So, maybe right now isn’t the best time for a game that imagines the first democratic socialist US president, but folks kind of brought that on themselves by saying, in real life, “now isn’t the best time for a democratic socialist US president,” so I can’t really fault Democratic Socialism Simulator’s developer, Paolo Pedercini, for just going ahead and doing the damn thing.
And so what we have here is a single-player game (though I could honestly see it being bent into a fun casual local multiplayer game, just because it’s got a lot of interesting characters and choices to make) with a single gameplay mechanic that Pedercini took, and this is not a joke, from Tinder: swipe left to decline an action, swipe right to accept it. Below your decision card readout is a graph which shows you your approval rating by moving little virtual animals (your voting base) back and forth along an unlabeled political spectrum chart. The more people are grouped up near you, the higher your popularity. If people start to move away, it means you’ve done something unpopular or something bad has happened as a result of your government’s actions.
In addition to popularity, you have to pay attention to two additional things: your party’s legislative majority (and whether you have one), and bars showing your budget, “people power” and proximity to carbon neutrality. Finally, your game is split up into four potential rounds: each presidential term and, inside these, each midterm election. Your goal: to make it to the end of your second term as a democratic socialist having done your best to reduce the US’s carbon footprint, bring prosperity to the people, and foment a revolution without being pressured to resign or getting deposed by the military.
What surprised me during my playthroughs is that while democratic socialism is a “radical” ideal in the context of modern American politics, the game played with it as the centrist “compromise” position, and didn’t allow for much pushing in radical or extreme directions, either toward the left or the right. Like, nobody’s going to be out here making their right-libertarian tax paradise given the game’s constraints, but neither are we going to be setting up an anarcho-syndicalist federation in the ashes of the former republic.
I don’t mind a reset of the Overton window where the default “normal” position is toward a nominal democratic socialism. But I do feel weird with putting the president, with all the history that entails, at the center of this revolution. In games like A Bewitching Revolution, for example, your revolutionary actions are limited to helping other residents in the neighborhood realize their own class consciousness and develop the tools and infrastructure necessary to actually revolt, to disconnect from the oppressive state they are enveloped by. While you spread the seeds, your neighbors make them grow. In Democratic Socialism Simulator, it’s the opposite. You’re the only gardener, and the people are your crop.
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