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Power Politics (Game)
Power Politics Game is a simulation game featuring the 1992 United States Presidential election, originally published by Will Vinton’s (California Raisins) Cineplay Interactive.
Commentators have noted that after an election simulation game is complete, the winning player does not run the country as the newly elected President of the United States. This observation was thought appropriate because the game is such a realistic simulation of the American political climate that it exists somewhere between education and entertainment.
The game simulated the real world so well that the Associated Press printed its "simulated" results predicting a victory by Bill Clinton in the 1992 elections.
While it is a worthwhile and challenging simulation for gamers, Power Politics also found its way into classrooms in over 300 colleges and universities, as a tool for teaching the realities and complexities of political campaign management.
A player can campaign for one of thirty previous presidential candidates in an attempt to create an alternate history.
A player can create a political candidate with specified strengths and weaknesses, defining how liberal or conservative the candidate will be; select positions on the important issues; set the schedule; determine what type of advertising campaign will be run and how much to spend on it. Selecting a running mate is part of the game simulation.
Players can also do “what-if” scenarios by pitting former candidates from different eras against one another, just to see how the candidates would have done against different opponents in eras of differing political climates than that which the candidate really lived.
The game was developed by Randy Chase, who went on to create a special version called The Doonesbury Election Campaign, essentially the same game, but starring the characters from the Doonesbury comic strip. Chase obtained all rights to the earlier versions and was planning to bring the game forward to apply to the 2008 presidential election, but died of heart failure and complications of diabetes at age 53.