The US Elections as bad game design

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 3:29 am

Ohio is overpowered, and Florida's mechanics are unclear.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 3:43 am

Funnily, there's never been a good game about the US Presidential Elections either.

The last attempt was Campaign Manager featuring McCain vs Obama, which sucked horribly because the two campaigns were basically indistinguishable from one another (the McCain and Obama campaigns each have their own deck, which lets them fight over certain states. The problem? The two decks are basically identical except for like 2 cards).

Winning essentially boiled down to timing your card plays correctly so that you push one state irrecoverably over to your side before the other team can react.

Also, because the game already assumes that California and other states are already guaranteed to vote one way or the other, you're only fighting over a tiny number of states.

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 3:47 am

I've heard lots of folks argue for getting rid of the electoral college as a house rule and replacing it with the popular vote, but I don't think that this is well-thought out. It won't balance the game, and classes like Wyoming would still be underpowered.

If anything, it will only make California, Texas, and New York overpowered.

And now that Obama's elected, there's a petition going around to secede from the Union to make their own Edition of the game. We all saw what happened with that Confederacy spin-off game before USR sued them into oblivion.

Whatever · Post by **Whatever** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 4:31 am

If you think Wyoming is underpowered, you are crazy. You can buy Wyoming for waaaaay fewer points than the equivalent fraction of a High Density state.

K · Post by K » Thu Nov 15, 2012 4:55 am

If the electoral college rules were not used, the Republican player would always lose.

There are 72 million registered Democrats and 53 million Republicans. Around 42 million are either No Party or some minor Party.

There are also massive unregistered Democrat voters in states like California where we know that our vote doesn't count.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 5:05 am

Whatever wrote:If you think Wyoming is underpowered, you are crazy. You can buy Wyoming for waaaaay fewer points than the equivalent fraction of a High Density state.

There's also the fact that in a lot of states, only a tiny fraction of the population is actually "in play" and the rest are already going to vote Red or Blue anyway.

The one good aspect of Campaign Manager is that it does at least simulate this aspect - since you don't need to get the whole state to your side, just the "undecideds".

The bad side is that it demonstrates how just a little campaigning can suddenly net you a massive windfall of electoral college votes (especially with states like Florida) because states don't give out electoral college votes proportionately - it's all or nothing.

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 5:13 am

There's also an egregious loophole:

A character with the Businessman Class, combined with Ownership of a Voting Machine Item, can convert Democratic votes into Republican ones.

Separate Link: Unfortunately not enough gamers are aware of this issue, or that it can completely wreck game balance.

Third Link: Also, has anybody checked out Nate Silver's 538 Handbook? He's one of the best character optimizers out there!

Username17 · Post by **Username17** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 12:15 pm

Zinegata wrote:Funnily, there's never been a good game about the US Presidential Elections either.

I heard reasonably good things about 1960: The Making of a President. It helps that that was one of the elections that was legitimately very close.

-Username17

RobbyPants · Post by **RobbyPants** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 4:52 pm

Libertad wrote:Third Link: Also, has anybody checked out Nate Silver's 538 Handbook? He's one of the best character optimizers out there!

There are a lot of other professional players that consider him a dirty, dirty munckin, and ignore his tactics. When his tactics win, they get all butthurt about it, and mysteriously stop bringing him up.

Do note that these other players are unlikely to adopt his winning tactics, just to get pissed off at the next game.

Kaelik · Post by **Kaelik** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 6:58 pm

Libertad wrote:A character with the Businessman Class, combined with Ownership of a Voting Machine Item, can convert Democratic votes into Republican ones.

Separate Link: Unfortunately not enough gamers are aware of this issue, or that it can completely wreck game balance.

While your second link may or may not be valid, depending on what they mean by "trend lines" and what that actually shows, your first link is bullshit.

Ignoring for the moment that it was reported to happen the other way too at other locations, I am 100% sure that this was an error in the programming and not at all a deliberate fraud.

I know this because it would be like infinity times easier to make X percent votes for Obama actually be registered as for Romney despite showing as for Obama. It would actually be harder to change the hitboxes for the names than it would be to change where the votes go, and it would be more effective, because of fucking course anyone voting for Obama would notice that it checked Romney.

So there is literally a zero percent chance that this was an example of fraud.

Libertad · Post by **Libertad** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 8:09 pm

Kaelik, you need to speak in gamer code when talking about elections in this thread.

Josh_Kablack · Post by **Josh_Kablack** » Thu Nov 15, 2012 8:49 pm

Well, rejiggering hitboxes is a tried and true method of rebalancing games.

Zinegata · Post by **Zinegata** » Fri Nov 16, 2012 1:17 am

FrankTrollman wrote:
Zinegata wrote:Funnily, there's never been a good game about the US Presidential Elections either.
I heard reasonably good things about 1960: The Making of a President. It helps that that was one of the elections that was legitimately very close.

-Username17

It's better than Campaign Manager for at least trying to be asymetrical (Nixon and Kennedy have fairly different events with good historical flavor), but my friends who've played it tell me that there are too many broken strategies in that game.

Though, to be fair, it borrows heavily from Twilight Struggle which is a pretty broken game too (Soviets win 60% of the time). So at least its brokenness may not entirely be the subject matter's fault but the designer simply not having a good developer to fix the balance.