Proposition Sim 2000

Weekly constraint.

This week we were asked to make a prototype with the constraint Small Scale, Large Scope.

What is it?

Proposition Sim 2000 focuses on trying to get the required votes to pass proposition 453. Players must talk to other politicians and make deals with them to get their vote.

What tools were used?

Paper: Simple first stage
Draw io (https://app.diagrams.net/): Used for early fast game plan
Unity (https://unity.com/): Game engine
Fungus (https://fungusgames.com/): Narrative design plug in for unity (download here https://github.com/snozbot/fungus)

Prototype

The game takes inspiration from Papers Please [Lucas Pope 2014] a game that is set in an immigration office. Proposition Sim 2000 is very small in its scale taking place in one room with the phone and phone book being the way the player communicates with other NPCs.

However, the way the game is structured allows for a lot of scope and expansion of the story as you can add any number of other NPCs through the phone book.
As this is a prototype the game comprises a limited set of choices that form a loop with every NPC wanting something from another NPC.

Conversation choices (Blue and Pink lines show links between two NPCs)

One of the things I wish that I had incorporated was moral choices, are you willing to agree to something you do not believe in to pass this proposition. As Bartel (2015) discusses should you feel uncomfortable for making bad choices in a video game? If this game were to be developed further then the needs and wants of the NPCs would be thoroughly re-examined and changed from the whimsical needs that they currently have like wanting the cheese mines removed, to more thought provoking needs that would hopefully make the player think ‘Am I willing to do this?’. For example, could be the player agreeing to vote on banning abortion get the vote they need when the player is pro-choice, or do they stick to their ideals and say no I will not vote for this.
Currently player never knows what proposition 453 is, however this is something that would also change with the player given a choice of what they wanted to try to pass.

Issues learned

Currently the way the game it set up an NPC will help another NPC and vote for the proposition if they are getting what they want. This should have been set up differently so that they will either vote for the proposition or help another NPC. I did not consider this when I started making the game just as I had not really put much thought into what each NPC would want and how it would link into helping another NPC. The story is also quite simple with much of the conversations being the same with every NPC, I again did not consider the time it would take me to make different conversations for every NPC. I think the prototype could have worked just as well with four NPCs rather than the seven that are there currently and having less NPCs would have allowed me the time to be more creative with their dialog.

References

3909 LLC (2013) Papers Please [Video Game] Microsoft Windows, OS X, Linux, iOS, Play Station Vita, Android.

DRAW.IO. 2022. ‘Flowchart Maker & Online Diagram Software’. app.diagrams.net [online]. Available at: https://app.diagrams.net/.

Bartel, C., 2015. Free will and moral responsibility in video games. Ethics and Information Technology, 17(4), pp.285-293.

Fungus Ltd (2014) Fungus [Application] Unity.

Unity Technologies (2021) Unity [Application] Microsoft Windows.