The concept behind Democracy is interesting. Put the player in the hot seat, letting them make decisions that will shape the nation. On paper it sounds intriguing. In practice, it falls a bit short, but I think necessarily so. No game, no simulation can possibly account for all the factors that go into running a country, although Democracy makes a valiant attempt.

Basically, the game allows you to set policies, in an attempt to win the next election. You get 4 years, with the game advancing one quarter at a time. You set new policies, you adjust existing policies, and you can fiddle with the budget. All of these things you need to do to make your constituents happy, the economy grow, and of course, get re-elected.

About every turn, you’ll be asked to make landmark decisions: Should you ban subliminal advertising? What about stem cell research? Some of the decisions are very topical, but some seem to me that they’d be more appropriate at the state level, rather than at the federal level (recycling, for instance). In addition, you’ll get random events that may or may not affect the world around you. Scandals, weather disasters, and medical marvels are some examples. I didn’t see any immediate effect on the overall status when these hit, however.

In addition, you need to try and balance all your constituents – you have liberals, conservatives, smokers, religious, tree huggers (excuse me, enviornmentalists), etc. Each has specific satisfaction levels that are graphically represented. If you hover over the group, the game will show you what factors affect their statisfaction. The same holds true for unemployment, literacy, violent crime, etc. Policies in economy, welfare, transport, health, or taxes all interact with one another in a delicate balancing act. I think the game does a good job of representing these interactions.

If you manage to get elected for a new term, you will be asked to choose two campaign promises out of a fixed set. Your continued elections will now factor in whether or not you actually met those promises. Here’s where the game falls down a bit. Once you’ve achieved eliminating violent crime, for example, you can’t promise to reduce it another 15%. Well, you can – but you won’t achieve that goal. Eventually, if you maintain long enough, you’ll run out of achievable goals. At that point, all you can do is hold on, or switch to another country and start over.

The game has some technical flaws. If you run it in windowed mode, the cursor is positioned about a half inch above the menu item, making some choices impossible to make. In addition, although you can save a game in progress, you can’t load it. The load games screen remained blank for me. You also can’t control where you save your games, and you can’t go hunting for them when it comes time to load them. You’re basically limited to playing a session, and then starting over when you come back.

Technical issues aside (and not being able to load a saved game is a big one), Democracy is an interesting experiment in political simulation. If it wasn’t so generic (I only played UK and USA, so maybe there’s more) in the situations, and had some more variety in the things that happen in the different countries, and if it had more variations in events (how many times can you have the same medical breakthroughs, anyway?), I’d be spending a lot more time in this game. Trying to balance the costs of various policies, trying to keep a balanced constituency (I always seem to hork off the liberals, for some reason), trying to become a political powerhouse in the shortest amount of time – these would be some great self made goals. Otherwise, it’ll be a game that’ll get old quickly. Which, I guess, is probably a reflection on why we limit our president to two terms!