Do you want to be President?
Put yourself to the test in President Infinity 2024
The clock ticks to 4 am on November 6th 2024. Reporting from across the US is beginning to consolidate into a result. Despite trailing in the popular vote, narrow flips of Georgia and Florida look to provide a comfortable victory. The networks call it – Nikki Haley is the next President of the United States, Kamala Harris her vanquished opponent. This isn’t my real prediction for November’s polls, but one of the fun outcomes playable in the engrossing President Infinity 2024.
The game, playable on PC and MAC, is the latest incarnation of a series now marking its twentieth year, with perhaps the most accurate and playable election campaigning game around. The brainchild of 270Sims and Anthony Burgoyne, the games are designed to sit somewhere between education and entertainment and make for a thorough recreation of the ins and outs of political battles.
270Sims aim to “make our society better by improving citizens’ understanding of their political systems”. They do this by producing games which explore the dynamics and issues of some of the world’s most important elections. Since 2004, the Presidential version has been their flagship, but others have explored parliamentary elections in the UK and Canada as well as US congressional fights. For a politics nerd, it is hard to think of a better way to fight through political battles.
The latest incarnation offers a range of options for playing through the 2024 Presidential Campaign. You can control the candidates, narrowing the field or allowing extra third parties, and play around with tickets. Streamlined play offers you the option of coming into the race after the contenders, while a fuller challenge requires you to navigate the primaries too (though on the Democrat side, this is often impossible or pointless, depending on your pick).
Each candidate has their own skills and pitfalls. Trump appears with high charisma and low integrity, while Biden is hampered by weak stamina, making him harder to deploy and more gaffe-prone in the campaign. As a lead candidate, part of your challenge is bringing together a combined ticket that mitigates these, including plenty of options for wheeling and dealing once the primaries are in progress.
While the candidates are largely set, beyond that the game offers a vast amount of control over campaign strategy and tactics. Gameplay is turn-based, with players limited by stamina, funds, and “campaign points”, making canny resource management an essential part of the contest. The goal, quite simply, is to win, building the electoral machine that will carry you into the White House.
Like in real life, that is easier said than done. Players start by setting an electoral platform on a range of policy positions. As in real life, changing this mid-contest becomes a costly flip-flop, but at the same time, you have to match them to an expectant public. Policy spectrums are set out on a range of important US issues, allowing you to run from the left, right, or centre of your respective party, with each move a careful balancing act between your base and the median voter in the states you want to win. You also choose your geographical targets and recruit foot soldiers for the campaign ahead.
With the platform set, the battle then becomes about getting your message across. There are two main metrics for this – advertising and physical campaigning. Building and buying ads is perhaps the most complex and crucial part of the game. Ads are deployed on a statewide basis and can be prepared on the two dozen or so issues the game keeps in play, either as positive ads for your candidate, or attack ads on your opponent. Using these successfully is key to winning, but misuse can leave your campaign bankrupt weeks out from polling day. Equally, each issue can only be used once in each state, so going out of the gate strong on the economy can leave you grasping around for something to talk about in the last stretch of your campaign.
As your ads dominate the airwaves, your candidate zips around the country making speeches, attending rallies, and raising funds. These deliver political gains, but are exhausting, sapping away at their stamina so again have to be managed carefully. At the same time, they have to maintain their “issue knowledge” and debate prep to avoid gaffes and to make their appearances more impactful. At the end of each turn, a newspaper sums up what the voters have responded to, while a more detailed pop-up reveals your progress. Through the campaign, your running mate and endorsers might also join the campaign trail.
Through all of this, it’s vital to keep an eye on the polls. Public polls pop up on a national and state level, with varying margins of error. You can fill in the blanks from private polling, but this again drains your war chest. As the campaign progresses, states flick between red and blue (largely corresponding to real-life dynamics) while the “momentum” scores show whether your campaign is gaining or losing ground.
If all of this sounds intricate, it is. The learning curve is steep, and you’ll find your first few campaigns going wildly awry as you run out of money, or neglect your safest states only to find them flipped while you go chasing after big opponent bases. Fortunately, a play-through only takes a couple of hours and a range of difficulties give you the chance to get the hang of it.
As an independent game, you can tell the love, and frankly nerdery, that has gone into this. Detail is more important than flair. The interface is simple and there are no flashy graphics. The interface is mostly charts, texts and click buttons. The feel is like a simpler, older management sim, but for someone who cares about the content that doesn’t take away from the experience. Some of the bugs on early versions are more of an issue, but these are rapidly being patched in the run-into election day.
For those with an eye for detailed politics, there is little out there like it. While other, bigger games, focus on government this is about the best approximation of how to get there. The results are realistic and the metrics of the game are a good way of making political campaigning playable. In addition, the range of campaign scenarios makes this repeatedly replayable.
Not only can you try your hand as the major candidates this time around, but a few wildcards are there too – including a run as the Greens, or as an Independent Dwayne “The Rock” Johnson. Beyond that, the game comes with a range of historic election scenarios built in, so you can also try your hand at Bush/Gore, Nixon/Kennedy and about a dozen other contests. An editor mode even allows you to build your own campaign game from scratch – perhaps inserting yourself or some other fantasy combination of candidates.
President Infinity isn’t going to sit alongside the major gaming releases. It’s a niche game for a niche audience. Its detailed capturing of the mechanics of a campaign is, however, hugely impressive. It hits the mark between educating people on how politics happens and being a fun experience for the inner electoral nerd. It’s a great way to while away some hours between now and November, playing with permutations and getting yourself dragged into ad buys in Arizona. With more updates to come, it is only going to get better, and I heartily recommend it.