Bounties attract serious brainpower to the challenge.
The idea is to use the existing fantasy sports manager model, and adapt it to cover the global political landscape.
Instead of picking a squad full of players who earn you points based on their performance over the weekend, users would build a fantasy cabinet with leaders from around the world and receive points based on the respective countries' socio-economic progress over a term.
Why?
It would serve the same purpose existing fantasy sports leagues serve to their respective sporting codes already. That is to be a fun activity that helps build "fan" engagement. Just as the Fantasy Premier League game has grown to have millions of users across the globe, some of whom have no connection or native interest in the Premier League at all. We have seen that the FPL has resulted in users knowing much more about all the clubs in the Premier League, not just the ones they support, as it is neccessary to have a good knowledge of what is going on in order to be a successful FPL manager. Would it not benefit society if more people took an active interest in knowing what is going on in the political landscape on a global scale?
How it works?
The platform would have to be managed by an impartial organization like the UN or a dedicated research group. They are the ones who would need to build a complete databasis of the global political landscape, update and score the game and sponsor incentive prizes. To use the FPL as an example, they are managed by the Premier League, which makes it possible for them to always be up to date and accurate regarding all things Premier League.
I would imagine a cabinet to be made up of different heads of state and high ranking officials from accross the world, with points being awarded for progress in different areas, and deducted for any mistakes/controversies. To use a well known, simple, example, a team consisting of Liz Truss would have gained a lot of points when she was recently elected Prime Minister of the United Kingdom, whereas one containing Boris Johnson would have lost points. Just like it is exiting fantasy leagues, the successful player would not be picking a team based on who they like, but on who they expect to score points.
Scoring could be based on a wide variety of different indicators like GDP, contribution to climate conservation, conservation, education, employment and life expectancy, and rather than being scored weekly, teams will have to be judged on larger incriments of time.
I really think that if this can be done well it could go a long way into turning people into informed global citizens, which would have a snowball effect of people being more educated about and involved in their local politics.
Is this something you could imagine being fun and informative?
What other parameters could be used to determine scores?
How to account for differences in political ideologies?
Subash ChapagainSep 19, 2022
For the fantasy premier league (or any other fantasy virtual league based on real-time sports), the rubric for assigning points is straightforward: based on captainship, vice-captainship, score, clean sheet, assist, etc. However, when it comes to scoring politicians, how do we design a similar rubric? This seems to be even more complex if you think about the political and ideological differences. For instance, any conservative leader might be assigned low scores if we judge him/her from a liberal point of view. What happens, say, for instance, a politician formulates a policy that makes abortion illegal? Or when a leader either cuts off or increases taxes heavily? Such issues must be addressed, and the parameters defined firmly before starting such a gamified league.
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
Agreed. There needs to as little room for speculation as possible. Considering even established metrics are lauded by some, and disproved by other analysts. Even GDP for instance. Many say it's mostly irrelevant and only look at the country's production percentage in the GDP.
The metrics should be easily measurable as there is the proclaimed impact on climate conservation in the press conference announcing the action, and there's the actual impact. Or as the byproduct: the unwanted consequences on society as a whole, just look at The Netherlands recently.
The photo Spook Louw used for illustration is great and funny, but to take it at face value, I'd for instance captain the man that was assigned the minus and demand my bonus points. Banking on that the currency of his country has improved a lot compared to the Euro in the last year. Also 1, 2, and 3, cold numbers, should be rated higher than CNN's or Twitter mob's take on some leader's character, being the point.
Putin's actions in great part contributed to Boris Johnson resigning. So how do we measure that? As they are competitors. Or were.
Meaning that the fantasy should also be organized to value the changes that actually benefit the people the politicians are serving. Or supposed to be serving. Like purchasing power of their citizens, currency rating, population increase... That would be another major feature of the fantasy. Clearing up the evaluation of politicians.
If web3 or blockchain can be involved, that could maybe give it extra legitimacy.
This is a great idea, but needs a lot of work to be functional. Listing the metrics and estimating the time scale at which they can occur.
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Spook Louw2 years ago
Miloš Stanković Subash Chapagain I fully agree with both of you that there would be no fair way to account for differences in ideologies. But to affirm what Subash has already mentioned, and to draw more from the original game, scoring, in the way I imagine it (although I do not have a complete idea as to the exact system yet, hopefully, you can assist), would be based solely on measurable results.
In the same way that FPL does not measure how well a player has played, there are no judges watching every game giving players different scores, it is completely reliant on statistics. So even if Player X plays a brilliant game, they might not score nearly as much as Player Y, who is a far less skilled player but happens to have been able to score a lucky goal against a weaker opponent.
I imagine that information like a rise or fall in GDP, life expectancy, employment rates, and literacy rates would be the type of statistics that are used to assign points on a quarterly basis. This way, just like with the FPL game, it would be beneficial for "managers" to pick "players" who are not necessarily in the best "clubs". For instance, while America would be considered to be a go-to, players will recognize that smaller, less stable countries have higher potential score returns.
This also eliminates the problem of differing ideologies, while people may differ regarding whether Putin or Zelensky are "in the right" the effect of war on the aforementioned statistics would be undeniable. If Manchester United and Manchester City play a brutal derby, with both teams performing at the best of their abilities, and it ends in a 0 - 0 draw, their players would simply not have high returns, whereas Forest may end up losing a chaotic match 7 - 6 to Bournemouth, and the Forest players are likely to have high returns.
Remember, the purpose of this idea is not to devise a metric to determine what the best politics are, but to create a fun, competitive way to get people interested and involved in global politics.
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Subash Chapagain2 years ago
Spook Louw thanks for the response. Like you said, if we can guarantee or minimally design the game to be just used for fun or at best for enhancing political literacy among the population, it should be doable and i can imagine the game being helpful. However, I think it needs to be highly regulated both technically and from the perspective of bureaucracy as well so as not to let it be pervasive and counterproductive.
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Metrics suggestions
Miloš StankovićSep 20, 2022
I would say that currency deviation should be a factor as it's frequent. It doesn't have to be a value equivalent of a goal or whatnot, but half a value of an assist, for comparison.
If a country joins the organisation of a "player" you have, for instance, EU, NATO, BRICs, or CSTO, that should be a plus. If a country leaves, like the UK leaving the European Union, that should be a minus for all the politicians in the EU "team" that you have selected.
Coup d'etat attempt - really big minuses even if it fails. Revolution as well. Yet these are rare.
Protests larger than X (30,000 people) - minus. This can be that factor which is frequent and gives some power to the people.
BTW, when I typed in "political metrics" and went to Google images, the first photo showed a collection of graphs, containing two graphs with vote stats, and four regarding Twitter stats...
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Spook Louw2 years ago
This is exactly what I was thinking of. To once again make use of the FPL game as an example. Some metrics would be low scoring but frequent in the same way FPL players get points for minutes played, like your suggestion for using the exchange rate. Others would be rare, but high scoring, resembling penalties or red cards. These would be events like coups, protests or diplomatic agreements.
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Election results as the metric
Miloš StankovićSep 19, 2022
To add to Subash Chapagain's complaints, when I read the title (one of the best on the platform) I thought it was going to be a simple elections fantasy. For instance: if you picked Macron for the French presidential elections - that would bring you X points. Le Pen, slightly fewer, Melanchon, fewer...
Yet sports fantasy has the advantage that it's going from week to week, sometimes even twice a week. And you can see clearly, and live, what your picks have done.
It's hard for me to think of concrete political matters that happen on that scale, or even monthly.
To do it for elections, presidential or party ones, you'd need to include many countries for it to be fluid and catchy during a period mimicking a season. Yet few follow more than several countries politically, or care about the impacts of smaller ones. Meaning no one is going to stress about Bulgarian parliament elections or know how to make an educated pick on it. Bar Bulgarians.
One could probably best do the election approach for USA and each of their state elections, senators or governers. Judges maybe. Yet one would have to put in serious security or identification measures for this fun tool not to be taken over by the parties in order to present their candidates as more favourable by the people through bots or spam. Like they did with pools.
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Spook Louw2 years ago
I believe there are betting markets that already cover election results, obviously, they do not fulfil the same purpose this idea is meant to, namely educating and consequently getting more people involved in global politics. Election results will undoubtedly play a significant part in the scoring system, but should by no means be the sole metric, as that would not serve as very educational in isolation. So I agree with all of the points above, but I hope to be able to implement a much more intricate scoring system.
Perhaps when I respond to Subash Chapagain 's contribution and your comment above, I will be able to better explain what I imagine the metrics to be. I'm very happy to hear that the general idea piqued your interest initially.
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Point of defining playing field levels
Miloš StankovićSep 20, 2022
Obviously, we can't compare the governors of U.S. states with the presidents of countries. So the playing levels should be defined. For the "Champions League", the highest level, I would advise only to have presidents, vice-presidents, prime ministers, and ministers of government eligible as players. Additions?
If you are playing the intra-U.S. game, then you only get to pick senators, governors...
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Spook Louw2 years ago
I agree, I think for the base "global politics game", it should be leaders and very high-ranking ministers only. Another way of making it interesting would be to define different positions to select people. For example, there could be separate categories for the environment, defence, economy, etc. In the same way that attackers in FPL do not get points if their team keeps a clean sheet, a player picked in a defensive capacity might score more if they are involved in a peace treaty, but would not benefit from their country's environmental efforts. This would require serious players to be knowledgeable about different sectors of politics.
To return to your contribution, after establishing that, it would be possible to look at different variations of the game and adapt it to suit national or even regional politics. But I think the best version of the game would be for global politics, as so much of the scoring will depend on global events.
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Time constraint point
Miloš StankovićSep 20, 2022
Another issue is defining what's the time period in which the season is played. Football seasons have start and end dates, politics are ongoing and eternal. What's a fair timeframe, because if you cut the season 1939 to 1941 then Hitler was a winner.
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Spook Louw2 years ago
I thought of two ways to address this issue, firstly, I don't think it would be a design flaw if Hitler scored good points if he was selected at the right time and in the right "position", as long as it's understood that he would have been heavily penalised for everything that went wrong as well, so overall, Hitler would have been a bad asset.
Back to the timing. Either the game needs to be ongoing, with metrics checked regularly and points being updated continuously, with the only restrictions being how often you are allowed to make a transfer. Alternatively, a much slower game, but possibly more fair and structured, would have set terms, where metrics are added up only after a year, or even four years (as most presidential terms are four years, this seems reasonable, albeit very slow). While I think that the slower model would probably be easier to build, and the design forces people to make decisions that they are confident in, I personally believe the quicker version would be more enjoyable.
This is one of the biggest challenges I have with this idea, so any further input or suggestions regarding time constraints will be appreciated.
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Miloš Stanković2 years ago
Spook Louw Four years cut-off is too long. People forget and lose interest after two weeks of the international break in sports, let alone after years.
I do like the idea of the competition being ongoing and having only cut-off points for awards and proclaiming winners of sorts. As to mimic seasons occasionally. Ideally, I think it could be twice a year, or quarterly. As a lot of data is driven and presented for these time periods exactly.
So one could say they are a 2022 Q1 winner amongst their friends.
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Add your creative contribution
General comments
Miloš Stanković2 years ago
This can be a fantastic addition to my challenge of how to make people care about international affairs and geopolitics in peacetime.
Spook Louw Sep 15, 2022
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