Positech Games announced today that its upcoming government simulator Democracy 3 has gone into beta, presumably progressing from some antiquated feudal system to a model stable enough for players to fiddle with.

A government sim strikes me as on oddly counter-intuitive concept for a game. As self-serving as western politics has become in recent years, I like to cling to the hope that even the most parasitic MPs harbour at least a shred of public interest beneath all the bullshit posturing. But this is a game, the general idea being that it is something you strive to win. I’d imagine that throughout the entire experience I'd just be looking for ways to remain in office, regardless of all the single mums out on the street in my virtual world that doesn’t exist.

All political careers end in failure, and Democracy 3 is thus a game that cannot truly be won, only eventually lost

The developers have acknowledged this problem, admitting that “”. Maybe it should be marketed as an optimistic prequel to the wonderfully bleak Papers Please . It's a fair bet that's how any country I was put in charge of would end up anyway.