Massive online democracy game.

[Lemmy]

Originally i intended to make a longer and more detailed post about this, but my experience with long posts is that i, and probably most other users, don't read them. So here is just a (relatively) short post describing the global idea of my Massive Online Democracy Game (MDOG).

To find out what a democracy game actually is, i suggest you look around in the DG forums here in apolyton to get an idea.
A general description would be a game where an unlimited amount of people playtogether united as one empire in a TBS-game, either against the AI or other human-controlled empires.

What's "wrong" with the current demo games?
The game and the discussion are seperated. Most, if not all of the discussions about what to do next are held on these forums. The game however has nothing to do with these forums. Problems that are consequences of this:

1. The treshold for searching for a piece of information is rather high. The game has to be started, the savegame must be loaded, information must be sought. If Alt-Tabbing isn't possible, then the info has to be written somewhere. Exit the game, and you can finally post the piece of info.

2. For citizens to stay up to date on what happens in the game, they either have to download the save each time, or the government has to give detailed reports on everything that's happening. The last bit is rather demanding of the government, so it comes down to that the citizens are required to own the game to stay up to date.

3. Cheating is possible. Either by the one who is playing out the turns, or by citizens of the game if the save is publicly available. Nobody knows what the president is doing when he plays the turns. Some things can be checked by downloading the save, but not everything.
But the most obvious cheat would be what the citizens can do with the savegame. They could play ahead, find out information about other civs, and use that info to steer discussions.

The MODG i was thinking about
The game and discussion would be integrated in one website, done with php/mysql. The game played wouldn't be an existing TBS game, but a "new" TBS-game, based on the current TBS-games. But the difference would be that the game will be run on the server, and turns will be processed at fixed intervals.
Here's how it would work:
A players signs up for the demogame, and choose a side/emprie/faction in the game. Once logged in, the player can only see the information about his side, but it will be easily accesible.
The elected ministers in the demogame can, depending on their constitutional rights, give orders in the game. For some actions it may be required to have a poll first. If that is the case, then a poll must be started, and if the poll result is positive, the order for the action is given.
There would be several factions in the game, all controlled by human players, and all with their own government structure. The government structure will be decided on by the players before the game starts.

Ehm..oops, still a bit long...

[Lemmy]

The game itself
It would a be a spacebased 4x game.
Why? Because of the possiblo unlimited map size, if a game gets to crowded, just add another empire to the edge of the map .
Ship design would have to be in off course.
Seperate bulid queues for military and social, as in galciv.
Lots of diplomatic options, treaties and such. There is no AI to woory about here.
Planet with different ratings and such.
A nice big map to explore and colonize.
Starbases of some sort.
etc..

The point is, there is no need to worry about the game becoming too much micromanagement, with 50 people playing the same game, MM is needed to not feel redundant.


Off course, the biggest problem would be the sheer amount of work that has to be done.

[The diplomat]

Originally posted by Lemmy
The game itself
Off course, the biggest problem would be the sheer amount of work that has to be done.

If the game requires so much work that it feels like a full time job, then I would want to get paid for it.

[jdd2007]

you would need to expand on it, and make some changes, but its a good idea, except unfortunately like most others it will never materialise.

[Leland]

Some gameplay issues that pop to mind...

• Information: since it's trivially easy to cheat by either logging in to the enemy's camp, or by just having friends there, the real distinction between what information is available to a player cannot be what empire/faction he's playing in, but rather what position he has in the faction. For example, if every citizen knows about positions of military units and movement, then it's likely that the rival factions know this stuff too, regardless of whether the game allows it or not.
  
• Length: is one game supposed to last indefinitely, or are there victory conditions of some sort? If the latter, do the players themselves get ranked? By what criteria?

[Lemmy]

Information: since it's trivially easy to cheat by either logging in to the enemy's camp, or by just having friends there, the real distinction between what information is available to a player cannot be what empire/faction he's playing in, but rather what position he has in the faction. For example, if every citizen knows about positions of military units and movement, then it's likely that the rival factions know this stuff too, regardless of whether the game allows it or not.

But one of my gripes with the current DG's is that information is hard to get(dl'ing savegame, starting game, alt-tabbing etc...).
The only way to log in the enemy camp would be to have multiple accounts. Now all massive online mp games have this problem and all of them has taken certain measures to counter it. You can't eliminate cheating, but in this case, if someone cheats everyone will know.
A player can't just walk in and say empire x is preparing an invasion and their fleet is parked at asteroid belt x032. Most of the other players will have the common sense to realize that this player got that information by cheating. Probably resulting in a ban for the account in question.
I think in every online game there are more honest players then cheaters. You'll have to count on them to keep the game cheater-free.

However, i do think that the idea that not every citizens know where every military unit is has merit.
Units that are in deep space may be invisible for the citizens, they'd have to rely on government information in that case.

[Lemmy]

Length: is one game supposed to last indefinitely, or are there victory conditions of some sort? If the latter, do the players themselves get ranked? By what criteria?

No set victory conditions are needed IMO.
The players themselves can decide when an empire has won the game, or when the game has become too boring the play.
Also i assume new features will be added as the game progresses, when the game has changed significantly, it could also reset.
Ranking players could be interesting, criteria can be their approval rating, or highest election victory. I see a lot of possibilities for rankings, best military commander for example.

[Leland]

Originally posted by Lemmy
one of my gripes with the current DG's is that information is hard to get(dl'ing savegame, starting game, alt-tabbing etc...).

I didn't mean to say that the information would necessarily be hard to get... just that if you want easy access to information in a massively multiplayer game, you're going to have trouble enforcing secrecy. Can't have it both ways. IMHO, a large chunk of information being public to all citizens regardless of faction doesn't necessarily break the game; you just have to take this into account when designing.

The only way to log in the enemy camp would be to have multiple accounts. Now all massive online mp games have this problem and all of them has taken certain measures to counter it. You can't eliminate cheating, but in this case, if someone cheats everyone will know.

I don't think it's that clear cut. What about honest speculation? If someone says "I'm pretty sure the Lemurians are hiding a cruiser in Uranus," it could very well be a lucky guess or clever deduction instead of cheating. However, if every such guess is countered with "cheater, cheater" chant it might effectively kill all discussion on strategic issues and turn the whole game into a witch hunt.

I think that cheating like this would be worse than in average massively multiplayer game. Usually having a second account doubles your chances at best, which might not be that devastating if the game has hundreds of players. But in this case, even the tiniest leak can have serious repercussions to the whole faction that's being spied, and it's hard to figure out where the leak is even if you know it exists. Furthermore, there's the chance of spoilsports who announce national secrets just for laughs and might not even care about getting booted. It's true that cheating can never be eliminated altogether, but making it possible for one person to ruin the fun for everyone is a big problem when number of players grows.

The concept is still good. Just that the underlying game should emphasize long-term strategic choices instead of secrecy. Make most of the information available to everyone, add faction-specific discussion forums (just so that the players get that feeling of belonging) and a few secret goodies for top officials (like, only the head military honcho can access information on secret army bases). It could work.

[Lemmy]

How about this:
Each ship in the game has a certain security level, this level is set by the government and decides who gets to see it. By default its at the lowest setting, meaning everyone can see it.
At higher settings only specially selected people are able to see it. The people who can see it are selected by the elected government official who controls the ships.
This could become an agenda for elections, one candidate promising to make military affairs more public, and the other wanting to be more secretive about it.

I don't know, one on side i like the idea of possible secret ships and bases. But on the other hand it is a democracy game and the citizens can't vote on it if they don't know anything about it. They also can't know if the minister did something they would not approve of. Making some things secret can allow the leaders to ruin the game for the citizens.

[Leland]

Originally posted by Lemmy
How about this:
Each ship in the game has a certain security level, this level is set by the government and decides who gets to see it. By default its at the lowest setting, meaning everyone can see it.
At higher settings only specially selected people are able to see it. The people who can see it are selected by the elected government official who controls the ships.
This could become an agenda for elections, one candidate promising to make military affairs more public, and the other wanting to be more secretive about it.

This occurred to me too... and it would be great. The average joes of course want to know what's going on, but doing so compromises security and potentially hurts the faction. A living proof that democracy simply doesn't work . This idea could be extended to other areas of the game as well: maybe even allow the government to spread misinformation.

But, like you said this kind of propaganda would have to be restricted so that the leaders can't get away with just about anything. Most of the data should be reliable (population, economy, social engineering, etc.) and the stuff that's not reliable must clearly be marked as such. No piece of information should be forged by just one person; at least all the members of the government should be aware of what's really going on. And maybe there could be a time limit after which misinformation expires: an administration that's lying to the electorate will that way be eventually exposed (assuming they even get to be in power that long).

[DarkCloud]

Instead of creating a computer game- just do something simple and create a random number generator; then create a simple board game

that would save a lot of time and effort