That’s a relatively recent development, at one point the UN was actually a fairly democratic institution. For a few years Algeria was actually the most powerful country in the UN due to leading the G77 coalition!
In retrospect a lot of my comments came off as a bit rude, my apologies. Thanks for the very kind reply!
When I was choosing a Democrat VP, it talked about their policies and administrative accomplishments, but when I chose a Republican VP, it mostly talked about their personal accomplishments and reputation. I think it might be a lot more valuable to the player if we got to know the Republican policies too!
Ah, then I misinterpreted the way those were phrased. Thanks for clarifying! Those sound great, I really appreciate the thoughtful response.
If populism is something intended for a future update then I totally understand why this wouldn’t be here yet. Looking forward to that!
Ah, good to hear, I’ll grab that then.
Thank you for the excellent response! I really appreciate the clarification, despite my original comment being a bit snippy. I’m definitely planning to go further in the game now, reading this.
I’m not gonna say I actually disagree given what my actual position on the political spectrum is, but there’s still some difference between Christian isolationist-nationalists and neoconservative imperialists.
Well in a two party system it is sometimes more convenient as a non-traditional candidate to try and take over the nomination of the minority party rather than deal with the extensive machinery and near impossible standards for candidate vetting that the majority party in your region uses. But maybe that was only a truism before the rise of social media and making all politics national./culture war politics in the US.
Realistically both the Republican and the Democratic party would be poor fits for the kind of fictional candidate I’d want to play here but third parties and independents don’t stand a chance in the US system at the moment
If the author made that an option. Theoretically he could have won Portland mayor and (state senator before that, since Dems have a history of not caring enough about state levels politics anyway) as an independent on the back of voter fatigue with a long succession of Democratic mayors who failed to sufficiently address the housing problem. It is however not an option for the game at present. To make it an option the backgrounds would have to expanded in content but limited to less, 5-6 options, just like the origin stories in Dragon Age origins.
But then you answer your own question. There currently is no option to be like Sanders, so we still have to make that binary choice and growing up poor in Oregon the people who would have been in power all the time would have been the Democratic party. Working with them may well be a necessity but currently the mc can only be a seemingly enthusiastic card-carrying member of the party they belong to.
Which leaves me with the fact that while charismatic outsiders and their supporters can and have in the past taken over the minority party in some states, doing so with the majority party is often next to impossible.
Think of it this way what my mc without the Sanders option would have done is almost like a hostile takeover of the Oregon Republican party with his own coalition of Latino, Asian and working class voters and probably forced a lot of the religious right in Oregon into an even more irrelevant third party, like the Constitution Party.
Pretty much like how McCain used to run a large part of the Arizona Republican party.
It’s worth noting that he did need a coalition with a Democrat as VP to even get elected. That the coalition option is given would likely mean that the US by the time of number 50 and with most of the boomers having died off is likely going through a period of partisan realignment.
One presumes you’d have an (I) next to your name, but caucus with the Dems, like Sanders does.
I feel like it’d be a lot of work on the part of the author for not much of a payoff, honestly.
Oh, cool, so you agree that Republicans’ constant attacks on reproductive rights and LGBT+ folk deserve a hearty “fuck off and die”, good to know.
Maybe I’m misremembering, but I think you can basically tell your party to go away. Granted, that nets you the issue of risking having no congress/senate support to pass whatever it is you want to pass, but that’s… a reasonable consequence? Of course, the game’s Democrat party is more progressive than the real-life one, so there’s that.
In the end I suppose we side with what we side with because we view it as the lesser evil. If you don’t feel like you can get along enough to even communicate with the other side without insulting them, that’s ones own prerogative, but the moderation team is likely aware that it would not due to allow one faction to attack another constantly and not expect a similar response. WIP threads don’t seem to be the proper area for these types of discussion if I’m being honest. Given the nature of this WIP though, I knew something like this happening was inevitable which is why I tried to get it addressed earlier.
I joked with a friend of mine during the last presidential election that these lyrics from The Strokes song The Adults Are Talking was pretty accurate to how most people view 3rd party candidates and voters.
“They will blame us, crucify and shame us
We can’t help it if we are a problem
We are tryin’ hard to get your attention”
The very system itself is set up against them. Ranked choice voting would be far more representative then the system we have now. Would love it if we could try to change the election process in this game.
Due to the heated nature of recent responses and the focus shifting from the game to the individuals responding, slow mode has been put into effect for the next 24 hours.
This thread is for the game being developed by @RFKramer – please focus all posts on the game going forward.
For those interested in discussing politics outside of the game’s narrative, we have the Political Thread available.
I’ll certainly try and update it a bit. There is a scene at the Inaugural Ball where if you go to talk to your VP they’ll speak a lot more about their background but I’ll make a note to myself to go back and add in some more policy-talk during VP selection.
No worries! I’m happy to get any feedback that I can.
Unfortunately so! It’s my hope that in my next game I can give people more liberties to not work for the partisan duopoly but for this one I just can’t see how I’d be able to make third parties/independents work without completely rewriting the story.
You bring up a very interesting issue that I’ve come across while writing – trying to imagine an America that has survived to number 50. In quite literally the few months that I’ve been working on this project, so much in America has already changed. When I first wrote up the option to ban abortion nationally, I had to create a fictional Supreme Court case in this timeline that overturned Roe. As anyone following American politics is now keenly aware, that element of this story is no longer fiction.
Party focuses will certainly have shifted in the 50-ish years until when The People’s House takes place and, looking at partisan shifts in states (as a political nerd such as myself does), we’re already starting to see more blue votes coming from the sunbelt states while swing states like Ohio and Florida appear to be going safely-red. This creates a fun situation for me as I’m beginning to figure out how to write an entire campaign chapter some fifty years in the future.
Also thank you to @Eiwynn for stepping in as the above messages got a bit crazy. It’s difficult writing a political WIP and not bringing up politics, but I’d ask that we try to focus on political options and their repercussions within the WIP.
Speculating a bit further I don’t think that either my mc or his VP, former Pennsylvania governor Williams actually expected to wrest the nomination of one of the major parties and that their whole alliance was initially just an influence operation by two very much Washington outsiders (the sitting mayor of Portland and the former governor of Pennsylvania) to try and influence the platforms of some of the other candidates with what they both see as common-sense, practical solutions.
Apparently their quixotic movement managed to gain and sustain the kind of momentum that both Buttigieg and Warren ultimate fell short off.
The Supreme Court has certainly not made that any easier I even wonder if my mc can still be legally married to his husband…the craziest ones such as Thomas even want to re-criminalise sodomy.
Supreme Court decision after Supreme Court decision has given me plenty of ideas for storylines to implement for The People’s House. I will say that I am absolutely not writing in any sort of attacks relating to gender or sexuality into the story. While the sad reality is that a same-sex First Family would be attacked on the campaign trail and in the media, I do plan on steering clear of writing that into this story.
Thomas basically said “now somebody challenge Obergefell so I can get rid of gay marriage too”, so, ya know (plus other two cases whose names I don’t recognise but I THINK they’re contraception and gay intimacy?).
About to go full legal-nerd. Apologies in advance.
Justice Thomas wrote a concurring opinion (an opinion agreeing with the majority but not setting legal precedent, usually a way for Justices to explain their legal thinking) attacking the idea that the “Due Process Clause” (life, liberty, or property) encompasses things like abortion. He cites three cases in this concurring opinion, Griswold v. Connecticut (right to contraception), Lawrence v. Texas (the right of two individuals of the same gender to have sexual relations), and Obergefell v. Hodges (the right to same-sex marriage) as cases to “revisit.”
Interestingly, though, Justice Thomas does not mention the case Loving v. Virginia, which was yet another case regarding the Due Process Clause which allowed for interracial marriage. For those who may not know, Justice Thomas is in an interracial marriage, as his wife Ginni is white.
I obviously believe that all of these cases should stand, but it’s noteworthy that he only mentioned the due process cases that didn’t impact his own life.
So i presume the whole abortion stuff was Jettisoned or will you just add trigger warnings ?. Cause on one hand games are primary for escapism on the other hand self censoring is still censoring and just warning people rather than changing the story might be best bet, as artistic vision is kinda important i would say.
Ah noted i just figured from your same sex mention bit above you lean more towards the escapism stuff where stuff too uncomfortable is removed. Honestly i figure you got what it takes to write it well. Throught now you kinda gotten me insterested, is it possible to combo Abortion ban or limitation with increase in Welfare etc and will it actually change stuff ? because one major complaints i heard about pro life is that they are not providing the support needed thefore they are just pro birth.
