This is the president was a game that from the very beginning, I was worried that it wouldn’t really qualify as a strategy game. As you’d expect, it’s about being the President of the United States and making a lot of decisions about running the country and trying not to become too popular. But it’s closer to interactive fiction than a simulation, with a main storyline whose claims, if unsuccessful, would immediately end the game.
However, it did make me ponder what exactly “political strategy game” means.
The first interesting thing about This Is The President is that your goal is not to get re-elected or run the country well. Your first act is a victory speech where you construct sentence by sentence from a number of slightly branched options, none of which you have any context. What appeared to be a loophole is then revealed in subtext when your wife pulls you aside and confirms your true motives: to secure immunity from prosecution by passing an amendment to the Constitution. law at any cost. You’re a big fraud, even by presidential standards, and you promise, gain or leave it doesn’t matter for others to deal with, as long as you get the fix.
If you’re still not sure how serious the game is, it won’t be long before an old acquaintance invites you to a musical. The gameplay cutscene for this is so much fun that I would recommend the game just so you can experience it for yourself. Suffice it to say that the dialogue options then include dismissing the whole thing as delusional and confessing to your wife that the plot of the play is a true story, flashback to your character. a scandalous past that you can try to cover up otherwise, have your IT guy blow up the playwright with a drone.
It is refreshing to see a work about US politicians who do not treat them with reverence, but rather unremarkable figures in an innate corrupt system.
This is not a game made entirely at face value. And against my assumptions, it works. It is refreshing to see a work about US politicians who do not treat them with reverence, but rather as unremarkable figures in an innate corrupt system like the sad thing never to be. followed Shape of America. The plot is compelling enough to keep you from having to make decisions. Especially once it tells you, a little too far, that you can replay a month at any time. This function is not as useful as a full save function, but it is suitable to keep you unafraid of ruining your run with just one wrong click or one wrong decision. It keeps your story and thoughts moving, always focused on that single, very tangible goal.
Each month, you are faced with a number of events and must resolve them through dialogue options for most of the focus events, and by ordering your personal staff to perform tasks. that you think will help. Each employee-based event asks you to choose one or more employees to go with, and they’ll suggest possible solutions that match their expertise and personality. Like Hidden Agenda, you have to rely on your staff to make recommendations, so my hacker guy is the tool to find a missing person from the collected data. But when it comes to generating publicity, the best he can come up with is “present a free remote lecture on data analytics nearby,” while the attorney, sharp in procedural and paperwork matters, offering to threaten a wide range of homeless people. with a lawsuit.
After an event has started, you can often discuss with another person for more relevant expertise. It’s a good way to mitigate that common problem in games where you’re not given enough information to judge what to commit until you’re ambushed by an unexpected turn or one of Your people let you down. It also sells context, as you can easily picture Malcolm Tucker’s hurried phone calls and angry taxi rides and bouncing actions. However, there is a cost to this, which varies between characters. My PR star, spoiled and mercenary, but knows her worth anyway and demands a raise for it, while another will suggest that you owe them a lump sum. Composing them at the last minute also stresses them out, more so than if you started using them but never used them.
In fact, stress is a core system, as whatever your employees do brings them down, limiting what you can achieve in any given month. It goes down when they get vacations or expensive perks, and goes up by varying amounts when you rely on them on events. There is no direct correlation between the stress cost of an action and its effect, making it a game of judgment and reasoning rather than a game of numbers. Stress can passively increase or decrease depending on who you have appointed to each official office, which will also change income or public opinion over time, again depending on the individual. .
Money is important, but your main resource is your employees, and half the game is in the balance between keeping them busy, keeping them rested and ready to solve problems, and hoping only occasionally. leave them exhausted sometimes.
Employees even react to burnout in different ways. One character didn’t ask for anything when I invited him to an event, but said he felt like the rest of the team didn’t like him and asked if I was sure I wanted him to come. . Where my crooked press secretary could basically be paid to burnout, this guy instead asked for nothing, but made comments that made me worry about his mental health ta. Of course, mechanically, it would make sense to force him more since his part-time job is “free”. But that’s where you hit that line, right? It’s an absolutely amazing line Suzerain live on, between simulation and story. And that’s where a moment of character in a narrative-heavy, low-simulation game illustrates something a lot of polsims overlook. Everyone.
This Is The President is driven more by narrative than simulation, even compared to Suzerain, which is more of an interactive fiction game than a strategy game. But in some ways, I was thinking more strategically than both, and very mechanical simulation like Political process. Before, I tried to do the right thing and trust the right people. In the latter part, great as it is, I often think about numbers. The same is true of ministers in Shadow President, or Democracy. No matter how they dress, when political games focus too much on systems and simulations, the people in them become mere machines from which you can effectively draw. mathematical maximum. While they, or, say, Crusader Kings 3, can create narratives, those stories tend to come after the truth and don’t really serve the strategic element, nor are they served by it. service.
In contrast, This Is The President is a strategy game about managing employees as characters in the service of a story. That’s something that any political game should certainly focus on as much as raw data. It is by its very nature as unpredictable as life itself. To be sure, broad strokes remain the same across most cultures and eras. There are patterns. But the details are not the same. And a life in politics is certainly no more than a pile of details 24/7. Pose a strategic challenge from that is the real problem a political game designer has to deal with, not involving more thematic background or modeling more systems.
The price to pay in this case is, with even more secrets and interrelated subplots and Suzerain side events, This Is The President can only provide so many permutations for its a main plot. You can twist that storyline here and there in the dialogues, filling in your back story a bit. There’s a hint of something like 80 Days, where it encourages you to choose choices that are clearly a bad idea just to see what happens. Or perhaps it compares better, oddly, to Skyward Collapse, a game I only enjoyed when I realized that you shouldn’t be cautious and rational, but have fun escalating the difficulty and often then try to deal with the spiraling consequences. But you are still the same scammer.
Playing a crook is obviously oddly liberating, as the game never assumes that your president’s actions reflect anything about you as a human. Anything unethical or inconsistent is only a means to an end. It could be a safe route to gather enough money and material to bribe and blackmail your legislation through, or agree to any radical changes to put pressure on the Supreme Court to pass it. overwhelming argument. Or do you even want a change of heart and make an effort to be a really good head of state?
Your average Prez or PM pursues high positions because of various combinations of greed, sociopathy, and lust, and this person wants nothing more than a free card from prison. But since you have no other agenda and don’t want to stay in office, you can accept your arrest and do some good deeds before you go. I’m willing to hit a lot of big goals to gain public support, and the sheer novelty of a president who’s unafraid to call the NRAs evil serial killer bastards. But also completely ready to attract an occasional cashback or invest in one or twelve profitable schemes. Gotta accept that bribe. Look at awards and all that.
I really enjoyed This Is The President. It’s a strategic win-win, but I’m optimistic about where political strategy games are likely to evolve over the next few years. For most of my life, those were slim choices, with a very dry spreadsheet feel, and a disproportionate focus on elections. I think there’s a lot of room for more imaginative fare, with more exploration of storytelling and of government as a dramatic interweaving of personal and political. And if nothing else, it’s quite a feat to portray a perfectly in-service criminal in this day and age that doesn’t feel sadly accurate.
