This column is a reprint from Unwinnable Monthly #128. If you like what you see, grab the magazine for less than ten dollars, or subscribe and get all future magazines for half price.
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The Democratic Socialists of America is the largest socialist organization in the United States, with over 70,000 members. We believe that working people should run both the economy and society democratically to meet human needs, not to make profits for a few. The Democratic Socialism Simulator lets you play as the first socialist president of the United States. Can you redistribute power and wealth while addressing the climate crisis? Enact radical reforms, tax the rich, transform the economy, tackle the most pressing issues without alienating voters.
Where videogames meet real life…
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My first foray into running the United States as a socialist president didn’t exactly transform America into a utopia. After reigning in defense spending, nationalizing healthcare, liberalizing immigration and subsidizing organic farming, citizen engagement in the economy was strong and the nation built a substantial surplus. However, my environmental efforts lacked teeth and carbon emissions remained perilously high. The Democratic Party also lost seats in Congress, with no telling whether a potential successor could maintain power, let alone build upon the progress I’d made.
Democratic Socialism Simulator 2019
Fortunately, all of this happened within 20 minutes, and trying to right my wrongs took little more than starting another round of Democratic Socialism Simulator (Windows, Mac, Linux, Android). Developed by Carnegie Mellon professor Paolo Pedercini under his development label Molleindustria, it’s a simple strategy game that puts players in the shoes of a Bernie Sanders-esque president after winning the White House. My initial experience was just one of an effectively endless number of outcomes, but rather than quickly fixing my first shortcomings, subsequent playthroughs took me deeper through an exploration of the tension between idealism and compromise.
The game isn’t intended to offer a scientifically accurate model of how social democracy would work in the United States, but it is based on research around how social democracies have functioned in the past and may function in the future, and so offers an interactive look into what a progressive presidency in America might achieve.
After a brief introductory tutorial, the player is presented with a randomly generated succession of policy proposals from an array of different advisers, activists, government departments and lobbyist groups, each represented by an anthropomorphized animal avatar (which are all laid out in this public spreadsheet). You then swipe left or right to pass or reject each one, affecting your approval level among members of the electorate. Decisions also impact the national debt, greenhouse gas emissions and “people power” (a measure of equality in society and the economy). Balancing popularity with principles without losing seats in the House (which makes passing progressive legislation more difficult in your second term, should you be reelected) is key to success.
Think of something like the popular medieval monarchy franchise Reigns, but built around a theme of progressive politics and current events.
Responding based on your beliefs feels easy at first, and some proposals are worded in a way that leads you towards an answer. For example, your defense secretary may request funding for the Space Force while openly acknowledging its purpose is a mystery, or an immigration adviser might recommend taking brazenly inhumane actions to shut out immigrants. Others may use threats or intimidation to sway your opinion.
But as you progress, your path forward will likely start to look less clear. Since many of the choices you’re asked to make impact other policies, it’s possible to work yourself into a position where getting things passed becomes unfeasible due to political and/or logistical limitations. In those instances, you might be presented with a policy you want to support yet will only be given two different ways to say “no” or “not right now” (one more emphatically negative than the other).
The player also has no choice in which policies are proposed or in which order, which as Gita Jackson points out for Vice, leads to a level of randomness that undermines how much influence players really have on outcomes. Results are affected by chance as much as they are by choice, and the inability to prioritize an agenda and attempt to implement it from the start takes away from the sense that you’re leading a government rather than vaguely managing one.
Making matters more complicated, the electorate’s response to decisions doesn’t always feel like it’s following a clear logic. If an issue doesn’t directly clash with their priorities, compromises can sometimes slide past them seemingly without their notice (though they’d likely object if they had more awareness).
That’s not to say the game never favors the bold outright though, and after trying to push the game’s logic by passing policies left, right, and erratically either way, it seemed to reward some level of consistency. Getting pushback on a policy? Doubling down can sometimes be better than kowtowing to lobbyist pressure, and it might even let you work toward a solution that renders the complaint toothless. You might catch some heat from the predictably pretentious New Pork Times, stridently progressive Jackalin, or the scare-mongering FOX News (which is notably non-parodied), but you might also be rewarded with broad public support.
However, ending the game with a healthy balance sheet, an engaged public and strong environmental policy without hurting anyone isn’t easy to pull off consistently. After several playthroughs, I mostly failed to avoid uncomfortable compromises without consequences, resulting in difficult decisions around which trade-offs to accept to stay in power and whose rights would be inadvertently trampled.
What I found most compelling about Democratic Socialism Simulator are not just the questions it addresses about what could happen under a Sanders-style presidency, but also the ones it leaves unanswered after a round is over. How would certain compromises feel (like abandoning criminal justice reform to spare the political capital necessary to achieve Medicare for All and free public college) feel if I would be directly impacted by them in real life, whether they were intentional or not?
As a white college-educated male with a mortgage and a white-collar job, I’m playing real life with every cheat code turned on, and there’s a wide gap between problems that exist as abstract realities I read in the news versus the lived experience of oppressed people who cannot afford to wait for their rights. When nearly nothing the government does affects your material comfort, “compromise” doesn’t always land with the appropriate level of anxious urgency, and “pragmatic” often becomes a code word for “wait your turn.”
If electoral politics are essential yet transactional and insufficient for progress on their own, it is imperative to consider what is said and done as a result of my own actions and inactions, and what concrete steps must be taken to build a just and equitable future.
This is not a groundbreaking revelation, nor is it something new the game planted in my mind on its own. It is, however, a reality that the game has brought into sharper focus in my own consciousness, narrowing the gap between what I might have thought as morally correct, politically possible and immediately necessary to fight for. That examination of my own privilege is worth much more than the price of a cup of coffee, as the brutal realities of systemic oppression have landed near my own doorstep.
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Ben Sailer is a writer based out of Fargo, ND, where he survives the cold with his wife and dog. His writing also regularly appears in New Noise Magazine.
Democratic Socialism Simulator was released yesterday for Windows, MacOS, and Linux. The Android version is still under review. It’s a casual, single player game in which you play as the first socialist president of the United States. You have to evaluate an endless stream of policy proposals, balance the budget, reduce greenhouse gas emissions, gain the support of different voters and build people’s power.
The title Democratic Socialism Simulator is a bit of a misnomer since the game doesn’t portray a democratic socialist society but rather the first years of a hypothetical post-capitalist transition via social democracy. I have made a few prototypes that modeled a democratic socialist economy but, at least as single player experiences, they didn’t differ too much from traditional resource management games. I thought the very beginning of such a transformation would make for a more interesting and timely subject.
In other words, DSS is an attempt to prefigure a Sanders (or a Sanders-like) presidency by focusing on the issues not fanboyism. Most of the proposals are lifted straight from Bernie Sanders’ platform so you can see it as an interactive flyer of some sort.
DSS borrows its gameplay from the game Reigns (which in turn, borrows its interface from the dating app Tinder). It’s a simple but infinitely expandable structure that can touch upon a lot of topics with very little audiovisual content. Aside from being particularly satisfying on touch screens, the swiping mechanic is a clever way to present a lot of variables and effects to the player. Dragging a proposal left and right visualizes its most immediate effects without cluttering the interface.
In Reigns you play as king or queen, going through a series of grievances from your subjects. Your goal is to stay in power as long as possible by not alienating (or favoring too much) the Church, the people, the army, and the treasury. This kind of agency is appropriate for a feudal setting but it doesn’t work in a game set in a liberal democracy, and in which the goal is to change the status quo.
In DSS your actions are attributed to the coalition supporting the president. The congress counter represents not only the seats held by the Democratic party but also the forces that actually support you across institutions and in the civil society. Some radical reforms require a minimum of support to be enacted. Your presidency is obviously limited to two terms with the possibility of losing the reelection.
The voters’ approval depends on their top two issues, and this is a crucial feature. In a time of polarization and tribalism, it’s easy to forget that the ideological alignment of most Americans is more complex, contradictory, and multidimensional than what the media portrays. We are tempted to conceptualize voters as standing on an axis going from “very liberal” to “very conservative”, a gradient of blue and red. That’s a simplification that favors a centrist view: since the left and right wings are assumed to be already politically engaged, the only way to expand support is to appeal to the moderate center. In reality there is evidence showing that swing voters can hold very progressive and very conservative positions at the same time, and that non-voters are all across the ideological spectrum. I believe this multidimensional model of affiliation is fundamental to create working class coalitions in the USA and abroad. Moreover, in DSS the electorate’s composition and top priorities can change as a result of your reforms.
But DSS is not just a power fantasy for leftists. The game speculates about the challenges to radical reforms that could come from the ruling class, Wall Street, mainstream media, deep state, and corporate Democrats. While the polls show that proposals like the Green New Deal or Medicare For All are extremely popular, the general public may not be prepared to even conceptualize the opposition that they would inevitably encounter.
Democratic Socialism Simulator 2016
The latest issue of Jacobin is entirely devoted to democratic socialist horror stories. The capitalists may be irrelevant in numeric terms, but they have an enormous leverage over “the economy” and the state apparatuses. They can collectively withdraw investments and use their media to frame the subsequent crisis as a political failure. They can outright buy politicians’ support. They can exercise their clout over liberal elites. The left in the United States has been marginal for so long that any conversation about what can possibly happen once in power has become irrelevant. The neoliberal/technocratic vision of politics still dominates the Democratic base, and the idea of a continuous mobilization and pressure campaign after winning the elections is unheard of.
As the perspective of a democratic socialist turn becomes more concrete, we need to create culture that both expands the realm of the possible, and prepares us for the struggles ahead. Change may be scary, but no change at all is much scarier.
Democratic Socialism Simulator Download
DSS has not been designed to mount a precise linear argument. It has different endings and a specific starting point (you have a mandate) but it doesn’t prescribe a “correct” path to socialism. Instead it’s more like a collection of semi-random choices, conditions, and cause-and-effect relations that interact with each other in a messy way, creating a multitude of possible paths. Players can define their own idea of success: they can play as cautious moderates, or even enact some markedly right-wing policies (deportations, privatizations, austerity, militarism).
Games that try to embed their politics deep into their gameplay are still relatively rare. In my experience, many players expect a clearly delivered “message” and try to extract it from a single play-through. DSS has a significant element of randomness and a number of implicit mechanics that the player can only guess, so I wouldn’t be surprised if different people come up with widely divergent interpretations. Without getting too much into semiotics, what the game “says” about socialism is a network of micro arguments explorable in a variety of directions. The *ideological engine* of the game is basically a series of spreadsheets that I share here for the most curious and nerdy users. There is even a column with notes and links related to the specific proposal and event.
Democratic Socialism Simulator How To Win
Planetbase game. THE COMPLETE DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM SIMULATOR SPREADSHEET (spoilers) Lovecraft's untold stories switch review.
Notes: The data should be rather self explanatory. The “equality” variable is the “people’s power” red bar. The command “chain” stacks a card right after the current one. The command “delay” postpones an event after a random number of cards within certain intervals.
Democratic Socialist Simulator is not free. After 17 years of Molleindustria, it is the first proper commercial release. I’m already getting some comments like “iF iTs SoCiaLIsT wHy IsNT iT fREe??”. There are a couple of reasons:
1) Pretty much nobody cares about free games today. Websites don’t review them, stores have no interest in featuring them. There are hundreds of indie games coming out every day. Many of these releases are student projects, prototypes, half finished jam games, joke games, zine games, sketchy asset flips. It’s wonderful to see such a democratization of the form, but I’m afraid not putting a price on a game is increasingly seen as not attributing any value to it.
Contraption maker free. 2) During the Flash era, free online games could reach a potentially huge audience. Some Molleindustria games racked up millions of plays. It meant connecting with people outside my filter bubble and challenging them with naughty anticapitalist games. To some extent, Democratic Socialist Simulator is meant to preach to the choir (although it’s a rapidly growing choir); it’s less “Wake up sheeple!” and more “What is to be done?” so I’m fine if the price tag pre-selects the audience.
3) Free games cannot be used for fundraising purposes. In recent years we’ve seen a multitude of game bundles put together to support good causes. Since all my games were free I had nothing to contribute, and that bothered me a lot.
Socialism Game
Of course if you are a broke comrade, feel free to contact me, and I’ll send you a download code.