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[grzegorz.holdys]

Hello everyone

I would like to invite you to play my little game called "The economy, stupid!". You can find it at www.theeconomystupid.eu. In this game, you take on a role of a prime minister of a moderate-sized European country. Your task is to survive the whole four-year term in office and make sure, that your party wins the next elections. The game focuses on macroeconomic aspects of governing a country, so the only instruments at your disposal are taxes, welfare benefits and public sector funding. Any comments would be much appreciated.

One more thing. The game requires Java 5.0 or higher.

Grzegorz

[Guert]

Any screenshots?

At the same time, it would be a good idea to introduce yourself properly...

Later!

[Massena]

I can post what I think of the overall layout and apresentation of the game, and nothing else, because I'm really bad at this game. 
Below, a screenshot of how I messed up my country completely in just one turn:


The interface is slick and well made, the graphics are great and I really think the black and white fits the game. The depth of the game really shows you probably have a solid background in economy.
The thing is, I am a complete moron when it comes to economy, and changing taxes in SimCity is as far as I go, so I was kinda lost when playing the game. Although you shouldn't worry about this, since I'm clearly not your target audience.  :D
The only thing I think you could improve is to add some simple sounds when changing menus or pressing buttons.
Overall, great work. 

[Farbs]

I'm fighting to understand it too, but I find the idea interesting enough that I'm still playing.

Also, in one of the reports you've misspelt "losing" as "loosing".

[Farbs]

STOP!!!
National debt has exceeded 50% of GDP!
You must reduce the planned budget deficit to zero,
before playing the next turn.

There's something very magical about these words.

Regarding the interface, I think you should consider playing the transitions much quicker. They're cute at first, but after a while I became quite sick of watching them.

I think the biggest challenge is giving people enough feedback that they know why their decisions had particular outcomes. This is as much about showing causality as it is about effectively communicating state. If each action button showed a popup explaining the implications of that action I'd probably have a better idea of what I was doing. Also, the text report gets dull to read after a while so I stopped paying attention to it. Is there a graphical way you could represent this data? The actual report text was still useful in understanding why things happened, but reading it as a report became dull very fast. Would it be possible to have a graphical report with the explainations in popups?

[Guert]

Seaking of this, it could be interesting to tell us, in the tax screen, what is the national dept so we know how much to change our plan.

Plus, an advisor telling you that 100% tax rate + no funding will piss off people

But serioulsy, an advisor actually teaching us economy would be interestign so that players with no basics in economy can learn how to play.

Later!

[ThetaGames]

Even though I was forced to resign twice (Oh darn!), I liked it a lot.  It was very complete, yet simple to manage (only five things to adjust).  The line graphs were a nice touch, as well as the complete listing of almost all aspects of the economy.

The game seemed to favor a more 'Reagan-omics' approach; I lost much quicker when I raised taxes and social programs alike.  I don't know, but the game seems to discriminate against socialists!   (I could have just been really bad at it, though).  I tried very hard to keep the budget balanced, as that seemed to tick people off the most (that and 30% income taxes).  I have only a basic understanding of real-world economics, so I don't know how realistic the game is.  All the same, it was fun to play.

My only other complaint is the somewhat slowness of the graphics between screens.  I like to switch quickly between all of the screens on the left-hand side, and the PowerPoint-esque 'transition' made this a somewhat slow process.  I would either quicken these effects greatly, or remove them altogether.

If only we had an executive system like that in the States, you know who'd be gone in a heartbeat.


Good work!

~ Theta Games

[grzegorz.holdys]

Thanks for the feedback people!

I'm sorry for not introducing myself properly My name is Grzegorz Holdys. I'm from Poland. "The economy, stupid!" is my first step in developing serious games, but as the famous philosopher Bugs Bunny once said: "Watch out for that first step Mac, it's a lulu!" As for my background, I'm not an economist. I studied computer physics and I'm currently working in a research project, that deals with computer modeling of environmental and social systems. I guess, I could say, that I have a background in modeling things

I have to go to work now. It's 7:46AM in my timezone . But I will be back and comment on your comments.

Again, thanks for the feedback and see you.

[grzegorz.holdys]

The only thing I think you could improve is to add some simple sounds when changing menus or pressing buttons.

That's a good idea.

Also, in one of the reports you've misspelt "losing" as "loosing".

Thanks! I've corrected the error.

I think the biggest challenge is giving people enough feedback that they know why their decisions had particular outcomes. This is as much about showing causality as it is about effectively communicating state. If each action button showed a popup explaining the implications of that action I'd probably have a better idea of what I was doing. Also, the text report gets dull to read after a while so I stopped paying attention to it. Is there a graphical way you could represent this data? The actual report text was still useful in understanding why things happened, but reading it as a report became dull very fast. Would it be possible to have a graphical report with the explainations in popups?

I'm currently thinking about creating a political RPG game. I would take the model from "The economy, stupid!", expand it, so that it includes non-economic issues and introduce various characters. The player would again be the prime minister and some of the NPCs would be the ministers. Decisions would be made during cabinet meetings, during which the ministers would present their ideas, along with argumentation, and the player would have to choose which ideas should be implemented. This way I could circumvent the "advisor" issue because the ministers would say, why they want to do this instead of this.

The game seemed to favor a more 'Reagan-omics' approach; I lost much quicker when I raised taxes and social programs alike.  I don't know, but the game seems to discriminate against socialists!   (I could have just been really bad at it, though).

I guess, the game does have a certain liberal bias. Although I'm sure there are many hard-line liberal economists, who would argue, that this game promotes interventionism...

My only other complaint is the somewhat slowness of the graphics between screens.  I like to switch quickly between all of the screens on the left-hand side, and the PowerPoint-esque 'transition' made this a somewhat slow process.  I would either quicken these effects greatly, or remove them altogether.

Darn it. It took me quite a while to write those transition effects . Java does not have any standard way of doing GUI animations, so I created my own. There are 3rd party libraries, that do this, but they are larger, than the game itself and I wanted to make the applet as small as possible. Anyways, you are probably right and I'll have to get rid of them, or maybe create an options panel, that would allow the user to turn them off.

[grzegorz.holdys]

Few people have reported winning this game
You may find their tips useful:
http://potatoeconomist.blogspot.com/2008/01/blog-post.html
http://forums.livingwithstyle.com/showthread.php?t=1869948958

[ThetaGames]

It seems (from reading the tips of game winners) that the best strategy is to cut taxes and social programs during lag periods.  I'll have to try again; it seems like you can't win the game with a socialist approach.

[Movius]

I completely wiped out unemployment in my first turn. Yet apparently the unemployed are still protesting.

[grzegorz.holdys]

I completely wiped out unemployment in my first turn. Yet apparently the unemployed are still protesting.

Hmmm... The fact, that the non existing unemployed people organize demonstrations is actually a smaller problem, than the fact, that you were able to reduce unemployment to 0%. I'll have to look into that.

It seems (from reading the tips of game winners) that the best strategy is to cut taxes and social programs during lag periods.  I'll have to try again; it seems like you can't win the game with a socialist approach.

You could win with a socialist approach, if there was no limit on the national debt to GDP ration. A real socialist government would surely remove such limit in no time

[grzegorz.holdys]

OK, I think I fixed the bug that made it possible to eliminate unemployment Now there should be enough unemployed people to organize demonstrations. I have also made the transition between panels on the main screen faster.

Cheers!

[Soulliard]

Those voters are brutal! They don't let you get away with anything!

...I wish America's voters were that discerning.

In any case, it was an interesting game. I'll have to show it to my more economically-gifted friend. He'll probably enjoy it.

[grzegorz.holdys]

Thanks! Let me know what he thinks