In a system similar to the fantasy football leagues, in the fantasy parliament league, you pay a small registration fee, then choose a name for your political party and pick from a list of international politicians to elect to your (shadow) cabinet, and as backbenchers.

Keep track of your party's progress at fantasyparliament.com, and strive towards accolades like 'Party leader of the month', 'Best prime minister', etc.

Virtual elections, to be held every 2 months, give different parties opportunities to play at government and opposition. When in virtual government, the player can introduce new laws, bring about electoral reform, and such and such. When in opposition, players can argue and suggest new policies. Scandals are randomly generated, often swiftly ending the career of Mr. Politician, and perhaps even bringing down a government. International events also happen once in a while, causing everyone to come together and be nice.

As in fantasy football, none of the actual debates really take place, but points are awarded for success of arguments, and opinion polls are constant, giving an idea of popularity. An election could either consist of players' votes (not allowed to vote for themselves) or by a computer-generated virtual electorate, making decisions based on demographics or party success.
-- Parvenu, Jan 08 2003

A Scorecard of sorts http://www.opensecrets.org/
political contribtions (US-only) [banksean, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Model United Nations http://www.teachun.org/modelUN.html
Yet another extracurricular activity for your kid to sell candy for. [LoriZ, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Log Rolling http://www.cl.cam.a...litics/logroll.html
Committee simulation game. Looks fun actually. [eritain, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Nationstates http://www.nationstates.net
Text-based politics game [sambwiches, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Nomic http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/nomic.htm
This sounds sort of like Nomic which I can heartily recommend. [ry4an, Oct 04 2004, last modified Oct 05 2004]

Fantasy Celebrity League http://www.fafarazzi.com/
Points assigned for scandals rather than touchdowns. [jutta, Sep 01 2006]

Or, (and this is the way I originally imagined it when I read the title) you pick your Fantasy Team from the people already in Congress, oops, Parliament. Then your Team gets points for Things Lawmakers Do, such as 1 pt. for Speech Given, 1 pt. for Voting for the Winning Side, 3 pts. for Glad-handing, et cetera.

This actually sounds pretty fun.
-- crawdaddy, Jan 08 2003


Can we pick dead / retired players, or do we have to stick with the current crop of do-nothings?

I'll take Greenspan, Powell, and Rudolph Guliani.
-- RayfordSteele, Jan 08 2003


A problem I see is that fantasy sports leagues use the statistics from the _actual_ games going on, to drive the results on the fantasy teams. I.e. if one of your players is injured in real life, then your fantasy player is injured too.

How are you going to do something similar with politicians? Yes, I see how you can use some things like "speech given", "scandal" and so on to drive the league, but much of the statistic based stuff is simply not going to work. For example voting history is severely influenced by real-world party affiliation and so on.

This is further complicated if you let people mix and match international politicians, because Congress sessions don't match up with Parliament and so on.

I think maybe you could work out the details, but its not obvious to me.
-- krelnik, Jan 08 2003


Yes, but doesn't the nature of a two-party system mean that the fantasy play is going to work out like a two-team league? Every player (politician) either wins (voted for) or loses (voted against) on every game (bill voted on), so theres little opportunity for personal variations in statistics that make fantasy league play interesting.
-- krelnik, Jan 08 2003


To be clear, Parvenu's original idea wasn't based on awarding points for real-life politicians's actions. It sounds like more of a simulation-type game.

My idea, which was the one awarding points for real-life politicians's actions, was meant facetiously. Giving "3 pts. for Glad-handing" was supposed to connote this.

Still, surely, it's no dumber than Fantasy Golf or Fantasy Auto Racing.
-- crawdaddy, Jan 08 2003


//To be clear, Parvenu's original idea//
It is clearly implied by using the words "fantasy league" in the title. That's how a fantasy league works.
-- krelnik, Jan 08 2003


Well, that's not what I meant. I used that term simply to liken it to a fantasy football league - the 'fantasy' bit is where the similarity ends really. It can take cues from real-life events but it doesn't work on a points system: what sort of a government would that be?

It's open-ended, much like the SIM games, and nobody actually wins: you simply get the satisfaction of getting into power and perhaps staying there; the game is ongoing.
-- Parvenu, Jan 09 2003


You could take fund-raising activity into account too. This could serve as one type of objective score. The FEC (US Fed. Election Comm.) is once source for the raw data here in the US.

You could also break that down further by types of lobbies contributing.
-- banksean, Jan 09 2003


[Parvenu] Ah, well I guess I got distracted by your title and the first annotation. Although I was pointing out flaws above, I actually like the idea in the "fantasy league" form if it could be worked out.

Reason: because a fantasy league draws its results from the real-world counterpart, this game would encourage those who played it to actually pay attention to what was going on in their Congress/Parliament/Diet/Knesset/whatever. That's a good goal in and of itself.
-- krelnik, Jan 10 2003


There's usually a "draft" process at the beginning of a fantasy league, that would preclude you from getting all the star players.
-- krelnik, Jan 11 2003


Add the word 'hockey' before the word 'league' and I'm game.
-- Cedar Park, Apr 16 2003


Ottawa Senators?
-- waugsqueke, Apr 16 2003


There's a text based Internet game called NationStates [link] for the political pundit in you. You create a nation and then shape it by deciding the outcome of a variety of issues (about 2 a day) such as abortion laws, affirmative action and policing. You canset up a region in which a number of countries try to develop the largest economy or most livable nation. Good fun for a group of friends. We could create a region for HBers.
-- sambwiches, Apr 16 2003



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