Democratic Socialist Simulator

Democratic Socialist Simulator: a computer game where you basically play Bernie Sanders, having been elected president (in 2020, when the game came out), trying to make things good. Can you redistribute power and wealth while addressing the climate crisis? Enact radical reforms, tax the rich, transform the economy, tackle the most pressing issues without alienating voters or bankrupting the government. But beware: the ruling class won't give up its power easily. Even your closest allies may turn on you... It's by no means a serious simulation, but is based on extensive research on viable policies, and on the history of social-democracies. https://www.molleindustria.org/demsocsim/

From Molleindustria. https://www.molleindustria.org/blog/about/

Model parameters are viewable as gsheet!

Darn I can't seem to get it on any of my machines.

Democratic Socialism Simulator – Release Notes

The title Democratic Socialism Simulator is a bit of a misnomer since the game doesn’t portray a democratic socialist society but rather the first years of a hypothetical post-capitalist transition via social democracy. I have made a few prototypes that modeled a democratic socialist economy but, at least as single player experiences, they didn’t differ too much from traditional resource management games. I thought the very beginning of such a transformation would make for a more interesting and timely subject. In other words, DSS is an attempt to prefigure a Sanders (or a Sanders-like) presidency by focusing on the issues not fanboyism. Most of the proposals are lifted straight from Bernie Sanders’ platform so you can see it as an interactive flyer of some sort.

DSS borrows its gameplay from the game Reigns (which in turn, borrows its interface from the dating app Tinder). It’s a simple but infinitely expandable structure that can touch upon a lot of topics with very little audiovisual content. Aside from being particularly satisfying on touch screens, the swiping mechanic is a clever way to present a lot of variables and effects to the player. Dragging a proposal left and right visualizes its most immediate effects without cluttering the interface.

In DSS your actions are attributed to the coalition supporting the president. The congress counter represents not only the seats held by the Democratic party but also the forces that actually support you across institutions and in the civil society

The voters’ approval depends on their top two issues, and this is a crucial feature. In a time of polarization and tribalism, it’s easy to forget that the ideological alignment of most Americans is more complex, contradictory, and multidimensional than what the media portrays.

I believe this multidimensional model of affiliation is fundamental to create working class coalitions in the USA and abroad. Moreover, in DSS the electorate’s composition and top priorities can change as a result of your reforms.

The latest issue of Jacobin is entirely devoted to democratic socialist horror stories. The capitalists may be irrelevant in numeric terms, but they have an enormous leverage over “the economy” and the state apparatuses

The left in the United States has been marginal for so long that any conversation about what can possibly happen once in power has become irrelevant. The neoliberal/technocratic vision of politics still dominates the Democratic base, and the idea of a continuous mobilization and pressure campaign after winning the elections is unheard of.

DSS has not been designed to mount a precise linear argument. It has different endings and a specific starting point (you have a mandate) but it doesn’t prescribe a “correct” path to socialism. Instead it’s more like a collection of semi-random choices, conditions, and cause-and-effect relations that interact with each other in a messy way, creating a multitude of possible paths.

DSS has a significant element of randomness and a number of implicit mechanics that the player can only guess, so I wouldn’t be surprised if different people come up with widely divergent interpretations. Without getting too much into semiotics, what the game “says” about socialism is a network of micro arguments explorable in a variety of directions. The ideological engine of the game is basically a series of spreadsheets that I share here for the most curious and nerdy users. There is even a column with notes and links related to the specific proposal and event.

Notes: The data should be rather self explanatory. The “equality” variable is the “people’s power” red bar. The command “chain” stacks a card right after the current one. The command “delay” postpones an event after a random number of cards within certain intervals.

Democratic Socialist Simulator is not free. After 17 years of Molleindustria, it is the first proper commercial release.

Run an America full of talking animals in Democratic Socialism Simulator. There are simulation games that try (?) to be neutral. SimCity never lays out its philosophy of urban planning. Democracy lets you rewrite its rules to role-play any democratic system.

Democratic Socialism Simulator is not that kind of allegedly dispassionate system. It’s a new project from Molleindustria, the studio founded by Carnegie Mellon professor and developer Paolo Pedercini, known for games like Phone Story and Every Day the Same Dream. Part wry edutainment and part leftist in-joke, DSS makes you the first Democratic Socialist president of America and then pelts you with scandals, lobbyists, and impending environmental doom, all played out with colorful talking animals.

DSS’s interface lays its (literal) cards on the table, encouraging you to rebuild America based on ecological sustainability, economic equality, worker organization, and citizen engagement — “all the good stuff,” as the game labels its “people’s power” meter.

You drag the card toward one of two options, and the game responds with short- and long-term consequences.

Instead of being a monarch, though, you’re the president. So your choices don’t just make you more or less popular. Some aren’t possible without a congressional majority, which depends on Democrats’ performance in the midterm elections, which depend on how many voters you win or alienate

The game requires more pragmatism than its name suggests. In an introduction to the game, Pedercini says it’s not designed as a “power fantasy” for democratic socialists, but as a way to conceptualize ambitious policies like the Green New Deal while exploring their obstacles — you can even peruse a spreadsheet with every choice and consequence.

The game includes hard fail states like losing your reelection bid, being asked to resign, and failing that, getting forcibly escorted out of office

pragmatic isn’t the same as amoral. DSS is written like a lighthearted but devout DSA Twitter account

It allows for different political positions, but it doesn’t present them as equally ethical, nor suggest that players are simply expressing themselves in a judgment-free sandbox.

At the same time, Pedercini suggests that DSS doesn’t have a straightforward message about socialism, partly because it’s based so much on randomness and unintended consequences. The text emphasizes that you’re playing out simulations, which — by their nature — are fraught with simplifications, artificial limits, and potentially straight-up mistakes

Video Game Review: Democratic Socialism Simulator

the indie scene, through games like Disco Elysium and Tonight We Riot have shown that video games can be used as a vehicle for leftist politics. Democratic Socialism Simulator, the latest entry from the Italian “culture jamming” group Molleindustria, continues this trend

The policies are all taken from discussions in the modern socialist movement: from Medicare for All and cancelling student debt to seizing the means of production. These decisions adjust meters indicating your budget, carbon emissions, and “people power,” as well as your overall popularity among different sections of the electorate.

its most fun aspect is the way its political statements spit in the face of conventional simulation game tropes.

The simulation genre of video games to which Democratic Socialism Simulator belongs is known for open-ended sandbox games. The player is given a set of systems that model a city (SimCity), a civilization (Sid Meier’s Civilization) or someone’s life (The Sims). They can use these systems to reflect whatever values they want, but the underlying systems are presented as politically neutral representations of reality.

But no simulation will ever be a direct replication of reality, and the systems driving simulation games reflect their own political biases.

In a talk in 2017, a Molleindustria developer discussed the hidden neoliberal and technocratic biases in city simulation games like the SimCity series. He pointed out that, in that series “Class stratification is simply a constant beyond the player’s agency.” Because of this, crime is represented as its own system, detached from class, and it’s always solved by building more police stations

Democratic Socialism Simulator, on the other hand, wears its politics on its sleeve. The developers are clear that their game is “by no means a serious simulation, but is based on extensive research on viable policies, and on the history of social-democracies.”

the game’s tutorial kindly informs you: “Well, if you are interested in status quo simulators you might want to play literally any other game instead.”

While Democratic Socialism Simulator gives players the opportunity to challenge the capitalist norms that other simulation games take for granted, doing so provokes backlash from the ruling class. The capitalist media (represented by Fox News and the New Pork Times, run by an anthropomorphic fox and pig respectively) will make sensationalist distortions of your policies and manufacture scandals in efforts to turn the public against you.

Even as the game parades in cartoonish unrealism, it ends up being a lot more honest about what socialists can, and can’t, accomplish under the capitalist state than other games of its type.

Making a series of individual yes-or-no decisions on policy measures is far from reflecting any sort of genuine workers’ democracy, something the game itself acknowledges when its tutorial declares: “Yes, a single player democracy is a contradiction in terms.”

But other assumptions made in the game raise questions about the ideology of the game-makers. The game still limits you to working within the framework of a parliamentary road to socialism. You’re given the option to support strikes if they break out. But you can’t use your platform to call for strikes and demonstrations, or even to build solidarity campaigns to strengthen them.

The game similarly takes for granted that a democratic socialist president would come to power within the Democratic Party. Your ability to pass progressive legislation is determined by the balance between Democrats and Republicans in Congress. You can support left-wing primary challengers, but the idea of building a new, working-class party doesn’t figure into the game’s mechanics.

Corporate Democrats can betray you by defecting to the Republicans. But the game doesn’t depict anything analogous to the open sabotage carried out by the Democratic Party establishment against the Sanders campaign.

within the game’s mechanics, it’s the masses themselves that act as the biggest break on progress

Democratic Socialism Simulator came out during the highpoint of Bernie Sanders’ 2020 presidential campaign. And the game’s politics reflect both the strengths and weaknesses of the activist layer around that campaign

after Sanders was defeated, Jacobin switched to a completely pessimistic approach, lamenting that “Bernie’s army never showed up” and blaming the masses for his defeat. Democratic Socialism Simulator has similar contradictory takes on the limits of reform: optimistically downplaying the resistance of capitalist institutions, while pessimistically downplaying the revolutionary potential of the working class.

In spite of these limitations, Democratic Socialism Simulator is politically leagues above other games in its genre.

'Democratic Socialism Simulator' Is Weirdly Depressing. My second go around at Democratic Socialism Simulator, I decided to shoot for the stars. No plan would go unpassed, no benefit not given to the worker. I bankrupted the country and was asked to resign, eventually lead out of the building by a military coup. It wasn’t like that every time, though. Twice, I was able to enact the policies I wanted, sacrificing and delaying very little, creating the groundwork for a socialist utopia. Once I even lowered carbon emissions to almost zero.

The player is presented with cards that represent issues, and by swiping right or left you can choose how to handle it

Some choices will need the approval of congress, represented by a chart in the left hand corner, to be approved. Your congressional seats will change over the course of the game based on your choices.

While the game is snappy and easy to get invested in—who wouldn’t want to pass Medicare For All and tell Congress to suck eggs?—it’s the binary, random choices that reveal its flaws.

My first go around I was able to fund all my utopian policies fairly easily because I was able to reform the Supreme Court, pass a billionaire tax, and then legalize pot very quickly. I couldn’t figure out what else I could spend my money on, frankly. In my other tries, if I was unable to get at least one of those cards, I had a lot of trouble getting anything done.

I came away from Democratic Socialism Simulator sad that it reflected so many of my frustrations with politics as they are, rather than showing me the kind of better the policies that you’re swiping on would create.

Democratic Socialism Simulator is (tragically, regrettably) still as relevant in 2024. It’s a great time to talk about socialism. And it’s always a great time to talk about games, which is why I’m revisiting Molleindustria’s Democratic Socialism Simulator. The turn-based decision-making sim, which was released in February 2020, lets you play out presidential actions as if you were a democratic socialist elected to the office

The scenarios are presented by political actors illustrated as animals

As you make decisions like whether to forgive student debt and whether to openly support unionization efforts, a slew of metrics and graphs at the bottom of the screen display the impact of your choices.

Your decisions don’t just impact the tangible things like budget, though; you also have to keep eyes on the amount of power you’re providing the populace, how your choices are impacting the environment, and which voters you might alienate with your rhetoric

It’s ultimately a shame to watch the game walk you through all the infinite options that would better the United States and its people, and lay out why and how they’d be effective, and then click out and go back to a reality where neither political party adequately represents the people

But I still think this game is a great way to teach people in your life about the merits of democratic socialism

each playthrough takes anywhere from 15 to 45 minutes, depending on how long you take to make choices and how quickly you lose

The best part of the game is its replayability. Even after running the sim tens of times, I still occasionally see a scenario or character I haven’t before