It’s time for our first major Early Access update! We had originally planned to push this update much sooner, but first we needed to get our house in order. Our long-term commitment to bringing a full-fledged political sim into existence meant Political Arena got to Early Access in a rather breakneck manner, with little time for things like “best practices,” “rest” or “thinking.” We now have a plan in place to ensure that the game will grow faster and more robustly. More on that at the end of this update.
So … Early Access 0.2!
Have you ever bemoaned the lack of worker deployment mechanics in legislative simulators? Do you often find yourself perusing this year’s National Defense Authorization Act and wishing it were stamped with a visual meter conveying the bill’s political health? Well, we have – quite a bit – and yes, your assumptions about our Saturday night plans are probably correct. Political Arena 0.2 is all about making Political Arena’s legislative system more strategic, customizable and dramatic.
Thing 1: Strategy in bill drafting
Drafting time is no longer pegged to the magnitude of a bill’s policy changes. Instead, bill drafting is broken up into discrete rounds. At the end of each round, the bill’s stats (more on those below) improve by a certain amount. The higher the stats, the better the bill’s chances for legislative and/or political success (not always the same!).
You can introduce a bill whenever you want – but doing so comes at a price. Larger bills take more time to get right, so the less time a bill cooks, the greater the risk for political blowback.
You can now delegate your staff to various roles in the bill drafting process. Each role improves bill drafting outcomes differently: talking to constituents about the bill, meeting with reporters and so forth. Each staffer brings to bear a different set of skills, which makes them better suited to certain roles. Staffers can only be deployed to a certain number of roles at once.
As Political Arena develops in Early Access, the ways in which you’ll be able to deploy staffers will grow, meaning you’ll have to be extra strategic about how you make use of your people.
Thing 2: Bills are alive!
Not in the Schoolhouse Rock anthropomorphic sense – though you’ll see a bit of that in our tutorials. No, bills in Political Arena now possess three key health stats that greatly impact their fortunes.
Quality
Quality is a measure of how well a bill is drafted. This isn’t a reflection of whether the bill’s proposed policy changes are a good idea, but rather how well-executed the bill is. While we don’t normally think of bills as being crafted – as if you could drop $1,500 for a particularly good one at Restoration Hardware – the rigor and thoughtfulness that goes into one can make all the difference to its success. If you want to combat the algae bloom in the Reflecting Pool by dropping a bunker buster on it, that’s up to you, dawg, but just make sure your bill delegates authority to some government entity with access to things that go boom. Giving it to the Bureau of Labor Statistics would make for poor bill Quality.
NPCs will place varying levels of significance to a bill’s quality depending on their profiles – Wonks and Principled characters will likely pay closer attention while Amoral and Hyperpartisan ones won’t care quite as much.
In future updates, a bill’s Quality will impact how it is metabolized by the world upon its passage into law. For example, algae hawks may prove to be very upset with your decision to deploy the Bureau of Labor Statistics in the War on Reflecting Pool Algae ™.
Momentum
A bill’s Momentum is the sum of all recent activity around the bill: cosponsorships, media attention and so forth.
With all our leaders seemingly in their 70s and 80s, you’d be forgiven for thinking the question, “What have you done for me lately?” is a sign of cognitive decline (and it might still be!). However, even by the already shortsighted standards of our feeble human brains, politicos are especially prone to short-term thinking.
Momentum reverts to zero with time, but if timed right, a surge of positive or negative momentum can decide a bill’s fate. This is meant to simulate any number of real-world legislative occurrences, such as a vote being delayed due to a surge of last-minute opposition, the reluctant scheduling of a vote due to a firestorm of organizing by an insurgent party faction and so forth.
Standing
Standing is a bill’s long-term health. Even after a bill’s Momentum has subsided, its on-the-record support and opposition remains. Think of this as what you’d see if you googled a bill: press releases supporting or denouncing it, news reports about it and so forth.
Of course maybe the news organization that reported on your bill’s bumpy history has since been shut down as part of corporate reshuffling, its records erased from the internet forever (gotta make your 10-Q pop, y’know?). Though the erosion of civil society can be a real lifeline to democratically elected officials, don’t count on being bailed out by this: the free press has a few good years left in it, we’re sure.
Thing 3: Tutorials!
We’re playing around with ways to onboard players – both into the mechanics of Political Arena and into politics itself. Much of the early game is now threaded together by a series of tutorials that will help people new to Political Arena and/or American politics. An interesting thing to note is that many (most?) elected officials arrive in Washington knowing surprisingly little about its ins-and-outs, so in this instance the tutorial is actually adding to the realism.
Looking Ahead
The most exciting thing on the horizon is the introduction of career and campaign mechanics in our next major release, 0.3. The initial mechanics will be lightweight compared to their ultimate 1.0 form, but you’ll be able to navigate your politician’s entire career, including managing their campaign logistics and strategy. Presidential play and campaigns will be rolled out in later updates.
Much of our 0.2x work will focus on getting Political Arena’s code base in order to support the increasing demands of its ambitious feature set: optimizing for thousands of AI decision points, hundreds of thousands of constituent groups and a rich (literally and figuratively) ecosystem of special interests.
One visual update we have teed up for the near future is a redesign of our Pause, Load & Save and Settings menus. They are … less than great and the settings menu in particular will need to change to handle the game’s coming feature growth.
And on that note, I hope you all enjoy the increasingly dynamic legislative system. Try to make smart choices about algae.
—Eliot
