Right, it's the whole "The enemy's gate is down" thing game designers and players tend to be attracted to -- one clearly defined prize and everything else is just details on the way to getting it Like chess being scored only by checkmating the king and not on "points"
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Replying to @arthur_affect
Yeah. Allowing someone to win via more skillful deployment of their outnumbered pieces is cool game design and a failure of democracy.
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Replying to @BingoBingoBango
Nate Silver even said a really cringey and obnoxious thing about this, that the WTA system of EVs for states makes his job as a pollster both more interesting and easier to resolve And that a pure popular vote system would be both more boring and more work
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BingoBingoBango
I.e. it's a game that would be decided a lot earlier -- total popular vote margins in a national election are rarely all that close -- but to be able to give accurate betting odds you'd have to keep track of everything everywhere on a much more granular level
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BingoBingoBango
Like a board game where every single thing a player does either nets points or loses points, and the number of such actions is very high, which makes it a much bigger pain in the ass to score and makes it much easier to call a definitive winner early on (so a "bad, boring" game)
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Replying to @BoardGameLawyer @arthur_affect
I don't think it's possible to extract a single coherent goal from the framers; if they were trying to create a representative democracy that would reflect the will of the people, they failed before they began. But winner take all swings are often compelling game design.
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Replying to @BingoBingoBango @arthur_affect
As I said above, it is good game design for an outnumbered faction to be able to win via skillful play, but terrible democracy. The goal of having an exciting an engaging contest (i.e. game design) is almost 100% opposed to the goal of justice.
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Replying to @BingoBingoBango
Right, a good election would be fairly strategically boring, in the sense that the "right play" is immediately obvious -- try to appeal to the biggest population centers with the most movable votes that you can get to -- and then it's just a question of execution
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Replying to @arthur_affect @BingoBingoBango
I mean, in the most ideal possible circumstances, an election wouldn't be "gameable" at all and would just be this static expression of people's preferences that didn't change except to objectively reflect changes in the candidates' platforms and revealed character
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But that's a goal that's probably out of reach for even the best designed democracies
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