Election Coverage

[afleitch]

At the risk of repeating myself, this is where I stand.

1. If this game was a parliamentary sim where everyone (party affiliation included) who signed up was in parliament, then elections wouldn’t matter. The entire focus could be on law making, government formation, voting, amendments and political machinations. Even if you ended up with 100 players, it would only make the game more challenging because parliaments of a similar size often have members who are very active and others that do bugger all.

There would be no ‘outside world’ to worry about, no need for checks and balances etc. I would have liked consideration given to that.

2. As it is, this game is not a parliamentary sim; it’s an elections sim and a parliament sim. It’s players are elected and holding office or not elected Those who aren’t in parliament are still in the game. In that case, you have to accept that there are two parts to the game. If you allow one half (the parliament) to play as it likes, then it can effectively ignore the other half. We’ve been told ‘start a newspaper etc’, but the game then has no interaction between parliament and outside parlaiment except when there are elections. There’s not ‘rules of play’ that says ‘you know what; sometimes the parliament can’t do x, the citizens do x.’

You can ignore petitions from the public, you can ignore the managing of external events, the press, trade unions etc. And likewise, if you’re not in the parliament you can ignore it if there are no ground rules. You can get enough people behind you to say, ‘we six players have decided to mount a coup’ and you can play like there’s been coup.

[Talleyrand]

I also support finding ways for non-elected official members of the simulation to play a role in it, but what exactly are you proposing for them to do just that? Should the GM recognize outside bodies like trade unions, the press, and paramilitary organizations? I'm open to all ideas.

[Cranberry]

I do think that your last proposal, the GM officially recognising a number of outside bodies, be it trade unions, chambers of commerce, lobbying firms, the press, or even paramilitary organisations, as it both gives people incentives and stuff to do, and it adds an interesting extra that Atlasia doesn't have, at least not to an official extent.

Additionally, I would love if we could, in some way, get some component of money in politics, say, election budgets for the parties, into the game, it would certainly add some real life flavour, and we could maybe even end up with a real corruption scandal . I am afraid though I have no idea how such would be administered, but maybe someone understands what I am talking about and has some ideas up their sleeve?