Game design and the government

Starfox

So I was thinking about Stop Whining!, and started wondering if this lesson is applicable elsewhere. According to you guys, most people are terrible game designers because they don't know what they want. In a democracy, the populace is the "game designer". Will people, given free reign, go changing "rules" willy-nilly and break the government? Would it be better to hire (elect) someone who knows a lot about games (politics) to design and run your "game"? Is this why we have representative democracies? I just thought this through to its' logical conclusion and pictured the U.S. government broken like Tribes II because everyone wants this, wants that, without regard to how it will affect the game overall.

Any opinions on this? Or am I just crazy, and people wouldn't do this in real life? I don't think I'm that far off base.

Starfox

Aww, no takers?

Mosquitoboy

You may wish to add something else relating budgeting to how much space the game takes up on the CD/hard drive...
You can't add 1,000,000 weapons, because then there would be no space on the disk for maps.
You cant have $100,000,000 go to a war and have no money to go schools. (No political agenda here. Just happened to type it this way.)

merry_minstrel

So I was thinking aboutStop Whining!, and started wondering if this lesson is applicable elsewhere. According to you guys, most people are terrible game designers because they don't know what they want. In a democracy, the populace is the "game designer". Will people, given free reign, go changing "rules" willy-nilly and break the government? Would it be better to hire (elect) someone who knows a lot about games (politics) to design and run your "game"? Is this why we have representative democracies? I just thought this through to its' logical conclusion and pictured the U.S. government broken like Tribes II because everyone wants this, wants that, without regard to how it will affect the game overall.

Any opinions on this? Or am I just crazy, and people wouldn't do this in real life? I don't think I'm that far off base.

People will change rules in a bad way if given free reign, but that's why public discussion happens in a democracy, and the process of decision-making is a rather long and complicated one. For example, if you wanted to reinstitute torture, all you'd need would be sufficient media support and the majority of people would approve of it. That's why there's a constitution and a Supreme Court.

Edit: Well, now that I think of it, the US has already partially reinstituted torture.