the problem with just having a myriad of sliders is that so many problems are not 2 sided.
take religion for example.
there is the "truth is relative crowed" and the "truth is absolute crowd" in the simplest terms, but that does not even begin to describe the behavior of people.
on the "truth is relative" side, do you respect all truths, or do you respect none? or perhaps you only respect truths you see as good? how do you treat people who claim to have the one true truth? laugh? kill? pretend to agree? how far do you take the philosophy? is the world real or an illusion? how does your belief affect your actions? if someone forces you to convert, do you oblige, usurp or rebel?
on the "truth is absolute" side, what do you do with people who do not agree with you? do you still respect their belief, or do you persecute and/or kill? are true believers superior, or merely just enlightened equals to unbelievers? what about converts vs. people born into the religion? is there such a thing as "too faithful/zealous" or is the person at the end of the slider bar the best (is being near the end better than being at the end)?
i am going to flesh out that last one with an example.
we have a kill elves ok/not ok slider. our religion has a mandate to kill elves. priest 1 is at the end of the slider "kill all elves, anywhere at any cost," priest 2 thinks "kill elves on sight, if convenient" and priest 3 thinks "kill elves, unless their useful." how do we define this religions optimum overall? who is the outlier? do we need another slider to adjust how far away from the norm is ok? if so we may as well have two sliders, one for acceptable deviation above and one for below, in case they are not equal. we are also going to need a slider for all 3 preists that dictates how much risk they are willing take to accomplish their job. is a 1 to 1 trade worth pursuing, or should you retreat and hold out for better odds? we are also going to need deviation sliders for the risk slider, to help us define the risk slider norms for the religion. we are also going to need a slider for each slider that tells us how acceptable being outside of norms are as well. maybe it is perfectly ok to be outside on the risk norms(i.e. frowned upon), but not ok to be outside the intensity norms(i.e. punishable by death).
you see that a single issue can get complicated quickly, as soon as you start asking questions. how deep down the rabbit hole do you need to go, or are willing to go? are are the sliders for complicated, realistic and fun? what are the deviations for the community?
a single slider is not enough to describe the complex interactions, so you would need to break things down into multiple sub sliders to convey the meanings. if you dig to yet another level you will need a whole host of other sliders again. what you come up with is a kind of "slider tree" with various other sliders becoming available depending on where you are on the current one. or you can do something really complicated like the rgb color triangle with alpha channel, and just add dimensions, corners and intensity sliders as needed (i would love to see a complex sociopolitical issue modeled as a cube with alpha, beta and gama sliders. . . .).
and then you have this whole notion of "left" and "right" that always baffles me. take RNGs asertion that dwarves are "far right" when it comes to civil rights because "Only rarely are any non-dwarfs admitted into society." how is that "far right?" after all, Stalin had the Jewish, Polish and Gypsy purges (among many others), and he was a "far left" dictator. Lincoln was the one who started the civil war to end slavery, and he was on the "right" side of the political line.
in the end the whole political discussion is moot. dorfs are commi/dictator/monarch structured because that gives the player the control they need to play the game, and while you can do things like expand the economy, have dorfs oust unpopular leaders, revolt against "the man" and pretty much riot and do their own thing, ultimately you cannot have *all* the dorfs up and vote the *player* out (a few ignoring the player and doing their own thing is fine, but all of them doing that would make the game "plat itself" and leave nothing for the player to do but watch). that would not be fun. the player is ultimately the one in charge, and the dorfs need to follow orders one way or another for it to work.
in short, dorfs and other player races can never have a truly free society, because then the player would have nothing to do. the player will always be the dictator, no matter what you call it.
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Topic: Political Spectrum (Read 1981 times)