What are Ideologues? Where did they come from?
Ok gamers, I am going to do a quick series on each of our four Ideologues. We’ve play-tested with hundreds of players, and most have found the SHASN Ideologues to be the most charming and intellectually elegant part of the game.
Political archetypes:
The idea for these characters came from a desire to distill the politicians we see around us into archetypes. I really wanted to find a combination of characters that are mutually distinct but collectively exhaustive. In other words, pick any politician you see around you, and their characteristics will match some combo of the ideologue characters you see in the game.
I should mention that our parent company - Memesys Culture Lab - wears many hats and sits in many seats, one of which is documentary filmmaking. In 2017, we made a documentary on a political revolutionary, a contemporary Indian politician named Arvind Kejriwal. The documentary, ‘An Insignificant Man’, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was eventually distributed by VICE Documentary Films. The experience of making this documentary gave me and my teammates priceless insights into the workings of a political campaign from behind closed doors. After examining political players and Ideologues from up close for years, we found the necessary ingredients for the ideological pillars of SHASN:
The Capitalist, The Showman, The Supremo, and The Idealist.
Rather than selecting which character they want to play with, players have to become these Ideologues bit by bit, with every policy decision that they make, and earn their powers over the course of the game.
In the following posts of this series, we’ll examine what each Ideologue stands for, and the powers they wield.
Political archetypes:
The idea for these characters came from a desire to distill the politicians we see around us into archetypes. I really wanted to find a combination of characters that are mutually distinct but collectively exhaustive. In other words, pick any politician you see around you, and their characteristics will match some combo of the ideologue characters you see in the game.
I should mention that our parent company - Memesys Culture Lab - wears many hats and sits in many seats, one of which is documentary filmmaking. In 2017, we made a documentary on a political revolutionary, a contemporary Indian politician named Arvind Kejriwal. The documentary, ‘An Insignificant Man’, premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival and was eventually distributed by VICE Documentary Films. The experience of making this documentary gave me and my teammates priceless insights into the workings of a political campaign from behind closed doors. After examining political players and Ideologues from up close for years, we found the necessary ingredients for the ideological pillars of SHASN:
The Capitalist, The Showman, The Supremo, and The Idealist.
Rather than selecting which character they want to play with, players have to become these Ideologues bit by bit, with every policy decision that they make, and earn their powers over the course of the game.
In the following posts of this series, we’ll examine what each Ideologue stands for, and the powers they wield.
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