundamental to the game and in many ways the entire game turns on it. We are very proud of what we created in it. We could have spent many more months tinkering with it and polishing it, but we're confident that what came out of the process presents political struggle in a novel, simple, and realistic way.
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