I just watched Brett Hennig TEDx Talk (https://www.ted.com/talks/brett_hennig_what_if_we_replaced_politicians_with_randomly_selected_people) about replacing democracy for a random selecting system and I had a random idea for an overtly complex (maybe) game.
Basically the idea is this, a city builder like Sim City 2000, with something like Entity Based Modeling for simulating, with a dummy IA building the city. The AI turn, it does it's random city building.
On the player turn, he gets a random citizen from the city assigned to him as his player character, and he has to create a policy (have no idea how exactly) that will influence how the city builder AI works, hopefully trying to maximize what's best to that citizen.
As the game progress, you are being matched with different citizens of the city, and they are all being behind the curtains being tracked. At the end of 15 turns, the final score for each assigned citizen is shown, and also the town score (population, produced money, debt,...).
This is just like the general idea, but I have no real idea if it could be fun or not, but the idea would be something that is visually interesting but still has lots of possibilities like Democracy.
Any thoughts?
Well I would definitely play it. It certainly sounds like the type of game I would enjoy, that's for sure.
Maybe the random character has a job such as street cleaner, cop, fireman, criminal or whatever. Depending on how the player decides to handle that character influences the "Mayor?" AI. Maybe an objective is to get a certain building built or policy made, like a police station. The player as the cop purposely does a terrible job, the criminal does a good job, then the Mayor is pressured into funding the police.
There could be all sorts of situations, like the player is now a tourist. Maybe he sees the sights and spends all his money helping the economy, or he gets back on the plane. All depending on whatever the current objective they are trying to influence.
How about allowing the player to set government policies at beginning of game, select player character, and then play to succeed at the PC's profession. It would be interesting to see the effect of different combinations of policies on different professions.
You could easily have several games in one, if you built the basic framework in the right way.