Democracy 3, in this sense, suggested 1) that the continual recalibrations politicians make is not a weakness of liberal democracies, but a condition of their existence, and 2) that compromise, in both its moral and practical dimensions, is part of the price we pay for the ability to elect our leaders (see Kill Screen’s David Rudin for more on the game design of democracy). Unnerving though it is, there is a begrudging kind of truth to this argument: democratically elected politicians can rarely afford to be the face of anything but the most moderate changes without risking the very platform that enables them to enact change in the first place. Once, when faced with a scientifically illiterate and globally uncompetitive workforce, the only practicable way for me to ban mind-dulling creationism from schools without losing reelection (or worse) was to restrict access to abortion. This interface forced players to acknowledge that this was no opportunity for moral certitude. Democracy 3’s iconic, elegant interface is an array of bubbles representing particular policies connected by pulsating red and green arrows, which indicate the force policies exert on popular opinion. Success in the game - defined as the ability to realize your political ambitions, whatever their ideological bent, by raising and expending political capital in favorable ratios - was entirely the province of compromise. The original Democracy 3 (2013) was an impassioned procedural argument for incrementalism, the belief that political change is best enacted through an ongoing series of small adjustments. But at a moment when many on the left, myself included, have never felt more hopeless about the future 2016 augurs, what does it even mean to represent democracy in/as a videogame? Isn’t the problem not that we’re lacking a clear direction, but that the direction towards which liberal democracies are tilting is all too clear? And, more importantly, that this all-too-clear direction is a fucking nightmare? A game designed to simulate the operations of a functioning (or not) democracy is going to be politically charged even under the most copacetic of historical circumstances. So when I receive an email inviting me to review British studio Positech Games’ Democracy 3: Electioneering that opens with the question, “With all the political madness currently engulfing us, isn’t it time for some clear direction?,” I am almost at a loss for words. WHAT DOES IT EVEN MEAN TO REPRESENT DEMOCRACY IN/AS A VIDEOGAME? Fukuyama’s post-Cold War optimism has been looking rather jejune lately, as liberal democracies across the West have found themselves strangled by a resurgent nativism that has helped spawn, among other iniquities, Trumpism, Norbert “Put Austria First” Hofer, the Brexit, France’s far-right National Front, and… need I go on? Arrange those embarrassments alongside the failures of the nominally pro-democracy Arab Spring and Orange Revolution, to say nothing of the abuses committed by the democratically-elected governments of Thailand and Turkey and, well, Fukuyama’s democratically-centered vision of the ‘end of history’ is looking tenuous indeed. The ‘inevitable,’ though, has a way of unravelling in spectacular ways. “What we may be witnessing,” he writes in summary,“is the endpoint of mankind’s ideological evolution and the universalization of Western liberal democracy as the final form of human government.” When later pressed for examples of what post-historical governance might look like, Fukuyama generally pointed to the example of the European Union, a supranational entity inspired (in his view) by an attempt to transcend national sovereignty, a defining characteristic of his post-historical world. In his 1989 essay “The End of History?,” the political scientist Francis Fukuyama, engorged by the collapse of the Soviet Union, claimed that human civilization had reached the conclusion of its sociopolitical development.
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