What If We Took a Fun Cool Platform and Made it Do Imaginary Politics
(Or, one idea for a diplomacy-style game you could potentially play on Manifold)
Link to Manifold so you know the basic format I’m talking about
Three “countries” are formed: a dictatorship, a democracy, and a futarchy. Hypothetically, dictatorships could be added if some players were interested in being a dictator instead of a voter. All nations are assumed to start with the same resources. All voting players are assigned to either the democracy or the futarchy; they can switch periodically so nobody is stuck with one governmental form for too long. Players are chosen to be the futarch and the president—their only job is to pose questions, so hypothetically there could be a council of each, and players could rotate through the position. Futarchs and presidents would be empowered both to write their own questions, and also take questions from citizen submissions. Futarchy and democracy citizens would be able to send in questions, but no particular citizen would have their questions guaranteed to be used.
In the futarchy, the futarch (or council of futarchs) poses a policy question and futarchy citizens bet on the market exactly as they would with any prediction market event. The questions should use outcome-based framing: “If we subsidize [product], will our GDP growth rate increase by at least [x]% over the next year?” This means that each policy is likely to have several questions behind it. The futarch decides on whether to enact the policy, and for every policy adopted, the futarch uses a random number generator with an appropriately set maximum to determine whether the related markets were correct. (Eg, if the market says there is a 5% chance of a certain outcome, the futarch would roll a random number generator with a maximum set to 20, and if the resultant digit was 1, the policy outcome would resolve TRUE. If a 60% chance, the generator maximum would be set to 5 and if the result was a 1, 2, or 3, the outcome would resolve TRUE. Etc.)
In the democracy, the president (or parliament) poses a policy question, and democracy citizens vote by all placing equal-sized bets on the market. The bets are tallied up and the majority wins. The questions should use action-based framing: “Should we subsidize [product]?” Citizens are encouraged to make arguments for and against in their comments, but there is no formal betting on these arguments. Every policy is assigned some probability of success, designated by the president; specific conditions of success are set using the futarchy procedure, based on citizens’ arguments. (The president will have a certain number of each probability he is allowed to give out, ensuring that not every policy can have a designated 90% odds of success. Also, there’d probably be a better way to do this.) The central difference in describing possible policy outcomes is that in the democracy, the questions breaking down possible outcomes are asked after the policy is voted on. The president then follows the same random number generator procedure described above to determine the true policy outcomes.
In the dictatorship, the dictator simply chooses which policies to enact. Conditions of success are set using the same procedure as in the democracy; true outcomes are calculated via the random number generator procedure.
Countries then interact with each other in a minimally structured way; they can decide to go to war with each other, trade with each other, etc. This game can be a “Model UN” structure where there is no specific end goal, or it can be given some ending condition and played strategically. One example might be: the futarchy wins if the democracy votes to become a futarchy, the democracy wins if the futarchy votes to become a democracy, and the dictatorship wins if it successfully conquers another country (or if either the futarchy or democracy vote to become a dictatorship, which would be surprising but possible). A time limit may be set on the game, to end in case none of the winning conditions are met, in which case all three countries are considered to lose. Alternatively, it could be that the country with the highest GDP (or highest GDP per capita) by a pre-specified end point wins.
Difficulties include the issue of determining the success of the democracy’s and dictatorship’s policies, and the necessity of having a very large number of players. It could be possible to make this a mega-party game, suitable for large meetups, but more likely you would want to run this game on Manifold over a long timeline, possibly several weeks.
No prizes for correctly predicting whether I was a Model UN kid.