Wings Over Scotland | Governing For Beginners

My first ever real experience of politics was playing Dictator.

Originally written by Don Priestley for the Sinclair ZX81 in 1982, it was a simple text-based game which subsequently came to other formats including the Commodore 64, BBC Micro, Elan Enterprise and the ZX Spectrum, which is where I encountered it.

(Its legacy very much lives on in modern games like Reigns, incidentally.)

It installs you as the new despotic ruler of a banana republic called Ritimba, located “somewhere vaguely equatorial” – it could most reasonably be interpreted as either Central/South America or Africa – which is home to various interest groups, including rebel guerrillas who may or may not be linked to the neighbouring country of Leftoto.

You start off with the country in pretty good shape after your coup, with almost uniform support across the board.

Your objective is to rule and survive for as long as possible without being assassinated or killed in a revolution, by balancing the demands of conflicting groups like peasants and landowners, with the assistance (or not) of the military and the secret police.

But rather than explain the entire plot, let’s see a game play out.

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And if you play Dictator for a while, you quickly work out the best strategy, which is summed up by this frame in Garth Ennis’ brilliant and highly popular comic book (and subsequently a TV series) Preacher, depicting a resignation letter to unlikely disfigured pop star Arseface from his manager, Lt. Col Gene Sergeant.

(Don’t say we’re not bringing you culture today.)

To save you deciphering all that ornate handwritten text, the end reads:

“I shall leave you with some words of wisdom that my dear old Pappy left for me: Fuck ’em for all they’re worth and run like hell, Gene.”

The game of Dictator in the above video is an unusually successful one, with the unseen player managing to hold on in office for an impressive 18 months, scoring a total of 91 points.

But that’s not the best way to play Dictator. The actual optimal strategy is this:

(1) On your first turn, go to the “IMPROVE YOUR CHANCES” menu and dump half the contents of Ritimba’s treasury into your personal Swiss bank account. (You don’t get to select the amount, it’s always half.)

(2) On your second turn, buy the escape helicopter for $120,000.

(3) And that’s basically that. From then on, just try to survive as best you can, grab as much short-term cash as possible (including aid from the Russians and Americans) until one or other group revolts, at which point you take no chances and scarper in your chopper.

You won’t stay in office anywhere near as long that way, but you’ll score a lot better, as demonstrated by my short and eventful reign here.

Because what Dictator depicts is that Ritimba, in common with almost every country on Earth today, can’t actually afford to run itself.

No matter how well-intentioned you set out, the numbers just kill you. The population are fickle, remembering only the last thing you did for them. You can give the peasants a national health service, free education and union rights, but introduce conscription to please the army and they’ll forget all that and your popularity will plunge.

Here, for example, by refusing to spend $120,000 on an irrigation system, we’ve upset the Landowners AND the Peasants, who are now in an unlikely revolutionary alliance against us (signified by the “A” – no one group can ever revolt by itself).

(Of course, it’s the plebs who have to put their lives on the line.)

But all that 120 grand would have done was buy you another month, maybe two. It’s a really bad return for such a large outlay. Much better to pick on the foreigners.

That lets you stick more cash into your Swiss bank account, until the inevitable day arrives (on this occasion just five months into your rule).

Now, you might get lucky and crush the revolt, at which point it’s wise to exact a bloody revenge to ensure the revolutionaries are too weak to try again.

[sound of machine guns]

But you shouldn’t take that risk at all.

As soon as things get hairy, you should haul ass out of there and live out the rest of your life in feather-bedded luxury (maybe with a lovely consultancy gig in business or the third sector or even writing novels). That’s where you get the big points.

And readers, while Dictator is a very rudimentary game in coding terms and came out more than 40 years ago, it actually painted a pretty accurate picture in 1982 and nothing much has changed since. Countries still run at a loss, and you can never please everyone. It’s a fundamentally impossible job, you have to sacrifice every principle very early on, the public are ungrateful bastards even if you try to be nice, and if you try to crush them they’ll eventually shoot you.

That’s why every governing party gives in to corruption the moment it achieves power (or even earlier), and why you should never expect anything else from them. All you can do to keep them even slightly honest is stay alert, take matters into your own hands and keep reminding them who they’re supposed to work for.

That takes time, effort and money, and is also why they try to take away your freedoms any chance they get, on any old excuse.

And why they want to shut down anywhere you might gather and talk about it.

That’s an impulse that spans the political spectrum, but Labour has been especially prone to it, this century in particular.

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Because the interests of politicians and the people are almost always in direct conflict, and they’re bothering to conceal it less and less. (Our theory is that the rot really started in 2009 with the expenses scandal, when they collectively realised how much they could get away with by just brazening things out, but that’s another article.)

The obvious (and rational) outcome of that is that people turn to a “screw the lot of you” entity, whether that be a political party or something more sinister. The electorate is getting angrier and angrier, and the more contempt they see parties holding them in the worse it gets.

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The mainstream parties in both Scotland and the UK may well already be beyond the point of salvation. But if their voters and members can’t persuade them to see sense soon, they may all find themselves wishing they’d bought escape helicopters on their first day in office, and deciding that the only way out is to kill you instead.

So be careful who you vote for, readers, and try to have a better reason than that they’re “your” team. They’re not, and it isn’t a game.