Cliffski's Blog

I’m working on adding two new policies to the next update for Democracy 4 today. By popular demand (deduced from in-game player voting during Early Access) I have decided that these two policies are worker dividends (profit sharing) and a ban on all cryptocurrency. I’d like to talk through what these policies represent from a game design and real world point of view, and show how they have been implemented.

First up is workers dividends. Like all Democracy 4 policies, these are not as specific as they sound, but represent a whole ‘area’ of legislation, in this case legislating on how workers must be compensated. In the overwhelming majority of countries, such legislation basically amounts to laying out a minimum wage (if one applies), and perhaps some rules about grounds the company may have to withhold such payments, or perhaps rules surrounding what kind of deductions from wages can legally be made.

In other words, in general, as long as a company pays you minimum wage, thats all you are entitled to. If you notice you earn $40/year and the company CEO earns $50million a year, and its all your effort that enabled this…then basically your option is to just quit and work somewhere else…

Some people take the view that this is unfair. Others take the view that this is capitalism working as intended. A clever company will reward employees fairly, or risk losing them to cleverer companies who spot their potential. This is the ‘perfect market’ school of thought.

Others might suggest that this is fine when we are talking about headhunting people with phds, but when it comes to warehouse workers, or other minimum wage staff, things don’t work that well. A company like amazon may earn billions in profit, but see no reason at all to pay its warehouse staff above minimum wage. If you are of a socialist mind, this is unfair, and exploitation and needs fixing.

Generally in my lifetime this has been a non issue where I live, until the last UK general election, the left-wing Labour Party did propose something akin to this new Democracy 4 policy:

In this policy, the party suggested that 1% of the shares of private companies be taken from them each year for 10 years (total 10%) and placed into an ‘ownership fund’ whose share of the profits would be paid to the workers. In a Marxist sense, this would be described as ‘seizing the means of production’, although in this case only seizing 10%. The idea was to share the profits of big companies with the staff, and was probably one of the most pure socialist policies proposed at the election.

In the end, the party lost (quite badly) so we do not get to see how the policy worked in practice, but it was popular with its supporters (and VERY unpopular with its opponents).

I need to include policies like this in Democracy 4, because as socialist players have pointed out, the game does not go to any particular extremes on the left economically. We have policies for minimum wage, retirement age, worker safety and even mandatory union representatives on company boards, but no direct pure wealth-redistribution from owners to employees. This policy fills that gap. The slider can be thought of as intensity, showing a range of measures from the ‘incentives for bonus schemes’ all the way up to ‘mandatory allocation of 90% of shares among the workers’.

My first thoughts are that this policy pleases socialists, and union members, angers capitalists and small businesses (effectively entrepreneurs), boost the chances of a corporate exodus, reduces foreign investment, but has a side effect of making all strikes less likely. (Why strike when you will feel the pain as profits drop?).

The second new policy I’m adding is a cryptocurrency ban. Sometimes people ask why such ‘ban’ policies even need a slider, but a ‘ban’ can mean everything from ‘some currency mining is banned if using certain power sources’ all the way up to ‘holding, mining or trading cryptocurrency of any kind is punishable by imprisonment’.

In this case the motivation is a combination of loss of government control (and thus tax revenue) and concerns for the environment. Liberals hate banning anything (because…freedom), and obviously any ban would have a vastly negative effect on the usage of cryptocurrency.

For background reading on the environmental costs of cryptocurrencies (specifically proof of work), just use google. Its pretty shocking. I have strong views on all crypto, including proof of stake, which although environmentally better, has the perverse effect of making the rich get richer. Perhaps someone will do an in-depth D4 mod that represents different types of crypto and their effects on socialists and capitalists!

And that reminds me… I must check that crypto’s CO2 impact is modeled in the game…

I’ve been doing some number crunching to check that I am moving in the right direction regarding balance on Democracy 4.

The game has a series of ‘events’ which are triggered by various inputs. Some of these events are pretty ‘informational’, in that they mark changes the player has made and their impacts, other affect the games difficulty by stopping the player racing too far ahead or too far behind. Others are there as a random curve-ball that the game throws to the player to shake things up. There are about 120 of them.

Because they are not triggered purely randomly, the frequency with which each event shows up is determined by the complexity of the neural network that forms the basis of the games simulation. This means that some events may end up triggering much more than others, if the inputs to those events are not balanced correctly.

In an ideal world, the whole game would be a truly self-balancing neural network, but I don’t trust the systems enough to unleash anything like that, so I collect statistical data on which events trigger in each game version, and then change some of the inputs each update so that things balance out for the better.

In an ideal world, every player gets to see 100% of the content in the game, so they are effectively getting what they paid for, and not being constrained to a tiny subset of the content because of poor balance. In other words, if I have an event called ‘school shooting’ and its triggering one tenth as often as ‘scientific breakthrough’, then the balance may be off, in that the inputs to the first event are too strong, and the second too weak.

Note that I am talking in grand statistical terms over thousands and thousands of players. An *individual* player may never see school shooting, or scientific breakthrough, depending on the countries they choose and their play style and skill, but I need to check I’m not adding content to the game that hardly anybody sees!

By collecting all this data, I can build up tables for each game version showing the total events triggered for players of that version, AND the number of times each event triggered. Like this:

1.27
Event Name	count
shareiposuccess	7790
shareipocancelled	7112
hugehurricane	4515
dubiousrolemodel	4190
resourcesobsolete	3913
multinationalcompanyheadquarters	3810
militarycontractscandal	3780

..and so on. Because I am looking at 120 events, I can work out that for version 1.27, if every event was equal, they would all trigger 1,406 times given the number of version 1.27 games played. I can then store the difference between the ACTUAL number of triggers, minus the target, and express this as a deviation in percentage terms from the target:

1.27
Event Name	count	percentage deviation
shareiposuccess	7790	453.78%
shareipocancelled	7112	405.58%
hugehurricane	4515	220.96%
dubiousrolemodel	4190	197.86%
resourcesobsolete	3913	178.17%
multinationalcompanyheadquarters	3810	170.85%
militarycontractscandal	3780	168.71%

So you can see that back in version 1.27, the top event (Share IPO success) is triggering 4.5 times as often as I would like.

I can then add up all of those percentage deviations and get a final number representing the total percentage deviation (in absolute terms) over all events. That gives me this:

Version	Absolute Deviation
1.27	6426.89%
1.28	5717.38%
1.29	6128.34%

In an ideal world, this number trends down over time as each version comes out.

Another way I looked at things was to just look at the absolute value of the top 10, and bottom 10 events, to see if I am effectively ‘squashing’ the trigger probabilities to prevent extremes. This is a major goal, because players will not notice and event triggering 5% more than another, but if one triggers EVERY game, or NEVER, then that does get noticed. When I look at this data I get these values

Version	Absolute Deviation	Extremes Deviation
1.27	6426.89%	2941.48%
1.28	5717.38%	2239.64%
1.29	6128.34%	2433.29%

By doing this for a whole bunch of different game versions, I can end up with a chart showing my progress!

More helpfully, I can quantify that the uneven-ness of the event triggering has improved by 14.73% since version 1.27. The extremes have been reduced more, by 30.29%

This probably sounds stupidly maths-y and the system is full of issues, such as events that only trigger in a few countries, and therefore SHOULD be seen less… but there are limits to which a single coder/designer/bizdev/marketer person like me can spend time crunching all this.

TBH its just a big relief that the numbers DO seem to be trending in the right direction, especially as I keep adding new countries and complex simulation elements (meaning that the simulation is in flux, and thus just remaining the same would be a balance-win of sorts.

It might be bizarre but I really enjoy this kind of analysis :D Now go tell your friends how well balanced Democracy 4 is :D