Wild, wiley rhetorical cards & pol. econ.
During an epic wine and cheese date last night at our neighbor’s house, we got to talking about my old idea to design a game based on political economies. So today, after a good long lie-in, I started working on that.
Thus far, I’m fleshing out the different political ideologies and their economic counterparts (e.g. fascist, totalitarian, communist, socialist, libertarian, and anarchist states, as well as republics, democracies, social democracies, and juntas). It’s been fun to learn and re-learn what a lot of these mean, but it’s slow-going!
The basic premise of the game is that you have to create a wealthy state with a happy populace; so, a capitalistic democracy might become wealthy, but its happiness index would be difficult because of the class oppression capitalism necessarily creates; likewise, a fascist state might depend on patriotism and nationalism with fiercely loyal citizens, but it might have a difficult time creating wealth and prosperity. The mechanics have yet to be designed, but suffice it to say, it’s looking complicated.
Obviously this is very early on, and I’m going to have to combine or limit the number of similar states (republic, democracy, social democracy are somewhat closely related, as are totalitarian, fascist, and junta states, as are libertarian and anarchist states, as are socialist and communist…there’s a whole huge spectrum). But what I’m working on right now are the Wild Rhetorical Cards! Since rhetoric and the careful use of language is at the base of much political force, these essentially wild cards you play to either help yourself or hurt your opponent, particularly when it comes to wielding influence over others, be they other players or your populace.
For example, you might play the John-McCain-inspired Maverick card to do something that would ordinarily piss someone off, but allows you to get away with it just this once; perhaps there could be an Argentinian Love Affair card you could play on an opponent to undermine his or her regime’s popularity; the Lose Your Voice card means you lose control of influencing anyone.
I’ve considered the following, but am not sure exactly how they’d be used yet:
Conservative Blowhard
Loony Liberal
Debate (you win or lose based on the roll of the dice)
Ann Coulter/Maureen Dowd Mudfight (sorry, couldn’t resist…)
Freedom, which lets you do something invoking “freedom,” like ease restrictions or declare a war (?)
I know it probably sounds pretty sketchy at this point, but if you happen to make sense of this rambling and feel inspired, your suggestions for Wild Rhetorical Cards are more than welcome.