All good ideas start as really (really) bad ideas
Politicians and policy makers are rarely allowed the luxury of failure. We jump to criticism as soon as the latest new initiative or department begins to whiff a little of drift, or of waste. But ideas aren’t born fully formed.
All ideas start off as bad ideas. Many of them stay that way. But a handful end up being great. The thing is, you can’t know until you put them on paper, get some feedback, try them out a little, and see how they do.
As a (long term wannabe…) game designer, I know that design requires failure. And not just because I’ve been failing at it for years now. When you create the first prototype of a game, the question isn’t whether it will fail - the question is how it will fail. The lessons you take from the first few tests are about the types of ways that it fails, when they happen in the game, and how much they matter to the players.
Getting good at game design is about getting good at failing well. Since I want to get good at politics, and at designing games about politics, this blog is offered in that spirit.
The ideas in here will all start off really (really) bad. (Unless they’re someone else’s of course, in which case they’re probably great.) But with your feedback, some of these ideas will get polished up into something worth enacting - thanks! - and others will be chucked away because they stay rubbish even after a few attempts to reshape them. But they’ll all be here for people to learn from, warts and all.
What’s coming up first?
At the time of writing (December 2024), I’m working on:
A proposed electoral strategy for the Liberal Democrats.
Thoughts about a vision, brand and political strategy for the Lib Dems.
A board game to be used as an academic experiment, with which to test whether different electoral systems incentivise different campaign strategies.
A card game that shows players how complexity and chaos work.
Some data analysis on tactical voting, third and fourth place Lib Dem seats.
Thoughts on political games I’m playing with a group of fellow politics nerds.
And some other stuff that I’ve forgotten. It’s probably awesome. (But in the spirit of this blog, it’ll start off really crap, obviously.)