ping wrote:Johnstone mentioned over on Story Games that he and you had the Canadian connection so could use the same political language during your game. I confess, I'm incredibly curious.
At a Seattle con I could be sure that everyone knew Democrats and Republicans, but a two-party system is dull from a Canadian perspective. (The politics itself is far from dull, but that's less to do with the party structure and more to do with the issues of the day and the amazing things that come out of politicians' mouths.)
We have three (or four, depending on how you count) major parties, one of which is the recent product of a merger between one old major party and an upstart reformist party; we have one party that often ends up with major tie-breaking power in Parliament but which can only be voted for by residents of Quebec; we have non-hippie Greens (more like European Greens) who are always a hair's breadth from finally getting their first Parliamentary seat; we have several single-issue and joke parties, such as the Marijuana Party, the Rhino Party, Pirate Party, Work Less Party, Communist Party—and I'll leave it to y'all to guess which are jokes and which are serious! And that's just at the Federal level of elections, never mind our provincial legislatures.
It was nice to be able to say, "the defeated Liberals" and have that be meaningful to both of us. The Canadian view of communists is also really different, since it isn't a McCarthy-era shorthand for "evil" here, and that nuance really came out in our game since Kelly ended up being a very red Red Party member.
There was also a moment when Kelly nationalised the atmosphere plants, which I referred to as "making them Crown Corporations." We had a good laugh that we could say that and know exactly what we meant!
(For context, Crown Corporations are owned by the people via the government. The name is due to the government being
de jure the appointed representative of the ruling power of the monarchy, despite the Crown being a ruler in name only.
As Vancouverites our hydroelectric power is a Crown Corporation, our vehicle insurance company is one, the CBC [think the BBC, but Canadian instead of British] is another. Oddly enough, health insurance
isn't run by a Crown Corporation, and it's that kind of nuance that playing Mars Colony with a fellow Canadian really brings to the table.)
So the Canadian connection really made Mars Colony's political party setup work for us. That's probably the one flaw in the game: it assumes that you're both going to share the same knowledge of political parties, and have the same understanding of what those parties stand for. I can imagine a game with one player hailing from Taiwan and one from Moscow potentially gaining no common-ground understanding from that part of setup.
