Political Games Forever

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.

When looking for 2008 polling data for creating or editing your own scenarios with Campaigns Forever, there are several good sources.

One is Pollster.com, which uses data analysis to create some nice projections of where the percentages really are at any given time, while trying to filter out the noise of any given one poll. They also have some nice graphs which give you a feel for the 2008 election up to this point.

RealClearPolitics also tries to do this, with a more simple averaging approach. Both have their strengths.

Pollster.com also has a nice blog section, which is easy to miss, with analysis of polls and polling related discussion. This post, for example, has a nice discussion on what it will mean for early primary and caucuses polling given that they are just after the holiday break. Check it out!

As speculated on in this previous post, “Fred Thompson and the Political Game Called Intrade”, Fred Thompson has now been surpassed by Ron Paul, John McCain, and Mike Huckabee on Intrade. Here are the latest numbers:

(Although Thompson is listed above McCain and Huckabee, their last trade numbers are above his.)

This continues the dramatic trend discussed in that previous post.

So what’s happened? …

(more…)

“President Forever 2008 + Primaries is a political wonk’s dream.”

Generation Gamerz has a nice review of President Forever 2008 + Primaries up. There are a few minor inaccuracies (for example, not all candidates start with $10M - as an aside, in the latest 2008 Beta scenario they start with their actual FEC 3rd Quarter amounts), but how can you not like a review that says:

“Like SimCity and the Tycoon series, this game is like watching the monkeys at the zoo, it’s hard to turn away.”

To be honest, watching politics is sometimes like watching monkeys at the zoo too - but in a different way.

Welcome to PoliticalGamesForever.com.