Campus Forever

One thing I’ve been doing over the last year or so has been tinkering with the customization feature on President Forever, an election simulation game.

They are coming out with a new upgrade to the Presidential version (they have made several parliamentary versions since the original P4E was done), probably sometime in the Spring, which will make improvements to their system.

What I’ve tried to do myself is reproduce a UF student body election using the P4E game. There are some variables I haven’t been able to perfect (the advertising costs are too low, the financial benefits of endorsements too high, etc.). I might be able to using their new system, which they used in releasing Canada 2006, but there’s a problem: UF isn’t a parliamentary game. And even if I tried to do the UF Senate elections, it’s imperfect because large districts group all the candidates together and they run as a slate.

Anyway, in order to help me improve these games, if you have digital images of candidates, or an idea of what the platforms were like for any election from 1999-2006, please don’t hestiate to email me. I prefer the Spring elections over the fall mostly because those are more competitive elections.

(President Forever is based on the Electoral College, so I’ve mapped out the campus based on Senate districts and # of seats. If they ever come out with a version of the game done strictly by popular vote, of course my preferences will switch to using that version, as Student Body elections are decided by votes, not Senate seats.)

This is more of a heads-up. Once I get to the point where I feel comfortable with the game, I’ll release the scenarios.

And yes, I’m a dork. But I like taking games a part and seeing how they work. And I didn’t want to just make up a US scenario, I wanted something more original. So there you are.