Patrick Curry’s Thoughts on Game Design

Here’s game idea number seven. I thought I’d try something a little different this time…

High Concept:

Oval Office is a Presidential-Sim. You play as the President of the United States, widely considered to be the most powerful person in the world. How you use these powers will be entirely up to you as you take on the day-to-day challenges of a real-life President. How will history remember you?

Platform:

PC

Why it needs to be made:

Most sim/strategy games have the player in the role of an omnipotent dictator whose subjects follow his every whim. In StarCraft you never have to pick up the phone and convince a senator that attacking the “Zerg” is a good idea. In Oval Office it’s people skills that will help you push your agenda, not frantic mouse-clicks.

Description:

Oval Office is a different kind of sim/strategy game. You don’t “control” hundreds of little soldiers and make them do your bidding. Instead you just control yourself… but you’re the President, so people tend to listen to what you have to say. The primary interface of the game is talking to people. If you want to get a budget increase approved, you call or meet with a senator. If you want to improve trade relations with another country, you meet with their ambassador or head of state. And if you want to send troops to aide a foreign country, you meet with your military advisors to talk it over.

Every action in the game has different costs associated with it. There’s the real-money cost, which comes out of the budget, there’s the political capital cost, which equates to favors with those in Washington D.C., there’s approval-rating cost, which determines what the public with think of it, there’s the diplomatic cost, which determines what the global community will think of it, and finally there’s manpower cost. You have to weigh the costs of each action against its benefits, and make your decision of what to do. Signing a certain bill might get you some more political capital, but at the cost of money. Giving a powerful State of the Union Address might raise your approval-rating here at home, but cost you some diplomatic points abroad.

Over the course of your term you will have to deal with a series of randomly-generated crises. There could be an economic crisis, and you have to decide how to best deal with it. Or a member of your cabinet could be under investigation for corruption. While these crises will keep you from pushing your own agenda, how you deal with them will have the potential for huge gains, or huge losses.

Why it will be fun:

Who hasn’t dreamed of being President before? While it has to be one of the most stressful jobs in the world, it also has to be one of the most rewarding. My aim with Oval Office would be to limit the amount of stress put upon the player while maximizing the rewards. And hey, if you learn something, that’s cool too.

Final thoughts:

Of all of the game ideas I’ve written so far, Oval Office has to be the least obvious of how to implement. I think it’s in part because I’ve never played a game like this before, so there would have to be a lot of experimentation with the interface and flow to get it to work just right.

Thanks to Matt and Ryan for being the sounding boards on this one.

Update from 2021: we're working on a game that reminds me of this concept -- Political Arena