Whenever this subject comes up, I feel like we need to invoke and revisit the greatness of a computer game that’s now nearly 30 years old: President Elect 1988, from SSI.
The designer was a guy named Nelson Hernandez, who I gather is/was a political scientist and academic. His son used to post here on Qt3 from time to time, actually. Crazy that a guy who was coming at this game design problem from an academic background nailed it so completely.
First, the candidates. Each historical candidate was given 3 ratings, almost like a role playing character. They were for speaking ability, charisma, and poise with 9 being the highest in any category. For instance, I remember that Bobby Kennedy was a 7/7/7. Mario Cuomo was a 9/5/3. Reagan was like an 8/8/6 or something. While it’s easy to parse what the first two things affect (stump speeches and debate performance), the poise was the wildcard. The more you “pushed” a candidate, the more likely he was to make a gaffe that could have serious electoral consequences.
Second, you had the demographics, and here Hernandez did a very cool thing. He started by simply dividing the country into fairly standard regions: New England, Mid-Atlantic, The South, The Industrial Midwest, The Midwest, The Mountain States, and The West Coast. Each of those regions got some hard coded demographics, based on election year (you could play any election from 1960 through 1988). Then each state got some hard-coded demographic information too, also specific for year. But–and this is the great part–it also had some national numbers that you could adjust if you wanted. Before each game, it would say “The national unemployment numbers for this cycle were historically: x.x%. Change? Y/N” It would do that for inflation, and then let you set two national “feeling” numbers for the general optimism and temperature of the voting public that election cycle (it would give you Dr. Hernandez’s own suggestions as a basis.) Finally, it would ask you if either candidate was the incumbent, and which party was in power for the previous election cycle. (It gave you the historical defaults, but let you change them for hypotheticals.) That’s just such a great game design, combining national and regional and statewide figures like that.
Third, the gameplay. Here things were a fairly traditional resource management sim. You had funds that were restricted, and depended on candidate and year. The game warned you too: money spent late was more effective than money spent in September. The game gave you like 8 weeks of play, basically from Labor Day through Election Day. At the start of the gameplay, you could decide to send your candidate on a foreign trip to a hostile, neutral, or friendly country. This was your Hail Mary play if you were a candidate with no chance. A good trip (it was almost always random) could give you a jolt in the polls. They also ate up time and money resources.
You had a certain number of things you could do each week as far as personal appearance go. You had advertising to spend. Each new region cost money, each new state cost money, so you had to focus each week. You could then elect to have a debate after every week. Your number of campaign appearances could go really high (especially if you had a candidate who was charismatic and a good speaker), but you had to watch it: the more stops, the more likely you were to have a gaffe happen, which was modified by your candidate’s poise.
The debates were a mixed bag. You had to know some history. The game had like 30 debate questions in the database, but the game told you that some questions were more important than others, depending on the year. For instance, the civil rights questions were of prime importance in 1960s election scenarios, but less so in the 1984 or 88 scenarios. Each question gave you numerous options for how to allocate your time answering it, with the safe answer simply being “Kill time by telling a story.” You could score more points by being wonky, but you also raised your chance of making a gaffe if your poise was too low. One way to always win with Reagan was to always spend 70% of your time on any debate question on “Kill time”, because that option used Charisma as a stat, and so you’d just kill in the debate by not talking about anything.
Finally, the last thing that’s great about President Elect is how it presented the results. On Election Night, it would roll the returns out in “real time”. You could set the speed by which they came in, and could watch each state to see how you were doing. The game would project states just like news desks do today.
It is and was a gorgeous, elegant, simple design that–all apologies to Mr Wardell–did an unsurpassed job of making not only an accurate simulation, but also a fun game of presidential election horse races.
