Democracy, or the government system in general, can be a funny thing. We’re asked to trot out of our homes (or register for postal voting like a sensible person would) to submit our votes for a particular party, for which we’re expected to be lumbered with the outcome regardless of the possibly terrible implications for the country. It’s often said that sometimes people don’t always understand what’s good for them. A game has never made me realise that before, until Democracy 3 came along.

In Democracy, you’re flung into parliament in a landslide victory and have to get to work balancing the country’s books while trying not to upset the populace. This sounds easy, until you take into account that people’s ideals for how things should be can vary wildly. In my first attempt at trying to run the country, I reduced spending on the military, increased CCTV surveillance, brought in anti-discrimination laws, but unfortunately had to raise taxes in an attempt to bring down the burgeoning deficit that was crippling my country’s finances. During this time, I survived 4 assassination attempts before finally being kicked out of office in favour of my political opponent.

Perplexed by this turn of events, I again threw myself into Democracy 3’s world of political bubbles with the same goal in mind, only to this time find myself on the receiving end of a successful assassination. It seems that my efforts to reduce the country’s deficit unfortunately didn’t resonate well with certain far right groups in the UK. So, I decided to lower the difficulty a touch, and finally started to see some success.

So much success in fact that I was able to make very few cuts to get the country into the black, and start gaining a surplus; it was a revelation! I was able to reduce taxes for everybody, including corporations, the poor, the rich and the middle earners. I was able to bring in policies that benefited every demographic, and this was where Democracy 3’s Electioneering mod came into play.

I was able to choose speech parts that resounded with the people of the country that I most wanted to appeal to; taking the opportunity to make sure that apathetic voters felt like their vote would be worth something. I was also able to draw up manifesto plans – you know, those promises that politicians make but rarely ever see through. So, I said that I would increase the minimum wage and reduce unemployment by 25%…apparently, this was a mistake. I won the election narrowly, it seems I hadn’t appealed to the people quite enough. Why, I do not know, but a win is a win, so I set about fulfilling my election pledges.

Efforts to reduce unemployment were difficult, and odd to say the least. Decreasing subsidies to farmers, and reducing the funding that the police and military receive. I find this odd, as surely increased funding to those areas means that recruitment for them would increase, seems this is not the case. Anyway, it seems that many people didn’t like this idea of low earners getting more money and less unemployment along with lower taxes because, once again, I was assassinated.

It seems odd that a game of this ilk would have an option to be killed by dissenters, but there it is. It’s something that you can toggle off, and realistically you should, as the reasoning behind killing you can be terribly nonsensical, as I’ve just explained. It just seems that even if you were to create a society where the people have more money in their pockets and a system to encourage money to re-enter the country to reinforce the GDP that there are some people that just won’t like it.

I guess I shouldn’t be that surprised — I mean a cursory glance at political headlines and the comments sections regarding ‘progressive’ policies shows that no matter what you do, people will be unhappy with anything that you do. Ensuring the happiness of the populace is an excruciating balancing act: while assassination may be a considerable over-reaction (a simple hammering at the polls would suffice), it shows that running the country is no simple matter.

Democracy 3’s system of branching policy bubbles, and group demographics simplifies and collates all the info you need to have a pop at seeing if you can turn the fortunes of your country around, and create the utopia you think your country should be. Although, to start with you might want to reduce the difficulty a bit, oh, and turn those assassinations off, ok?