Let's Play Illiberal Democracy: Authoritarian Political Simulators as Playgrounds of History

This paper examines how authoritarian political simulators, a genre of interactive fiction and strategy games, model the mechanics of illiberal democracy, the hybrid system in which strongmen hold elections while eroding civil liberties, the rule of law, and independent media. Its central argument is that these games use choice structures, narrative vignettes, and statistical feedback to draw players into a form of governmentality, teaching them to rule through the logic of the state's own statistics. The author draws on Foucault's concept of governmentality and Scott's notion of "seeing like a state" to frame this analysis, and proposes that political simulators can model the "illiberal playbook" of forging, bending, and breaking democratic institutions.

The analysis centers on three interactive fiction works spanning different geopolitical settings and periods: Hidden Agenda (1988), a Cold War-era game in which the player governs a fictional Latin American state transitioning from dictatorship; Suzerain (2020), a narrative role-playing game about balancing reform against democratic backsliding in a post-dictatorial state; and NERnia krónikái (2023), a Hungarian gamebook satirizing the System of National Cooperation under Viktor Orbán. Across these titles, the paper finds a common strategy of strategically ambiguous representation of political intent, in which hidden consequences of policy decisions and interpersonal drama reveal the web of social favors sustaining illiberal power.

The paper also situates the genre within a longer lineage of political games, tracing its roots to early titles such as The Sumerian Game (1964), Hamurabi (1968), and Balance of Power (1985). It further draws on research on interactive fiction's origins in training exercises for political scientists and military planners, arguing that the genre's capacity to model uncertain outcomes makes it well suited to simulating political maneuvering.

The author concludes that these games qualify Dyer-Witherford and De Peuter's claim that games serve as schools for labor and laboratories of techno-capitalism. The ludic structures of power, including divide-and-rule strategies and social maneuvering, can be applied to political simulators that address planned economies and hybrid regimes, suggesting that the genre extends beyond the critique of advanced capitalism to examine how authoritarian governance is learned, performed, and gamified.