Voting
A number of games have provided mechanics to simulate the processes of government that extend far into the game world. One of the simplest is the procedure of voting. Players may be called on to nominate and elect representatives to oversee important concerns for the rest of the game or beyond. Some characters may have goals that require them to get a specific person, perhaps themselves, into a position of power by the end of the game. Alternatively, voting procedures may determine the implementation of certain projects or plans, which could be a character’s goal in itself or just a helpful step towards a larger objective.
Games that have a strong political component often assign functional advantages to holders of certain abstract roles, encouraging players to campaign and claim abstract positions of power before the game ends, even if they have no prescribed goal to attain such a position. For instance, a minister of finance might have access to cash reserves, supplying the character that holds the post with an increased income or the ability to change the allocation of supplies to various resource-hungry projects. Players could then use the additional money or the completed projects to fulfill game goals that have little to do with being the minister of finance.
In Guild games, however, voting can be much more complicated than the basic one-man, one-vote scheme. A character might have lesser or greater influence on “democratic� procedures based on their station, their wards, their family connections or their affiliates. In Caer Phaedria (2002) by Jake Beal, Susan Dorscher, Jay Muchnij and Jade Wang, characters needed to draft and pass governmental edicts to achieve a variety of political goals. Players had to seek the cooperation and signatures of others to pass edicts, the signatures of some characters counted for more than others, and new edicts overrode contradictory old edicts.
