Political Games Forever

Think your political game theory is tops? Then test it out. Try Politico.com’s Kingmaker game, here.

Essentially, this is an election market, but you bet nothing and get a big prize if you win. It’s your chance to apply all that political game theory you learned to the 2008 primaries elections.

You need to predict the actual percentages for the candidates in the primaries. Right now, you can make political predictions for the primaries up to Michigan’s on January 15, 2008. The person with the most points by March 4 wins.

You place your predictions by moving the candidate around. Here John Edwards’ chances are being set for the Iowa caucuses. A bar on a graph represents your prediction for each candidate. If you move the candidate up higher on the graph, the bar will become narrower, indicating a riskier prediction, because it covers fewer possible percentages for that candidate’s vote results. If you move a candidate to near the very bottom of the graph, you can cover a large range but with a much diminished payout. All in all, another neat political ‘game’.

(Or you can try this game.)

Have fun!

In a way, President Forever 2008 is a political board game. You can easily imagine a board laid out in front of you with a map of the states, political cards and tokens for various game activities, money like in Monopoly, and so on. It is turn-based.

The difference, of course, is that political board games are limited in the complexity of the world they can simulate much more so than computer political games - and it’s difficult to create playable players without other humans around in a board game. In a sense, then, games like President Forever 2008 + Primaries are really sophisticated, hyper-board games.

We are now close to entering the brave new world of online political games with President Forever 2008 Multiplayer.

We successfully tested a two-player online game, then a three-player game, and now a four-player game. You can read about these things here and here. Having played just a two-player game, all I can say is wow. This is politics like never before.

What will the online world for P4E8 look like? When it starts, it will be straightforward. A place you can meet other players, or start a private online game, with any other human player around the world. This is still a gigantic step beyond the current hot-seat games, where you need a roommate to be able to play against another human. With time, we will start adding extra features. A competition ladder, a recent game results page, and candidate average outcomes are at the top of our wish-list.

It will be interesting to see how online strategies, by humans who are far more resourceful than the computer players, will or will not mimic real-life strategies. You can even imagine campaign strategists trying out different strategies online to see how it might actually play out. The strategy is especially interesting in primaries like the Republicans’ current 2008 one, where players (candidates) are making alliances, non-aggression pacts, and deciding which opponents to attack and which ones to build up. As one pundit has put it, it’s a complex game of “bank shots,” and I can see this happening in online games with not just 2 human players in a primary, but 4, 6, or however many.

More updates soon.